Land Use Must Stay a Local Issue

One of Washington’s thoroughly bad ideas is a legislative proposal to help developers skip local authorities and go directly to federal courts in challenging local land-use decisions. There are few resources that are as local as land use. Decisions on the issue should remain in local hands. The House, scheduled to take up the measure today, should vote it down.

The bill is being sold to House members as a noncontroversial procedural fix. It is far more than that. If enacted, it will interfere with the historical rights of the communities to decide how their land should be used. It would uproot a system that encourages local officials and land developers to negotiate solutions to disputes over use restrictions. In many cases, developers wouldn’t even have to go through administrative appeals channels.

Most communities in the United States have populations of just a few thousand and budgets to match, and to them expensive, protracted federal litigation would pose a formidable problem.

The measure, HR 2372, would make a federal case out of the myriad of zoning, planning and land-use decisions that local authorities make each year. A builder who was denied the right to put a strip joint near a school could go straight to the federal court. So could a land owner turned down for a license to build an industrial plant next to a densely populated neighborhood, or a residential development in an environmentally sensitive or historically protected area. The bill, written by the National Assn. of Home Builders and backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, offers an abject example of the undue influence that big money has on the legislative process.

Sponsors of the bill clearly failed to show that state laws and local authorities do not adequately protect the property rights of land owners and developers or that state courts are not competent to deal with property-use disputes. The bill, opposed by the federal courts themselves, the Department of Justice, most state attorneys general, city and county associations, environmental groups and historical societies, has no merits and goes against this Congress’ self-proclaimed role of the guardian of state rights against federal intrusion. The House should reject it.