Hadacheck v. Sebastian

No. 32. Submitted October 22, 1915. Decided December 20, 1915. Error to the Supreme Court of the State of California. Judgment affirmed (165 California 416, affirmed). Opinion of the Court by Mr. Justice McKenna. The report records no separate opinion.

Editorial note. Hadacheck owned some three acres in Los Angeles containing a bed of clay of unusual quality for brickmaking, purchased and improved for that purpose before the surrounding land was annexed to the city or occupied for dwellings. The land was worth about $800,000 as a brickyard and some $60,000 for any other use, and the clay could not practically be worked elsewhere. The city thereafter adopted an ordinance making it a misdemeanour to operate a brickyard or brick kiln within a defined district that included his property, and he was arrested and held in custody by the chief of police.

Editorial note. Hadacheck sought habeas corpus in the Supreme Court of California, which discharged the writ and remanded him to custody, sustaining the ordinance. He brought the case to the Supreme Court on writ of error, which affirmed.

Editorial note. The ordinance did not deprive the petitioner of property without due process of law or deny him the equal protection of the laws. A municipality may prohibit within defined limits an occupation that, however lawful in itself and however long conducted, has become offensive or injurious to the health and comfort of an area that has grown residential; the resulting destruction of the value of the property for that occupation does not make the prohibition invalid. The rule derived is that a restriction on the use of land, enacted for the protection of the public health and comfort, is not defeated by the antiquity of the use, by the owner's prior investment, or by the magnitude of the loss, so long as the restriction is not shown to be arbitrary or a mere pretext for discrimination.

Editorial note. Mr. Justice McKenna observed that the police power is one of the most essential of the powers of government and least capable of limitation, and that its exercise must in the nature of things advance some interests at the expense of others; otherwise no municipal development could occur. He rejected the argument that the ordinance was invalid because it forbade the manufacture of brick but not the removal of the clay, and the argument that its district boundaries were arbitrary, noting that the legislative body is entitled to draw lines and that the record disclosed no more than a difference of judgment about where they should fall. The claim of discriminatory enforcement was rejected on the record as presented.

Editorial note. Hadacheck is the pivotal case between Mugler and Euclid: it accepts the noxious-use premise but applies it to an industry not intrinsically immoral, in a setting where the harm consists in the incompatibility of the use with its neighbours. It thereby supplies the practical foundation for districting, and it is the source of the rule that the sequence of arrival — the owner came first, the houses came later — is not decisive. Its treatment of severe diminution in value later became one of the poles between which Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon and Penn Central drew the regulatory-takings line.

Editorial note. Followed. Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926), relied on the districting reasoning in sustaining comprehensive zoning. Applied and repeatedly cited in the regulatory-takings line, including Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City, 438 U.S. 104 (1978), as an instance in which a substantial loss of value did not establish a taking, and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992), which distinguished it because some beneficial use of the land remained.

Editorial note. Read with U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1, and the treatise chapters on nuisance, on zoning and the police power, and on regulatory takings.