Opinion ID: 755151
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Substantial Government Interests

Text: 7 With respect to the substantiality of New York's non-speech-related interests in the Zoning Amendment, the New York Court of Appeals observed that the City Council assembled an extensive legislative record connecting adult establishments and negative secondary effects, including numerous studies on the effects of adult establishments both within and without New York City. Stringfellow's, 91 N.Y.2d at 397, 671 N.Y.S.2d 406, 694 N.E.2d 407. The court then reviewed in detail this legislative record, which included studies by the Times Square Business Improvement District, the Chelsea Action Coalition and Manhattan Community Board 4, and the Department of City Planning (DCP). Each of these studies linked the presence of adult establishments to increased crime and decreased property values. See id. at  6-7, 671 N.Y.S.2d 406, 694 N.E.2d 407. 4 The court also noted that, apart from the City's own studies, the legislative record contained the conclusions of studies conducted by city councils and town boards throughout the country, which also showed a correlation between adult establishments and negative secondary effects such as increased crime, depressed real estate markets, and an overall decline in the quality and character of surrounding neighborhoods. See id. Finally, the court rejected plaintiffs' complaints about the sufficiency of the evidence, holding that it was entirely appropriate to rely on studies from other jurisdictions--particularly in light of the fact that City officials had considered the comparability and reliability of these studies--and that the nonempirical nature of some of the City's evidence (i.e., from surveys of businesses and real-estate brokers) did not render it valueless or insubstantial. See id. at  8, 671 N.Y.S.2d 406, 694 N.E.2d 407. 8 Plaintiffs now raise the same objections to the City's evidence that were rejected by the New York Court of Appeals, and despite that court's thorough review and analysis of the legislative record, plaintiffs claim that federal law requires the City to provide greater evidence of negative secondary effects than the New York courts required. Accordingly, plaintiffs contend that they are not estopped from relitigating the sufficiency of the City's evidence under this allegedly more stringent federal standard. In arguing that a more stringent standard exists, plaintiffs rely almost exclusively on Phillips v. Borough of Keyport, 107 F.3d 164 (3d Cir.1997) (en banc), a case that provides no support whatsoever for their position. Phillips was an adult-use zoning case in which the Third Circuit required additional evidentiary support for a zoning ordinance that had been upheld by the district court (1) without an answer from the defendants identifying the secondary effects alleged to justify the burden on expression, and (2) without a record supporting the reasonableness of any legislative expectations regarding the likelihood of these secondary effects and the ameliorative effect of the ordinance. Id. at 173. The Third Circuit noted that, whereas in Renton the Supreme Court had considered the City of Renton's legislative record to be adequate where it consisted solely of studies from other cities that could reasonably be deemed relevant, [h]ere, the district court had no way of knowing what problem or problems the Borough thought it was facing and there is no study or other evidence in the record concerning the secondary effects of 'adult entertainment uses.'  Id. at 174. In order to avoid reduc[ing] the First Amendment to a charade in this area, id. at 175, the Third Circuit required the Borough at least to identify the secondary effects with some particularity, and to offer some record support for the existence of those effects, id. Far from suggesting that federal law would require more exacting scrutiny of the legislative record than was undertaken by the New York courts in this case, Phillips stands for nothing more than the unremarkable proposition that a barren legislative record will not suffice under the First Amendment--a proposition which is unhelpful to plaintiffs, in light of the fact that the legislative record in the present case is quite extensive, as the state courts recognized. 9 In any event, quite apart from the fact that we find no merit in plaintiffs' argument that the federal standard for judging the substantiality of New York's non-speech-related interests is stricter than the state standard, this Court, in Buzzetti, has already considered and rejected the argument that the legislative record is inadequate, as a matter of federal law, to support the City's legitimate and substantial interests in the Zoning Amendment. As we stated in Buzzetti: 10 Renton emphasized that city officials were not required to make particular findings regarding the secondary effects of adult entertainment in Renton itself, but rather were entitled to rely on the experiences of ... other cities. Renton, 475 U.S. at 51, 106 S.Ct. at 931; see id. at 51-52, 106 S.Ct. at 931 (The First Amendment does not require a city, before enacting such an ordinance, to conduct new studies or produce evidence independent of that already generated by other cities, so long as whatever evidence the city relies upon is reasonably believed to be relevant to the problem that the city addresses.). Thus, New York City's reliance on studies from a variety of other areas of the country was well-placed. But ... New York City went beyond this minimal requirement: the DCP conducted its own detailed study, consulted other studies conducted in particular neighborhoods of New York City, and considered testimony given at public hearings in New York. 11 140 F.3d at 140 (first ellipsis in original). Accordingly, it is clear that there is no basis for allowing plaintiffs to relitigate this issue in federal court.