Court Opinion

ID: 9793426
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:47:21.431909+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:04:54.410770
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Day
dissenting:
Probably more has been written in this case than is necessary or desirable. Nevertheless it should be considered that in approaching this problem my brethren have given scant attention to the right of the people of Denver to govern themselves, the fundamental concept of our democracy. The people of Denver in their charter, which is their own home rule “constitution,” by free ballot have expressed themselves as to how their own property should be used for the benefit of all of them. This they can do in local matters if the charter itself is *182not violative of the state constitution. This charter has been quoted but not upheld. Yet every power they have granted and the purposes and objectives they have enumerated do not violate the constitution. In it the people have given to their city council authority to enact ordinances to carry out the intent and purpose and objectives of the charter. The people have set forth the purposes, all of which fit very well within the powers reserved to them in governing themselves. While it is true that the people cannot by vote impose upon an electorate restrictions that are clearly unconstitutional, their vote is particularly helpful in this case because of the duty imposed upon the judiciary to give constitutionality to their enactments if at all possible. The public welfare, toward which end the people may enact laws under the police powers, is subject to a narrow construction as in the majority opinion or to a liberal construction as in the states which have upheld the constitutionality of off-street parking ordinances. So we do not have a situation here where the unconstitutionality of the ordinance is clear-cut, unequivocal, and beyond reasonable doubt. Such ordinances have been so universally adopted and accepted by other communities — 265 of them — that we think the vote on the charter was meant to convey to a doubtful judiciary what was to be the public policy of Denver in regard to problems affecting its future growth. If a free people cannot go to the polls and by their vote regulate the orderly development of their own city, and their own neighborhoods, then we have taken away from them far more than is attempted to be given by the majority opinion. The people have set forth quite explicitly what they think is good for the whole. They are now told, not by a benevolent despot but by a solicitous judiciary, what is really good for them.
The English poet, William Cowper, wrote of Robinson Crusoe and his life alone for five years on a desert island:
*183“I am monarch of all I survey —
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea,
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.”
This may have been all right for Robinson Crusoe, but if there are great numbers of Robinson Crusoes in a home rule city, can each proclaim such right? I think not.
Writing of two shipwrecked passengers also cast on a desert isle, W. S. Gilbert, in his delightful ballad telling the story of the foundering of the Ballyshannon and the drowning of all the passengers except Gray and Somers, wrote:
“These passengers, by reason of their clinging to a mast,
Upon a desert island were eventually cast.
They hunted for their meals, as Alexander Selkirk used,
But they couldn’t chat together — they had
not been introduced.
* * *
And somehow thus they settled it without a word of mouth
That Gray should take the northern half while Somers took the south.”
It is the purpose of the poet to demonstrate that as soon as two people are thrown together and are likely to conflict, some regulation is in order. Though Gray and Somers may have been able to divide the island “withoút word of mouth,” a growth in population would have required a clear understanding of the rights and duties of each. These rules, as now expressed in charters and ordinances, were necessary to protect the people and to promote their common good.
Some of the specific grants of power given by the people in their vote to their own elected city council, which appear now to be of no effect, are: To regulate *184and. restrict the size of buildings and other structures, the percentage of lot that may be occupied, the size of yards, courts and other open spaces, the density of population, the use of buildings, structures and land. Among the expressed purposes specifically sought to be accomplished by zoning regulations and the charter — all, in my opinion, constitutional — were: To provide a comprehensive plan designed to lessen congestion in the streets, to secure safety from fire, panic and other dangers, to prevent overcrowding of land and to avoid undue concentration of population, to facilitate adequate provisions of transportation. The people and their comprehensive plan to prevent a duplication of or a compounding of the conditions prevalent in the downtown area (which developed unrestrained and which cannot be undone now) are to be held for naught.
The history of Denver, beginning with the years of no regulation in the use of property or in the size of the construction thereon, followed by the decades of inadequate ordinances and the deadly blows some of the decisions of this court struck at attempts to legislate in the field, has left the city with many scars. Judicial notice can be taken of what is plainly visible and of common knowledge. Our early fathers and the rugged individualists of pioneer days, most solicitous of the individual property rights, created a city which has been having a great struggle to meet the demands of growth. As a consequence of this individualism, there are encountered in every district dead-end streets, streets blocked by buildings and houses erected on the individual whim of the property owner without regard to contiguous plats, existing streets or adjacent property development. Opposition to or lack of uniform set-back requirements, all urged in the name of freedom of use, created conditions where streets cannot be widened, or, if they are, the movement of traffic splashes snow and water on the front stoop. Areas now designated as “blighted,” heavily dotted with buildings standing vacant or, in many in*185stances, commanding only nominal rents, attest not to the fact that the buildings are many years old, for many are well built and functional, but rather they stand as monuments to the lack of planning (such as was hoped to be achieved by the charter) which permitted buildings and houses to be jammed up one against the other. It was inevitable that under such circumstances the very owners themselves closed their property and in some instances sold for the best price obtainable. The colossal waste is apparent everywhere, and there is scant comfort in the present day that these “protected properties” now are looking to the federal government for a proposed program of urban renewal whereby their property will be purchased, torn down, and others will be given a chance to commence anew. But what value will be the new start if the area is developed under old concepts? If this potentially fine city in the next seventy-five years is to be allowed to develop with little more plan, legislation or restraint than were the downtown areas east and south from the river, to Broadway, it doesn’t tax the imagination to picture the catastrophic consequences.