Alternative Learning Formats in a Land Use Seminar

Since 2004, I have taught a seminar on legal issues related to suburban sprawl – first at Southern Illinois University College of Law in Carbondale, Illinois, and more recently at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Florida. The purpose of the seminar is to inform the students about legal rules that encourage sprawl, and to discuss whether and how those rules should be altered. At Southern Illinois, I focused on the traditional legal skills of reading and writing. My students read cases, statutes, and policy-related scholarship, and wrote a midterm exam and a research paper on what they had learned. At Florida Coastal, I have tried to add some alternative learning formats – in particular, field trips and guest speakers. This article describes how and why I used each of these techniques

How Overregulation Creates Sprawl (Even in a City without Zoning)

Numerous commentators have suggested that the spread-out, automobile-dependent urban form (often referred to as “sprawl”) that dominates metropolitan America is at least partially caused by government regulation of land use. But at first glance, the fate of Houston, Texas may seem to rebut that theory. Houston is America’s only large city without a formal zoning code. Yet Houston is as automobile-dependent and sprawling as many cities with zoning. It could therefore be argued that automobile-dependent sprawl is the inevitable result of the free market. The purpose of my article is to rebut that theory, by showing that land use is almost as heavily regulated in Houston as in cities with zoning, and that Houston’s land use regulations have the same sprawl-creating effect as similar regulations in other cities. Specifically, I point out that: *Houston reduces density (and thus increases automobile dependency) through minimum lot sizes and minimum parking requirements. *Houston requires that shops and offices both provide off-street parking and be set back from the street, thus requiring pedestrians to walk through parking lots to reach commercial destinations. *Houston requires that right of ways on major streets be 100 feet wide, thus impairing pedestrians’ ability to cross streets. *Houston requires that intersections on major streets be 600 feet apart, thus giving pedestrians few opportunities to cross streets. *Although Houston does not directly require separation of commercial and residential uses, the city government does subsidize enforcement of private covenants that seek to create such separation. *Houston has invested in sprawl-producing highways to a greater extent than other American cities. In sum, sprawl is as much a result of government regulation in Houston as in other cities

Recent Case Law, Disparate Impact, and Restrictive Zoning

The Fair Housing Act (“FHA”) prohibits housing discrimination, including the refusal to sell or rent housing based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status or national origin,and any policy or conduct that “otherwise make[s] unavailable or den[ies], a dwelling [based on these impermissible factors].”In 2015, the Supreme Court interpreted the “otherwise make unavailable” language of the Act to mean that the FHA includes not only claims for intentional discrimination, but also claims for disparate impact. Under the disparate impact doctrine, a defendant may be liable for facially neutral rules or policies that disproportionately favor one racial group over another. Zoning law often disfavors Blacks and Hispanics by limiting housing supply and increasing housing costs. Zoning codes generally limit the number of houses or apartments that can be built on a parcel of land. By restraining the overall supply of residences, these “minimum lot size” regulations make housing more costly. Zoning codes also make housing expensive in a variety of other ways; for example, zoning codes typically separate houses from apartments, thus limiting the supply of apartments. Because studies show that Blacks and Hispanics, on average, have lower incomes than Whites, minimum lot size requirements also tend to exclude Blacks and Hispanics from the municipalities and neighborhoods with the strictest limits. Because zoning raises housing costs, one might think that the disparate impact doctrine can easily be used to limit zoning. The purpose of this article is to examine recent case law to determine whether this is accurate. Part I of the Article describes the background of disparate impact law under the FHA, and Part II focuses on the most recent disparate impact case law in cases involving the types of zoning restrictions discussed above

How City Hall Causes Sprawl - A Case Study (Book Review)

Some commentators have labeled Atlanta, Ga. as America\u27s poster child for sprawl. Atlanta is highly auto-oriented, and suffers from higher levels of traffic congestion and air pollution than most other cities. This book review explains how sprawl happened in Atlanta - not through the mysterious invisible hand of the free market, but through transportation and zoning decisions made by city officials

THOU SHALT NOT PUT A STUMBLING BLOCK BEFORE THE BLIND : THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT AND PUBLIC TRANSIT FOR THE DISABLED

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), ordered local governments to make bus and train systems more accessible to the disabled, and imposed costly requirements upon local public transit systems - but did not give local governments funds with which to satisfy this mandate. By reducing the funds available to transit systems, the ADA has sometimes forced cutbacks in transit service for everyone including, ironically, the disabled to the extent that disabled people were able to use public transit before the ADA\u27s enactment). Thus, the ADA has occasionally (at least in times of budgetary austerity) been counterproductive. The ADA\u27s inadequacy is rooted in its approach to transportation policy: rather than requiring that disabled transit users be made equal to the auto-using majority, that statute requires merely that disabled transit users be made equal to other transit-dependent Americans. It follows that if a state or local government is not interested in aiding the transit-dependent disabled, it can freeze the disabled out of the transportation system by slashing service for all users of public transit - even if it increases spending on highways and other driver-related services. Thus, government can and does make the transit-dependent disabled second-class citizens by making all nondrivers second-class citizens. This article critiques the ADA\u27s inadequacy, and suggests a variety of possible solutions to the ADA\u27s problems

Suburban Sprawl, Jewish Law, and Jewish Values

In the second half of the twentieth century, America\u27s cities and suburbs were engulfed by suburban sprawl - the movement of people (especially middle-class families) and jobs from older urban cores to newer, less densely populated, more automobile-dependent communities generally referred to as suburbs. Cities throughout America lost population to their outlying suburbs, and cities that gained population usually did so only because they were able to annex those suburbs. America\u27s suburban revolution has not left Jewish communities unscathed. For example, the city of Newark, New Jersey, contained 58,000 Jews and thirty-four synagogues in the 1940s, but today has only a few hundred Jews and only two synagogues. Similarly, the city of St. Louis, Missouri, now has only one synagogue, although its suburbs have over twenty. Even in more vibrant cities, significant Jewish flight has occurred. In 1990, two-thirds of metropolitan Chicago\u27s Jews lived in suburbs, up from 4% in 1950. This flight to suburbia has affected Jews\u27 daily lives dramatically. Suburban Jews, like other American suburbanites, are highly dependent on automobiles. This article discusses the tension between suburban sprawl and Jewish values. Specifically, the article argues that the automobile dependency and class division exacerbated by sprawl conflict with Jewish ethical and environmental values and impede observance of Jewish law. In addition, the article rebuts libertarian objections to anti-sprawl policies by pointing out that Jewish law encourages public regulation of land use, and that in any event, anti-sprawl policies need not conflict with libertarian norms