Zoning toward oblivion: how the Supreme Court's decision in Euclid v. Ambler shaped modern America.

• Author: Root, Damon W.
• Position: The Zoning of America: Euclid v. Ambler - Critical essay

The Zoning of America: Euclid v. Ambler, by Michael Allan Wolf, Lawrence, Kan. : University Press of Kansas, 208 pages, $35/$16.95 paper

ON JUNE 23, 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court announced one of its most notorious and divisive decisions in recent memory: Kelo v. City of New London. At issue was the Connecticut town's use of eminent domain to seize several private homes and commercial lots on behalf of the Pfizer Corporation, which had already built a large research complex nearby and intended to erect offices and research facilities on and around the residential properties.

Writing for the five-member majority, Justice John Patti Stevens argued that New London's redevelopment project qualified as a "public use" under the Fifth Amendment because the city was seeking to provide "appreciable benefits to the community" including "new jobs and increased tax revenue" Toward that end, it had drafted a "comprehensive redevelopment plan" and was "endeavoring to coordinate a variety of commercial, residential, and recreational uses of land, with the hope that they will form a whole greater than the sum of its parts."

As a precedent for this holding, Stevens cited Euclid v. Ambler, a 1926 case known mostly to law students, their professors, and city planners. As the legal scholar Michael Allan Wolf argues in The Zoning of America, his illuminating and richly detailed new book on the case, Euclid was one of the most far-reaching Supreme Court decisions of the last century. "If not for that key 1926 decision," he writes, "most Americans would not be living in 'zoned' cities."

At the heart of the case was Euclid, Ohio, an eastern suburb of metropolitan Cleveland. In 1922 Euclid's village council unanimously adopted a sweeping new plan that regulated the height, area, and use of all structures built on the land within its borders. As the law's preamble declared, village residents sought "to preserve the present character of said Village and the public improvements therein, to prevent congestion, and to promote and provide for the health, safety, convenience, and general welfare of the citizens thereof."

Among other things, the ordinance forbade the operation of veterinary hospitals, slaughterhouses, tanneries, and stockyards within Euclid's limits. In general, the ordinance sought to minimize industry, apartment buildings, and the mixing of commercial and residential uses; it favored single-family homes surrounded by small lots--in other words, suburban living as we know it today.

The ordinance sailed through the village council, but not...