CITY OF CLEBURNE V. CLEBURNE LIVING CENTER, INC., 473 U.S. 432 (1985)
An ongoing struggle in finding appropriate community-based residential settings for people with developmental disabilities is, unfortunately, resistance from other residents of the communities. In 1985, this issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court invalidated the requirement imposed by the City of Cleburne, Texas, that the operator of a proposed group home for 13 men and women with developmental disabilities obtain a ‘special use permit,’ holding that this requirement violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
THE COURT’S FINDINGS
The Court rejected the argument that people with developmental disabilities were a ‘suspect class’, subjecting the City’s actions to “strict scrutiny.” Nonetheless, the Court held, the Equal Protection Clause demands that whenever legislation classifies a group of citizens differently from other citizens, the government must establish at least a “rational relationship” between the reason for the unequal treatment and the means used to address whatever the problem was the government was trying to address.
The City categorized the proposed group home as requiring a special use permit as required for “ [h]ospitals for the insane or feebleminded, or alcoholic [sic] or drug addicts, or penal or correctional institutions.”1 Such permits were not required for apartment houses, fraternity houses, or nursing homes. The Court found unconvincing, the reasons the City of Cleburne offered for requiring such a permit. They rejected reasons such as the fears of neighboring property owners and elderly residents, and the possibility that students at a nearby school would harass the residents.
The Court wrote, “mere negative attitudes, or fear, unsubstantiated by factors which are properly cognizable in a zoning proceeding, are not permissible bases for treating a home for the mentally “r” differently from apartment houses, multiple dwellings, and the like.”2
The Court also rejected reasons based on the fact that the home was located in a 500-year flood plain, and a residential neighborhood, ruling that these objections would be equally applicable to apartment buildings, nursing homes, and fraternities, none of which are required to obtain such a special use permit.
The Court thus concluded that “requiring the permit in this case appears to us to rest on an irrational prejudice against the mentally ‘r’.”3 The requirement as applied to the proposed residence was thus invalidated as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
