Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty (1926).
Case decided:
by the United States Supreme Court
6-3 in favor of the palintiff
The desire to cryogenically keep the community as it is at a point in time
The popular panacea for preceived problems:
Pass a law
And so
communities across the country,
worshipping the god of property values,
passed what were known as zoning laws,
regulating land use
And
the village of Euclid was not left out of the mania,
dividing the community into use, area, and height districts
in an overlapping map,
ranging
from classification U-1
(mostly single-family homes)
to classification U-6
(anything goes)
The amber Realty Company owned sixty-eight acres
between (what is now) East 196 and East 204 Streets
(west and east)
and Euclid Avenue and a railroad
(north and south),
mostly zoned anything goes
But
a part of it was zoned more restrictively
And so
then came that other popular panacea for problems:
the lawsuit
And
the case made its way through the scrutiny
of the watchdogs of the god of property values,
the courts,
all the way
to the ultimate arbiter
(here on earth),
the United States Supreme Court
(Myth of Impartial Judiciary:
A man from Cincinnati files a friend of the court brief
on behalf of the village of Euclid
The man is a friend of Chief Justice Taft
Taft finds in favor of his friend’s position
and brings the Court with him
Impartial justice or improper influence?
You make the call)
The decision:
Zoning
is a proper use of the police power of the state
and,
furthermore,
has a presumption of validity
“In some fields,
the bad fades into the good
by such insensible degrees
that the two are not capable
of being readily distinguished”
Postscript:
the land was eventually used mostly for industry,
as Amber Realty had wanted —
Michael Ceraolo is a fortysomething civil servant/poet trying to overcome a middle-class upbringing. “Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty (1926)” is an excerpt from his long poem
Euclid Creek: A Journey, which will be published by Deep Cleveland later this summer.