How Euclid v. Ambler Made Exclusionary Zoning the Law of the Land

On November 22, 1926, the Supreme Court of the United States handed a win to a village of a few thousand people on the shore of Lake Erie. Euclid, Ohio, had drawn lines across a map, painted some parcels for houses and others for shops and factories, and told a landowner called the Ambler Realty Company that its roughly 68 acres could not be used the way the company wanted. Ambler sued, saying the village had taken the value of its land without paying for it. A federal judge in Cleveland agreed with Ambler. The Supreme Court did not. The case is remembered by law students as a dry exercise in police power, but its real legacy is sitting outside your window: the quiet street where nothing but a detached house is allowed, and the reason a nurse and a teacher often cannot afford to live on it.

In short: Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. upheld zoning as a valid use of local power, and its reasoning treated apartments as a nuisance to be kept away from single-family homes. That ruling became the legal foundation for a century of exclusionary zoning, and undoing it is now one of the most important, and most bipartisan, fights in housing.

A village, a railroad and a judge who saw it coming

Euclid in the early 1920s was a suburb in waiting. Cleveland's industry was pushing east along the rail lines, and land near the tracks was worth a great deal more to a factory than to a family. In 1922 the village adopted a comprehensive zoning ordinance that sorted land into use districts, height districts and area districts. Ambler's parcel sat between a main road and the railroad. The ordinance split it, leaving part of it for residential use where industry would have paid far more.

The company went to federal court, and Judge David Westenhaver ruled for it in 1924. His opinion is worth reading today because he named the thing the rest of the case would politely step around. Zoning, he wrote in substance, was being used to sort people by income and, he suggested, by race. He pointed out that the Supreme Court had already struck down explicit racial zoning in Buchanan v. Warley in 1917, and he worried that use-based zoning would accomplish the same segregation by other means. He was dismissed at the time as an old-fashioned defender of property rights. He was also, on the central point, correct.

The brief that changed the Court's mind

The case was argued at the Supreme Court in early 1926 and then, unusually, set for reargument that fall. Into the gap stepped Alfred Bettman, a Cincinnati lawyer and planner who filed a brief for the national planning movement. His argument was modern and practical: cities were growing, uses were colliding, and orderly separation of factories from homes protected health and safety. Zoning was the kind of reasonable regulation that states had always been allowed to impose, like fire codes or limits on slaughterhouses.

It worked. Justice George Sutherland, one of the Court's most conservative members and no friend of regulation in general, wrote the majority opinion for six justices. Three dissented without writing an opinion. Sutherland's reasoning leaned on the old law of nuisance: a pig in the parlor rather than the barnyard, as he put it, can be a nuisance even if a pig is lawful. Communities could keep uses apart if the line between them was not clearly arbitrary.

Then the opinion went further than it needed to. In explaining why a village could keep apartment buildings out of residential districts, Sutherland described the apartment house as, very often, "a mere parasite" on the open space and quiet created by single-family homes nearby. He listed the harms: more traffic, more noise, fewer sunny yards for children. The apartment was not a home for working people in that telling; it was a threat to the homes of everyone else.

How a sentence about apartments became a business model

A ruling that zoning is constitutional does not, by itself, require any town to ban apartments. What made Euclid so powerful was the combination of three things that arrived at the same moment.

First, the federal government was already selling zoning. In the early 1920s Herbert Hoover's Commerce Department circulated a Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, a model law that states could adopt to hand zoning power to their cities and towns. Nearly every state did some version of it. After 1926, those local ordinances had the Supreme Court's blessing.

Second, the hierarchy was baked into the map. The style of zoning that took the village's name, Euclidean zoning, ranks uses from the most protected (the detached single-family house) down through duplexes, apartments, commerce and industry. Higher uses are shielded from lower ones. An apartment can be kept out of a house district, but in many early codes a house could go almost anywhere. That ordering told every planning board in the country which residents mattered most.

Third, the tools for sorting kept multiplying. Minimum lot sizes, minimum house sizes, parking requirements, height limits and limits on how many unrelated people could share a home were all upheld or left standing in the decades after Euclid. In 1974, in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, the Court upheld a Long Island village's limit on unrelated people living together, with Justice William O. Douglas writing that a quiet place where yards are wide and people few was a legitimate goal. Each tool, on its own, sounded like a neighborhood preference. Together they produced towns where the cheapest legal home was out of reach for most of the region.

Why the courts mostly stepped back

There was a moment when the Court seemed willing to police the edges. Two years after Euclid, in Nectow v. City of Cambridge, it held that a zoning line applied to one particular parcel was arbitrary and could not stand. But Nectow became the exception, not the rule. Federal courts largely left local land use alone for the rest of the century.

When challengers argued that exclusionary zoning was racially discriminatory, the bar was set high. In Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. in 1977, the Court held that a suburb's refusal to rezone land for integrated, moderate-income housing did not violate the Constitution unless challengers proved discriminatory intent, not merely a discriminatory effect. Intent is very hard to prove when the official reasons are traffic, school crowding and the character of the neighborhood.

State courts were sometimes bolder. New Jersey's Supreme Court, in the Mount Laurel decisions beginning in 1975, held that developing towns had an obligation under the state constitution to make realistic room for their fair share of the region's low- and moderate-income housing. The fights that followed lasted decades and are still being argued in New Jersey, but the doctrine produced tens of thousands of affordable homes that would not otherwise exist. It remains the clearest example of a court reading Westenhaver's worry back into the law.

The strongest case for the village, and the answer

It is worth stating the defense of Euclid fairly, because it is not foolish. Before zoning, a family could buy a house and wake up to find a rendering plant going up next door. People living near heavy industry suffered real harms, and many of them were poor. Separating dangerous uses from homes was a public health victory, and it still is. Environmental justice advocates today fight for exactly that kind of separation in neighborhoods where refineries and highways were sited next to schools.

There is a democratic case too. Zoning lets residents shape the place they live, through public hearings and elected councils, instead of leaving every decision to whoever owns the most land. Local control is a value many progressives share.

The answer is that the ruling bundled two very different ideas. One was keeping a smelter away from a nursery. The other was keeping a fourplex away from a single-family house. The first protects people from pollution. The second protects property values and social distance from neighbors who rent. A century of experience shows that the second idea, enforced by those who already own homes, tends to lock out newcomers, and the newcomers locked out are disproportionately young, Black, Latino and working class. Local control is real democracy, but it is democracy among the people already inside. The family priced out of a town never gets a vote there.

There is also a place where progressives have to own their part. Many of the most restrictive zoning codes in the country are in the most liberal metro areas, from the Bay Area to the Boston suburbs. Lawn signs that welcome everyone have stood on lots where the zoning code made sure few could follow. That is not a reason for despair; it is a reason to fix it at home first.

The long tail of a 1926 opinion

Measure the consequences by what is now illegal to build. In large shares of residential land in many American cities, a duplex, a row of townhouses or a small apartment building over a corner store cannot be built without a special exception, a rezoning or a variance. Those are the kinds of buildings that housed working families for generations, and many cities are full of beloved old examples that their own current codes would forbid.

The results show up in rents and commutes. When a region adds jobs and forbids most new homes near them, the price of the existing homes rises and the people who do the work move farther out. Long commutes burn time and fuel. Children change schools when the rent jumps. Older people cannot downsize in the neighborhood they know. Climate goals suffer too, because spread-out single-use development locks in driving.

And the racial sorting Westenhaver predicted did happen, layered on top of the explicitly racist federal mortgage policies of the 1930s and 1940s. Zoning by itself did not draw red lines, but it made the lines durable after the explicit tools were outlawed. A town that never said a word about race could still keep its demographics frozen simply by forbidding the kinds of homes most families of color could afford.

The reform movement that crosses party lines

The good news is that the politics of zoning have scrambled in a way that would surprise the justices of 1926. Minneapolis ended single-family-only zoning across the city in its 2040 plan. Oregon passed a state law in 2019 requiring larger cities to allow duplexes and, in many places, more on residential lots. California has passed a series of laws allowing backyard cottages and lot splits. Montana, under a Republican legislature and governor, passed a package of zoning reforms in 2023. In legislatures from Washington to Texas, the coalition for more housing includes tenant advocates, environmental groups, builders, free-market think tanks and young voters of every stripe.

Not every reform has worked as promised, and the details matter enormously: permits, financing, fees and construction costs can strangle a law that looks generous on paper. But the core legal premise of Euclid, that a neighborhood may treat an apartment as a nuisance, is finally being argued with in public. The argument is the one Westenhaver made a century ago: a rule that sorts people by what home they can afford is a rule about people, not about land.

Here is the argument, then, plainly stated. Zoning should protect people from harm, and it should stop protecting homeowners from neighbors. A town that wants nurses in its hospital and teachers in its schools should allow the kinds of homes those workers can afford. That is not a radical claim. Until 1926, it was mostly how American towns were built.

What you can do

• Learn your own map. Most cities post their zoning maps online. Find out what is legal on your block, and whether a duplex or a small apartment building could be built there. Then follow the housing fights in the wider region through the housing and homelessness topic page.
• Show up when the code is rewritten. Comprehensive plans and zoning rewrites come around every decade or so and are decided at hearings where a few dozen people often carry the day. Your city council members and state legislators decide these rules; find who represents you and tell them you support legal room for more homes.
• Back the people doing fair housing work. Fair housing councils, tenant unions and legal aid offices bring the cases and run the testing that expose exclusion. Look up groups working on housing and civil rights in your state through the organizations directory.
• Watch the courts as well as the councils. Land use law is still being written by judges, including in state constitutional cases like Mount Laurel. The Court Watch page tracks the Supreme Court's opinions this term with the Court's own summaries, so you can see when housing and property questions reach it.
• Talk to your neighbors as neighbors. The person worried about traffic is not your enemy. Ask what they would want a new building to look like, and bring a renter you know to the next meeting. Zoning was made by local people, and it can be remade by them.