Prop2 Class 19 – Zoning IV

October 24th, 2018

The lecture notes are here.

The First Amendment provides:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Section 5 of the 14th Amendment provides:

5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Here are some photographs of the St. Peter the Apostle Church in Boerne, Texas, the subject of City of Boerne v. Flores. I suppose this church makes an exception to the “Though Shalt Not Kill” Commandment for the Religious Freedoms Restoration Act, which met its constitutional demise within the hallowed walls of this house of worship.

These photographs are courtesy of Hanah Volokh.

Here is a map of the Village of Belle Terre in Long (not Staten) Island. Today, roughly 800 people live in Belle Terre. It is close by to the State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook (named because there is a brook with stones on campus). I’ve been there.


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And here is a photograph of a sign welcoming you (as long as you don’t have a roommate  to the Village of Belle Terre (courtesy of Ron Talmo):

To get a sense of how large the Laurel region is in this case, it considers a 20 mile semicircle (Pi * 20^2 = roughly 1,200 sq miles!) of Camden, Burlington, and Gloucester County.


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The issue of affordable housing for families is still pressing–see this article from Times.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that the city was planning to develop new super-small apartments — called “microunits” — it represented another step toward his ambitious goal of building or preserving 165,000 homes for poor and moderate-income families across New York by 2014.

But some housing advocates, community leaders and elected officials say this latest proposal only highlights that one demographic group has been left out: large, poor families.

This group includes members as disparate as West Africans in the South Bronx, Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and Bangladeshi in Queens, who are united by their inability to afford the high prices for large market-rate rentals and their inability to find publicly subsidized alternatives even as the overall housing stock has swelled.