Court Opinion

ID: 9496382
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:25:08.159068+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:32.527062
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
This is a difficult case, but I have come to the conclusion that the restrictions that Chicago’s zoning ordinance places on churches (a term that I use broadly to include any religion’s place of worship) violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I do not address the other grounds on which the plaintiffs attack the restrictions. The discussion of those grounds occupies most of the majority opinion, which devotes little space to what seems to me to be the strongest ground of the appeal.
The ordinance creates three zones so far as relates to the equal protection issue. (I am using the term “zones” functionally rather than to designate categories in the zoning ordinance, which, as is apparent from the majority opinion, is extremely complicated.) The first “zone” is residential. Churches can locate there without having to obtain a permit from the zoning board, as can a number of other nonresidential entities, such as clubs, restaurants, schools, libraries, and drugstores, though restaurants and drugstores only in highrise apartment buildings. Other nonresidential land uses in the residential zone, either require a permit or are banned outright. The second zone, which I shall call “commercial,” is for business and other commercial uses, including not only office buildings and retail stores but also wholesale outlets, warehouses, and light manufacturing, but excluding certain transportation facilities and heavy manufacturing. In the commercial zone, churches require a permit. Last is a zone reserved for transportation facilities and heavy manufacturing, which I shall call the “manufacturing” zone. In it churches are flatly forbidden, although bars, restaurants, and union lodges are freely permitted.
The question is whether the City’s restrictions on where churches may locate are rational. But “rationality” in the law of equal protection is not in fact a single standard, though the courts have been coy about admitting this. City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., 473 U.S. 432, 105 S.Ct. 3249, 87 L.Ed.2d 313 (1985), like this a zoning case, and decisions following it such as Congregation Kol Ami v. Abington Township, 309 F.3d 120, 133-44 (3d Cir.2002), and Cornerstone Bible Church v. City of Hastings, 948 F.2d 464, 471-72 (8th Cir.1991), identify a category of sensitive uses or activities, where judges are to be more alert for unjustifiable discrimination than in the usual case in which government regulations are challenged on equal protection grounds. See Lawrence v. Texas, - U.S. -, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 2484-85, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 (2003) (O’Connor, J., concurring); cf. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 224-30, 102 S.Ct. 2382, 72 L.Ed.2d 786 (1982). It is true that Cleburne refused to deem mental retardation a “quasi-suspect classification” warranting a standard of review more searching than that of rationality, see City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., supra, 473 U.S. at 442-46, 105 S.Ct. 3249 and on this basis the City of *769Chicago in our case cites the decision in support of its position. But one has only to read a little further in the Cleburne opinion to realize that the Court was not treating the zoning discrimination at issue there as it would have treated a discrimination in the taxation of railroads or the zoning of bowling alleys. Compare Fitzgerald v. Racing Ass’n of Central Iowa, — U.S. -, 123 S.Ct. 2156, 2159-61, 156 L.Ed.2d 97 (2003). The ordinance challenged in Cleburne required a permit (which was denied) for a home for mentally retarded people in a zone in which hospitals and nursing homes, along with private houses and a variety of other residential facilities, were allowed without permit. The mentally retarded arouse distaste and even fear among many people, but the Court said that “mere negative attitudes, or fear, unsubstantiated by factors which are properly cognizable in a zoning proceeding, are not permissible bases for treating a home for the mentally retarded differently from apartment houses, multiple dwellings, and the like.” City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., supra, 473 U.S. at 448, 105 S.Ct. 3249. The Court went through the other justifications that Cleburne had offered for the discrimination, found them wanting, and invalidated the ordinance.
The majority opinion in Cleburne is deficient in candor. Cf. Dennis J. Hutchinson, “More Substantive Equal Protection? A Note on Plyler v. Doe,” 1982 Supreme Court Review 167, 168, 179, 194. As a separate opinion joined by three of the Justices pointed out, “The Court holds the ordinance invalid on rational-basis grounds and disclaims that anything special, in the form of heightened scrutiny, is taking place. Yet Cleburne’s ordinance surely would be valid under the traditional rational-basis test applicable to economic and commercial regulation. In my view, it is important to articulate, as the Court does not, the facts and principles that justify subjecting this zoning ordinance to the searching review — the heightened scrutiny — that actually leads to its invalidation .... [T]he Court does not label its handiwork heightened scrutiny, and perhaps the method employed must hereafter be called ‘second order’ rational-basis review rather than ‘heightened scrutiny.’ But however labeled, the rational-basis test invoked today is most assuredly not the rational-basis test of Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma, Inc., 348 U.S. 483, 75 S.Ct. 461, 99 L.Ed. 563 (1955), Allied Stores of Ohio, Inc. v. Bowers, 358 U.S. 522, 79 S.Ct. 437, 3 L.Ed.2d 480 (1959), and their progeny.” City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., supra, 473 U.S. at 456, 458, 105 S.Ct. 3249.
We should follow what the Supreme Court does and not just what it says it is doing. The Court rejects a “sliding scale” approach to equal protection in words but occasionally accepts it in deeds. Cleburne instantiates though it does not articulate the proposition that discrimination against sensitive uses is to be given more careful, realistic, skeptical scrutiny by the courts than discrimination against purely commercial activities. Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 634-35, 116 S.Ct. 1620, 134 L.Ed.2d 855 (1996); cf. Lawrence v. Texas, supra, 123 S.Ct. at 2482. And while it is true that the Court has rejected the proposition that “Cleburne stands for the broad proposition that state decisionmak-ing reflecting ‘negative attitudes’ or ‘fear’ necessarily runs afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment,” adding that “although such biases may often accompany irrational (and therefore unconstitutional) discrimination, their presence alone does not a constitutional violation make,” University of Alabama v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356, 367, 121 S.Ct. 955, 148 L.Ed.2d 866 (2001), we should give due weight to “necessarily” *770and “alone.” Previous decisions of this court and other courts of appeals have recognized that the Cleburne line of cases expands the boundaries of “rationality” review. See Milner v. Apfel, 148 F.3d 812, 816-17 (7th Cir.1998); Pontarelli Limousine, Inc. v. City of Chicago, 929 F.2d 389, 341-42 (7th Cir.1991); Ramos v. Town of Vernon, 331 F.3d 315, 320 (2d Cir.2003); Able v. United States, 155 F.3d 628, 634 (2d Cir.1998).
Churches are no less sensitive a land use than homes for the mentally retarded, as both Congregation Kol Ami v. Abington Township, supra, and Cornerstone Bible Church v. City of Hastings, supra, recognize, though the reason is different. The mentally retarded are victims of irrational fears and cruel scorn; they are shunned. Religious people are not shunned, but religion arouses strong emotions, sectarian rivalry is intense and often bitter, and the mixing of religion and government is explosive. When government singles out churches for special regulation, as it does in the Chicago ordinance, the risk of discrimination, not against religion as such— Chicago is not dominated by atheists — but against particular sects, is great enough to require more careful judicial scrutiny than in the ordinary equal protection challenge to zoning.
Chicago’s ordinance discriminates in favor of well-established sects. Not only did they acquire the land on which their churches are built in residential areas when such land was relatively cheap and abundant, and therefore affordable by noncommercial entities, such as churches (and there are of course some wealthy churches); in addition, because nonconforming uses are grandfathered, the churches that have managed to get permission to build over the years in nonresidential zones are untouchable. But what of new, small, or impecunious churches, such as the 40 to 50 obscure sects, one of which has only 15 members, that compose the principal plaintiff, Civil Liberties for Urban Believers? And obscure they are. It is telling that of the six other named plaintiffs — Christ Center (150 members), Christian Covenant Outreach Church (ministering to teenagers and former gang members), His Word Ministries to All Nations, Christian Bible Center (35 members), Church on the “Way” Praise Center, and Monte de Sion Church — only one (Christian Bible Center) is on the city’s list of area churches. See http://www.thed-tyofchicago. org/church/.
As David Hume would have predicted, the greater vitality of American religion than of religion in countries in which there is an established church or churches owes much to our unwillingness to allow government to favor particular sects. Laurence R. Iannaccone, Roger Finke & Rodney Stark, “Deregulating Religion: The Economics of Church and State,” 35 Econ. Inquiry 350 (1997); Iannaccone, “The Consequences of Religious Market Regulation: Adam Smith and the Economics of Religion,” 3 Rationality & Soc’y 156 (1991). By impairing religious competition, such favoritism turns many people— those not comfortable with the creed or clergy or congregants of the favored church — off religion.
Religious competition presupposes free entry into the religious “marketplace.” A new church is unlikely, however, to have the resources necessary for building its place of worship in a residential area other than a slum, especially as the Chicago ordinance requires that the church provide parking, which will mean that unless its building is tiny it will have to acquire more than one city lot. A church that wants to build in the commercial zone, where land is cheaper, must obtain a special permit; and if it wants to build in the manufacturing *771zone, it is out of luck unless it can procure an amendment to the zoning ordinance. At issue in Congregation Kol Ami v. Ab-ington Township was a zoning ordinance that excluded churches from residential areas; this is some evidence that the City is wrong to suppose that it is any longer the case that churches fit better into residential than nonresidential areas. The phenomenon of the “storefront church”— an apt description of the churches in this case — reflects both the inability of a new, small church to afford to build in a residential area and the fact that a new church needs to advertise its presence, which it can do at little cost just by being located in a commercial area, where there are more passersby than in a residential area.
Small storefront or house churches can be found in many places in the city. A recent article by George Gallup reports that 40% of all American adults meet in small religious groups. Not surprisingly, a large number of these groups are in fact storefront or house churches which revolve around Bible study, prayer, and Sunday school.
This is not happening in just a Christian context. Within the New Age movement, Muslim, Hindu, and even Jewish traditions, small groups are gathering in storefront meeting houses. These storefront worship spaces will continue to grow for many reasons, but the one that will affect them even more than group dynamics is city planning. As tighter zoning laws are pass[ed] in Boston and real estate prices continue to sky-rocket, the only place for churches to turn to are existing commercial spaces.
Robert L. Lewis, Jr., “Ministry Research Project: Storefront Churches of Boston; A Photographic Study of Selected Storefront and Home Churches in the City of Boston,” http://www.bu.edu/ccrd/re-search/completed/storefront. html. The article is about Boston but the analysis in it is equally applicable to Chicago.
Granted, Chicago’s prohibition against locating a church in the commercial zone is not absolute. A permit can be sought. But obtaining one is costly for a marginal enterprise; the zoning board enjoys broad discretion in deciding whether to grant or deny a permit; and a public hearing is required at which opposition to the church’s application for a permit is predictable because churches do not enhance commercial activity (see Lucinda Harper, “Storefront Churches: The Neighbors Upscale Stores Don’t Love,” Wall St. J., Mar. 15, 2000, at Bl) — this is one of the reasons the City offers in defense of the ordinance. It is a bad reason, but it is the kind of reason likely to impress the zoning authorities.
It is a bad reason because while it is true that a church is less likely to enhance a commercial area than a Bloomingdale’s or a Four Seasons is, there are very few blocks in Chicago that are purely commercial. A combination of grandfathering, the grant of special permits, and changes in zoning law has produced a crazy quilt of land uses. On Michigan Avenue near our courthouse — an area zoned commercial as I have been using the term — retail stores, restaurants, hotels, colleges, office buildings, and clubs jostle cheek by jowl. If one of the clubs or colleges were replaced by a church, the commercial life of Michigan Avenue would not be affected, although the “tone” of the avenue might be lowered by a storefront church. (As a matter of fact, there is a church on Michigan Avenue — the Fourth Presbyterian Church. See http://www.fourth-church.org/.) For remember those “negative attitudes” of which the Court spoke in Cleburne? Not only are mainline churches apt to be hostile to upstarts such *772as the members of Civil Liberties for Urban Believers, and particularly to storefront churches, but even people who are not caught up in sectarian rivalries might consider the presence of a church rather a downer in a “fast” district, such as Old Town. Indeed, a permit for one of CLUB’s members was denied because it was thought that the presence of a church would impede the transformation of the area into a “nightclub district.”
The City’s brief offers the further, but absurdly paternalistic, argument that it is bad for the churches themselves to be located in commercial or industrial areas, because of noise and commotion. Obviously that is a judgment for the church to make rather than government, by trading off the cost to the church of noisy and profane surroundings against the benefits in lower costs of land acquisition and proximity to sinners, including prostitutes, drug addicts, and gang members, whose souls are particularly in need of saving. At oral argument the City’s lawyer pressed another point, that the mysterious exclusion of churches from the manufacturing zone is justified by the fact that if they clustered there they might try to expel the factories by bringing a nuisance suit. Because Illinois rejects the doctrine of “coming to the nuisance,” City of Pana v. Central Washed Coal Co., 260 Ill. 111, 102 N.E. 992, 998 (1913); Oehler v. Levy, 234 Ill. 595, 85 N.E. 271, 273-74 (1908); see also Wheat v. Freeman Coal Mining Corp., 23 Ill.App.3d 14, 319 N.E.2d 290, 294 (1974), it is not a defense to a nuisance suit that the nuisance was there before the plaintiff. The lawyer’s vision of churches concentrating in the manufacturing zone and then bringing a nuisance suit to transform it into — what, a religious zone? — is fanciful. But even if it were realistic, the City, which is a part of Illinois state government from the standpoint of the application of the equal protection clause, cannot defend discrimination by arguing that it is coerced by state law. Otherwise a state could pass a law requiring the police to beat up anyone they arrested, and police sued for violating the Fourth Amendment for using excessive force in effecting seizures of the person would have a defense, which no one believes. The state can untie the City’s hands by authorizing a “coming to the nuisance” defense, either generally or just for the benefit of manufacturers whose factories are in cities. Anyway a nuisance suit would not succeed unless the plaintiff could show a net increase in land values from abating the nuisance; and if so this would imply that the City was better off for the suit.
The City’s final argument is that the zoning ordinance represents a “global bargain” whereby churches get preferred treatment in the residential zone and secular uses get preferred treatment in the commercial zone. If one assumes, as I would, that the exclusion of commercial uses from the residential zone is rational (deny that, and one condemns virtually all zoning as irrational), the exclusion of churches from the commercial zone would be rational if their presence would crowd out commercial users. But that is an absurd suggestion. A slightly more realistic worry would be that if churches are allowed to bid for land zoned commercial, the price of such land will rise, to the detriment of commercial users of it, because the amount of land is fixed and the demand would have increased. But the aggregate demand of churches for land zoned commercial is too slight in relation to the amount of that land for allowing them to bid on it to affect the price noticeably.
Thus far I have been discussing the ordinance as it was amended in 2000 in virtual acknowledgment that its predecessor was in violation of the Constitution. *773For the predecessor ordinance allowed fraternal lodges and other clubs, community centers, and other meeting places to locate in the commercial zone without obtaining a permit. (The amendment eliminated this privilege, though colleges, union lodges, libraries, and funeral homes, along with the conventional business and commercial establishments, retain it.) The only difference between them and churches is that they are secular. There is no difference so far as the use of land is concerned. The “global bargain” defense is particularly questionable as applied to the old ordinance. A church is no more or less suitable for the residential zone than a fraternal lodge and a fraternal lodge no more or less suitable for the commercial zone than a church. The old ordinance discriminated arbitrarily in favor of churches in the residential zone and against them in the commercial zone, thus distorting religious competition in favor of existing and against new churches. The new ordinance retains one completely unreasonable distinction, that between union lodges and churches, putting one in mind of the Spanish Civil War, a struggle between syndicalism and clericalism. The distinction between churches on the one hand and libraries and colleges on the other hand, another distinction retained by the amended ordinance, is only a little more rational.
The plaintiffs filed their suit almost a decade ago, before the ordinance was amended. The amendment did not moot their challenge to the old ordinance because they seek damages for the delay they encountered in obtaining permission to build in desirable locations. If as I contend the requirement of a permit was unconstitutional because it discriminated in favor of fraternal lodges, then the delay the plaintiffs encountered in finding suitable quarters was the consequence of a constitutional violation and the plaintiffs are entitled to damages. As an example of the runarounds that the plaintiffs experienced in obtaining a special permit in the commercial zone, consider the hegira of the Christian Bible Church. From small beginnings (like Christianity itself), meeting in a private home, the congregation in 1988 began meeting in a funeral parlor, hardly an auspicious site. In 1990 it found a suitable building in the commercial zone, but did not apply for a permit after being told that the alderman for the ward in which the building was located would not allow a church at that location. The following year Christian Bible bought a building in another part of the commercial zone, applied for a permit, and was turned down. After trying without success to sell the building, the church renovated it, and while the building was closed for renovations the congregation met in rented quarters or private homes. The renovations completed, Christian Bible applied for and this time received a permit to use the building as its church. By now it was 1993; it had taken three years to find suitable space. As Christian Bible has only 35 members, the burden that the ordinance imposed on it was formidable.
Chicago’s zoning ordinance imposes the same severe burden on new churches that the ordinance invalidated in the Cleburne case imposed on homes for the mentally retarded, and with no greater justification. In doing so it denied the plaintiffs the equal protection of the laws.