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By CHAPLIN BARNES
Earlier this month the U. S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision whose impact upon American towns and countryside will be felt for years to come. In a case on appeal from the California Supreme Court, Agins v. Tiburon, the Court upheld zoning ordinances of the city of Tiburon which sought to protect the open space values of its land.
The city) a suburb of San Francisco, had enacted the ordinances in question in 1973 in accordance with a 1971 California state law requiring counties and municipalities to adopt open space plans and ordinances. The Agins, owners of five acres, wanted to subdivide their parcel into five lots, selling four of them and using the proceeds to finance a house of their own. Under the ordinances, which were enacted subsequent to their purchase of the land, to develop they would have had to provide the Tiburon City Planning Commission and City Council with a plan which would not be detrimental to the special topography and natural features of the area and which would be compatible with “adjoining patterns of development and open space.” Even though the ordinances would have permitted them to build from one to five housing units on their parcel, they chose not to comply with the ordinances (alleging that compliance would cost “up to S50.000”) and did not submit any plans.
Instead, in 1975, they went to court, claiming that the ordinances were unconstitutional as a “taking” of their property without just compensation, in violation of both the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. They sued the city not merely challenging the constitutionality of the ordinances but also seeking $2 million in damages for “inverse condemnation” of their property. (The land, incidentally, ai had been acquired for $$0,000 in 1968.)
The city responded in its defense that the property owners had taken no action to develop their land under the ordinances and hence had demonstrated no loss of property rights. The trial court found for the city, and the California Supreme Court affirmed the decision. The court’s opinion cited with approval the Supreme Court’s language of fifty years ago in the City of Euclid v. Ambler case. That decision, as valid as ever today, spells out the rationale for the legal right of communities to conserve their natural resources through zoning:
The expanded developments of our cities and suburban areas coupled with growing awareness of the necessity to preserve our natural resources... has resulted in changing attitudes toward the regulation of land use... Regulations, the wisdom, necessity and validity of which, as applied to existing conditions, are so apparent they are now uniformly sustained, a century ago or even half a century ago, probably would have been rejected as arbitrary and oppressive.
The U. S. Supreme Court agreed, affirming the California decisions: “...because the owners had not submitted a plan for development as the ordinances permit, there is as yet no concrete controversy regarding the applicability of the specific zoning provisions.” The only question before it, the Court concluded, was whether the mere enactment of the zoning ordinances constituted a ■ taking: whether the existence of the ordinances and their
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