The bar in question had cooperated with the police but then, unbeknownst to the owners, the department employed confidential informants to make drug buys on the premises. Although finding the owners had tried to address the drug dealing issue and had not permitted the nuisance, the trial court shut the bar down. On appeal, the intermediate appellate court found an as applied taking. Further, citing the Restatement of Torts as to nuisances, the court found that the city had not met the nuisance exemption to the compensation requirements of the Fifth Amendment since the owners did not have knowledge of the nuisance. The connection between religion and land use has also become an increasingly fertile field for litigation and legislation.
Some regulatory systems are simply too cute to pass muster.
Simi Valley, the home of the first Rodney King trial, adopted an ordinance that forbade all adult uses within 1,000 feet of religious uses. A procedural quirk was that applications for adult uses took time to process, while zoning permits for religious uses could be granted over the counter on the day of application. It so happened that on the very day that an applicant for an adult use had his application declared complete, an over the counter permit for a nearby adult bible class was granted to an institute headed by the president of the Simi Valley Board of Education, an avowed opponent of the adult use. In response, the Ninth Circuit held this effective veto over the issuance of a special use permit to adult businesses unconstitutional, since it delegated to private parties the power to ban protected forms of expression. In a Belmont, Massachusetts case, the neighbors of a proposed Mormon Church attacked a state law exempting religious uses from most local use regulations, alleging that the law established religion in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.