Assumptions

Unless otherwise specified, assume that N Rock City has a local zoning ordinance enacted under state law that substantively and procedurally comports with the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act and that grants the city the ability to regulate land use (use and bulk) pursuant to the police power. Assume a land use procedure similar to New York City's, requiring approval by the City Planning Commission and enactment by City Council. If you need to assume other underlying facts to support your answers, please do so explicitly.

Background

After over a decade of gangbusters growth, N Rock City, and the rest of the country, ran right off the economic cliff of a global pandemic. Uncertainty prevails, though some planning imperatives seemed more important than ever: economic development initiatives to get the job market back on track; affordable housing for the burgeoning numbers of low-income families; new open space to support the health and vitality of a population newly wary of how crowded the city had become during the boom years. How to pursue these initiatives on a traitened budget would represent perhaps the biggest fiscal challenge since the Great Depression, when city government was expected to do a lot less.

The current mayor, Mayor Bizkit, won election largely on the strengths of her promises to address a VERY different set of challenges emerging from the long boom - keeping up with demand for housing and office space, maintaining and expanding public infrastructure for a growing population, ensuring that the benefits and burdens of growth are broadly shared. During the campaign, Mayor Bizkit released a document called "A Comprehensive Plan for N Rock City" that included massive transit-oriented upzonings, tens of billions in investments in parks, schools, and public transit, and lots of subsidies for affordable housing in highopportunity areas across the city. On the first day of her administration, Mayor Bizkit duly introduced the plan to the City Council, which, in a burst of early-term bonhomie, advanced the plan to a public hearing and enacted it before the month was out.

Now N Rock's population and budget are shrinking. Faced with a drastically different set of circumstances, Mayor Bizkit and the Planning Department have had to pivot away from the Plan to seek out planning initiatives better suited to current challenges.

Initiatives

Mayor Bizkit is convinced that the City has been ill-served by decades of increasing complexity in the Zoning Resolution. With all the rules and regulations, it's a wonder than people can still build anything! While the booming economy masked difficulties in the development market, she is worried that development will grind to a halt unless she can cut the red tape.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, the Mayor proposes to return to the first principles of the

Euclid, Ohio, zoning resolution from 1923. As you'll recall, the Euclid use groups are as follows:

U-1: Single-family residential

U-2: Two-family residential

U-3: Apartments, hotels, hospitals, etc.

U-4: Offices, retail, restaurants, theaters, garages

U-5: Billboards, warehouses, light industrial

U-6: Heavy industrial, public utilities, jails, prisons, and "institutions for the feebleminded" Euclidean Zoning

These uses are to be mapped in appropriate areas across the city. A separate map implements height limits ranging from 35' to 250', with tower regulations permitting portions of developments in the highest density parts of the city to rise without limit. All else equal, a return to the simplicity of the very first American zoning resolutions should help to encourage new development once the economy resumes its functioning.

Questions: While this "detail" evaded the Mayor and her Planning Department in their rush to rezone, advocates are stunned by the implication of the rezoning for community facilities that house residents with developmental disabilities. The advocates retain you to advise them whether legal challenge is possible. What strategy do you advise? Be as specific as you can. What is the scope of the challenge? What is the likelihood of success?

As the lawsuit you devised above wends its way through the courts, N Rock State steps in and preempts the challenged aspect of the local Zoning Resolution, enabling "institutions for the feeble-minded" to locate in any district that allows residential uses. Mayor Bizkit and Governor Deftone have a famously tense relationship, and Mayor Bizkit is seriously irked by this state incursion into what has been the city's ability to regulate local land use since the 1910s. Is there anything Mayor Bizkit can do or argue to prevent the state from overriding local zoning? Why or why not?