Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp.
The Supreme Court ruled that a nonprofit housing developer and a prospective tenant had standing to sue over a suburb's refusal to rezone land for low-income housing, but held that the challengers had failed to prove the town acted with racially discriminatory intent.
The decision set out a list of factors courts should examine to detect hidden discriminatory purpose behind seemingly neutral government decisions, while making clear that a disproportionate racial impact alone is not enough to prove a constitutional violation.
“Determining whether invidious discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor demands a sensitive inquiry into such circumstantial and direct evidence of intent as may be available.”
The Court explains how judges should go about detecting hidden discriminatory motives.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled for the village after a bench trial; the Seventh Circuit reversed on constitutional grounds; the village asked the Supreme Court to review that reversal.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A religious order in Arlington Heights, a mostly white Chicago suburb, agreed to lease land to a nonprofit developer, MHDC, to build 190 units of low- and moderate-income housing using federal subsidies. The project required rezoning from single-family to multi-family use. After contentious public hearings touching on race and property values, the village board denied the rezoning request by a 6-1 vote, and MHDC and several individuals sued.
The question before the Court
When a Chicago suburb refused to rezone land for a racially integrated low-income housing project, did challengers have to prove the town intended to discriminate, or was it enough that the refusal hit Black residents harder?
Why it matters
The ruling makes it much harder for people challenging zoning and other government decisions to win on equal-protection grounds using statistics alone; they must dig up evidence of actual discriminatory motive. Housing advocates and local governments alike now look to the specific factors this case identified when litigating claims that official action was secretly driven by race.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Seventh Circuit, which never addressed the developer's separate claim that the rezoning denial violated the federal Fair Housing Act. That statutory question remains open and must be decided on remand. The constitutional ruling itself is final: the village's refusal to rezone stands unless the housing developer can show a Fair Housing Act violation on remand.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the village's zoning denial violated the federal Fair Housing Act, since the lower court had never reached that statutory question; that issue was sent back for further proceedings. The ruling also does not resolve whether disparate impact alone can ever violate the Act, only that impact alone cannot establish a constitutional violation.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Marshall
Justice Marshall, joined by Justice Brennan, agreed with the Court's standing analysis and its adoption of the intent requirement from Washington v. Davis. But he argued the whole case, not just the statutory claim, should be sent back to the Court of Appeals, which he thought was better positioned than the Supreme Court to re-weigh the evidence under the newly clarified standard and decide whether further trial court proceedings were needed.
Dissent — Justice White
“The Court gives no reason for its failure to follow our usual practice in this situation of vacating the judgment below and remanding in order to permit the lower court to reconsider its ruling in light of our intervening decision.”White's objection that the Court should have let the lower court re-examine the case first.
Justice White objected that the Court reweighed the evidence itself and applied a legal standard from Washington v. Davis that the Court of Appeals never had a chance to apply, when the normal practice would be to send the whole case back for the lower court to reconsider. He also thought the Court's lengthy list of evidentiary factors was unnecessary, since the trial court's finding that the village acted for legitimate reasons was left undisturbed anyway. He would have vacated and remanded on both the constitutional and statutory claims.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first addressed whether the housing developer and an individual Black plaintiff had standing to sue, applying the requirement that a plaintiff show a real, specific injury caused by the challenged action that a favorable ruling would likely fix.
- It found the developer had suffered a concrete injury (wasted money and a blocked project) and that one individual plaintiff, who wanted to live in the planned development, had shown enough of a link between the zoning denial and his inability to get closer housing to satisfy that standard.
- On the merits, the Court applied its recent ruling in Washington v. Davis, holding that a government action is not unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause merely because it has a racially disproportionate effect; the challenger must show that discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor in the decision.
- The Court then laid out a non-exhaustive set of clues for uncovering hidden discriminatory intent behind an officially neutral decision: the pattern of the action's impact, the historical background of the decision, the specific sequence of events leading to it, any departures from normal procedures or substantive factors, and statements in the legislative or administrative record.
- Applying these clues, the Court found the area had long been zoned for single-family homes, the rezoning process followed normal procedures, the village's buffer policy predated the project and had been applied consistently, and no evidence in the record suggested the buffer policy or property-value concerns were pretexts for racial bias.
- Because the challengers had not shown that discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor in the village's decision, the constitutional claim failed, even though the refusal arguably fell more heavily on Black residents than on the population as a whole.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Washington v. Davis (426 U.S. 229)
The Court relies on this recent ruling that proof of discriminatory intent, not just impact, is needed for an equal-protection violation.
Limits Kennedy Park Homes Assn. v. City of Lackawanna (436 F. 2d 108)
The Court disagrees with the lower-court reasoning to the extent it rested purely on discriminatory impact rather than intent.