Treat Thy Neighbor as Thyself? Equal Protection and the Scope of RLUIPA’s Equal Terms Clause
Can municipalities use the zoning power to prevent racial or
religious minorities from moving in? Not expressly. In 1917, almost a
decade before the dawn of modern “Euclidean” zoning—and several
decades before Brown v. Board of Education abolished “separate but
equal”—the Supreme Court decided that racially segregated zoning,
then common, was unconstitutional. But municipalities have other
ways to exclude minorities via the zoning power.