Tassinary, fellow authors' paper ponders
constitutionality of aesthetic zoning laws

A paper published in the spring 2010 issue of The Urban Lawyer by Lou Tassinary, professor of visualization at Texas A&M's College of Architecture, and two colleagues examines the legality of aesthetics-based zoning regulations.

"Equal Protection and Aesthetic Zoning: A Possible Crack and a Preemptive Repair," was written by Tassinary and Dawn Jourdan, assistant professor at the University of Florida's College of Law, and Russ Parsons, principal of Northwest Environmental Psychology in Seattle.

Jourdan is a former faculty member at Texas A&M's Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Parsons did postdoctoral research at the college's Environmental Psychophysiology Laboratory.

The article considers whether a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Village of Willowbrook v. Olech, infers that unreasoned zoning decisions violate the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause in the U.S. Constitution. It also discusses the type of evidence necessary to ensure that aesthetic zoning passes constitutional muster with respect to the clause.

In the Village of Willowbrook v. Olech decision, the authors wrote, "the Court reaffirmed that a sufficiently unreasoned or sophistical zoning decision can and will violate the Equal Protection Clause."

The equal protection question, they continued, should not be whether the codification of aesthetic values achieves an ideal level of rationality in theory, and should not be limited to issues of procedural due process; the question should be whether codification can achieve an acceptable level of rationality in practice.

"Codified aesthetic values," they wrote, "will pass constitutional muster if tethered to … empirical social science."

- Posted: Oct. 4, 2010-

Contact:   Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.