Landowners have no constitutional right to subdivide their land for housing

Evidence

“The impression that progress is inevitable and that certain areas have to be developed is a figment of the imagination,” a county official wrote in 1957. “Certain areas are not suitable for development, and cannot be used for housing and at the same time provide full protection to the health of the people. Such land should remain as farm land, swamp, or whatever the existing natural condition may indicate. There is a widespread misconception that the owner of a farm has a certain inalienable right granted to him by the Constitution of the United States to become a subdivider if he so desires. Such a belief needs careful scrutiny in the light of the need for protection of the general welfare, the public health and the community’s best interest.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Radically contests the Lockean-property commonsense threaded through the property-rights course material; the idea that rural land can be zoned to stay rural is the intellectual seed of later growth controls and exclusionary zoning. — connects to: Ecological reasoning led courts to deny landowners absolute rights over land — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 319; Land-rights law can be redirected to steward rather than possess the land — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1169; Legislative power cannot take property without the owner’s consent — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 171
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when and how did this 1950s anti-development argument get displaced by the takings/property-rights discourse treated as natural in the 1980s and after?

Broader Connections

• Land-rights law can be redirected to steward rather than possess the land #expands (0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1169
• Legislative power cannot take property without the owner’s consent #qualifies (0.75) — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 171