Euclid Decision and Constitutionality

• The Euclid decision set the precedent for the constitutionality of municipal land use lawsmarteau image by photlook from Fotolia.com
  
  Land use laws have been around for a long time, but the history of modern municipal land use laws begins with a 1926 Supreme Court case called Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company. The case began when the town of Euclid, Ohio enacted one of the country's first land use zoning laws, classifying property according to acceptable uses--among them residential, industrial and commercial. The Ambler Realty Co. sued the city to challenge the constitutionality of the zoning law, which specified the permitted uses for a given area. The Court found in favor of the city, and since then, most American municipalities have adopted zoning laws consistent with or similar to the Euclid policy.
  
  

Standard State Zoning Enabling Act

• The same year as the Euclid decision, the United States Department of Commerce published a document called the "Standard State Zoning Enabling Act," designed as model legislation for states to adopt. The document also provided guidance on constitutionality issues regarding zoning and ways to properly enact a legal enabling act. Many states quickly ratified version of the document through state legislatures, and the law became the backbone of municipal land use planning. Today, most municipal land use laws are based originally on state enabling legislation laid out in the 1926 Department of Commerce document.
  
  

Land Use Planning

• Most American municipalities engage in the practice of land use planning--enacting laws intended to plan for development and the infrastructure to support it concurrently. These laws have their roots in traditional zoning, but have been developed largely since the 1950s, when American cities began to feel a number of economic and social strains resulting from haphazard development. The correct use of land use planning regulation remains an intense debate in American politics, but most municipalities have made attempts to enact some sort of long-term vision to help ensure adequate urban services are efficiently provided to new developments.
  
  

Growth Management Laws

• Urban growth boundaries, enacted since the 1970s by municipal governments, act like the medieval walls of Europe: constraining urban growth to a particular areaDeiningertor image by J??rg Stumpf from Fotolia.com
  
  In the early 1970s, land use planning began to reach logistical limits. Urban sprawl became a serious political and economic issue for some cities, and others feared suffering the same fate in the near future. Many municipalities wanted urban development, but financing urban development at increasing distances from historical core cities became a more difficult challenge. The rise of the environmental movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s gave momentum toward efforts to try to restrain urban sprawl and land uses considered by some to be inefficient uses of urban space. The first of these laws--called "growth management laws"--was enacted in the state of Oregon in the early 1970s. The Oregon law established an ultimate boundary for city expansion, set cooperatively by local county and municipal governments. Many other states followed suit during the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to a new set of municipal land use regulations.
  
  

New Urbanism and Smart Growth

• Many modern American zoning laws have been changed to encourage more compact development.pictures of the urbanism in a crowded city image by Albert Lozano from Fotolia.com
  
  In recent years, cities have begun to change their priorities with respect to land use regulation. While land use laws traditionally revolved around zoning and separating uses believed to be incompatible, regulatory approaches today focus less on defining every aspect of project's design and more on incentivizing "livable" or "sustainable" development. Many of these regulations have come about in responses to urban problems faced by cities since the advent of suburbanization. Rising energy costs, increasing infrastructure burdens, and the emptying of once-diverse urban centers have contributed to political and economic pressure toward a vision of land use regulation that is less prescriptive and more adaptive to changing realities. In some cases, land use laws have been deregulated to allow for more flexibility to accommodate traditional urban developments, others have become more strict to pressure developers to get more out of existing infrastructure and curtail the extension of new city services. Some of these initiatives are very controversial, raising concerns about the future affordability of housing, increasing densities and the limits to private property rights.