Nectow v. City of Cambridge

No. 509. Argued April 19, 1928. Decided May 14, 1928. Error to the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Judgment reversed (260 Massachusetts 441, reversed). Opinion of the Court by Mr. Justice Sutherland. The report records no separate opinion.

Editorial note. Nectow owned a tract in Cambridge that had long been used for industrial and business purposes and lay near a soap factory and a railroad. A comprehensive zoning ordinance placed a strip of the tract, about one hundred feet deep, in a residential district, with the remainder in less restricted districts. A pending contract for the sale of the whole tract failed because the purchaser could not use the restricted strip for its intended purpose. A master appointed by the state court found on the evidence that no practical use could be made of the strip for residential purposes and that the district line did not promote the health, safety, convenience, or general welfare of the inhabitants of that part of the city.

Editorial note. Nectow sought a writ of mandamus to compel the issuance of a permit. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, treating Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. as controlling, sustained the ordinance as applied and dismissed the petition. The Supreme Court reversed on writ of error.

Editorial note. The application of the residential classification to this parcel deprived the owner of property without due process of law. The general validity of a zoning scheme does not immunise each of its particular applications; where the master's findings, accepted below, establish that the restriction of a particular parcel does not serve the public objects for which the power exists and causes serious damage, the restriction cannot stand. The rule derived is that a zoning classification is open to challenge as applied to a specific parcel, and the challenge succeeds where the classification lacks a substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals, or general welfare.

Editorial note. Mr. Justice Sutherland began from the concession that the governmental power to interfere by zoning with the general rights of the landowner is not unlimited, and repeated the Euclid formula that such an interference cannot be sustained where it has no substantial relation to the public welfare. He then treated the master's findings as the decisive material: they had not been set aside below, and they established both the absence of any public benefit from including the strip in the residential district and the practical uselessness of the strip for the permitted purpose. On that record no presumption in favour of the ordinance could survive. The opinion is brief precisely because it decides no question of the validity of zoning in general.

Editorial note. Nectow is the necessary complement to Euclid. Euclid held that districting is a legitimate exercise of the police power on its face; Nectow held that the exercise remains answerable parcel by parcel. Together the two decisions define the American structure of land-use review: broad deference to the legislative scheme, coupled with an as-applied inquiry available to the individual owner. Because the as-applied inquiry was long framed in the language of means and ends, Nectow was for many years cited in regulatory-takings argument; the treatise treats it as a due process authority, in the terms in which Lingle later confined the inquiry.

Editorial note. Followed as the foundation of as-applied zoning challenges. Its means-ends formulation was carried into takings doctrine by Agins v. City of Tiburon, 447 U.S. 255 (1980), and that use was repudiated in Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005), which explained that Nectow and Euclid were due process decisions and that the 'substantially advances' inquiry is not a test for a taking.

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