Suffolk Housing Services v. Town of Brookhaven

• Decision Date: 20 June 1977
• Citation: 91 Misc.2d 80,397 N.Y.S.2d 302
• Parties: SUFFOLK HOUSING SERVICES et al., Plaintiffs, v. The TOWN OF BROOKHAVEN et al., Defendants.
• Court: New York Supreme Court

Page 302

397 N.Y.S.2d 302

91 Misc.2d 80

SUFFOLK HOUSING SERVICES et al., Plaintiffs, v. The TOWN OF BROOKHAVEN et al., Defendants.

Supreme Court, Special Term, Suffolk County, Part I.

June 20, 1977.

Eisner, Levy, Steel & Bellman, P. C., Nathaniel Jones, James Meyerson, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Lawrence Sager, Arthur Eisenberg, New York Civil Liberties Union, New York City, for plaintiffs.

Walter L. Beck, Town Atty., Town of Brookhaven, for defendants by Raymond W. Giglio, Jr., Asst. Town Atty., Patchogue.

LEON D. LAZER, Justice.

In this state, persons who lack a legal or equitable interest in real property have never been granted standing to attack a zoning ordinance. Alleging that their constitutional and statutory rights are being violated by exclusionary zoning practices of the Town of Brookhaven, a number of such unpropertied individuals plus a few taxpayers and certain organizations have instituted the instant action for judgment declaring the nullity of the zoning ordinance of the Town and for extensive ancillary relief. The defendants have moved to dismiss the complaint on the ground that it does not state a cause of action and that the plaintiffs lack the legal capacity to bring the suit.

The Parties

The plaintiffs are comprised of four categories of individuals and three organizations. The individual plaintiffs are low income residents of Brookhaven, both black and white, who live in overcrowded or otherwise inadequate rented quarters; homeowning Brookhaven taxpayers, both black and white, who allege that the defendants' exclusionary zoning practices deprive them of the opportunity of living in a racially and economically balanced community; a white graduate student and his wife and a black graduate student at the Stony Brook campus of the State University who allege that they cannot find adequate housing which is within their economic means; a non-resident black woman who was forced to leave Brookhaven because she could not locate adequate housing for herself and her two children and who now lives on public assistance with them in inadequate housing in Riverhead; and the President of the Borough of Manhattan who claims to represent minority citizens living in the City's "slum ghetto" who cannot relocate in Brookhaven because affordable housing is unavailable. The organizations are Suffolk Housing Services, a non-profit agency established to assist low income and minority citizens to obtain decent housing in Suffolk County; the Brookhaven Housing Coalition, an association of religious and community organizations which have joined together to work for a racially and economically integrated community; and the Patchogue-Brookhaven Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which seeks solutions for the lack of adequate housing for low income and minority citizens in the Town of Brookhaven. Each of these organizations avers that its clients or members are directly injured and aggrieved by the defendants' zoning practices. The plaintiffs sue individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated.

The defendants are the Town of Brookhaven, its supervisor, its planning board, and the chairman of the planning board.

The Complaint

The plaintiffs plead, inter alia, that despite Brookhaven's population increase of 123 percent during the decade 1960-70 its black population was reduced from 3.4 percent to 2.6 percent and that 97 percent of the growth was white; that most of the minority population lives in racial enclaves of deteriorating housing located in North Bellport, Gordon Heights, Patchogue and Center Moriches; that it is Town policy to exclude multi-family development as of right and most of the 60,300 acres of vacant privately owned land is currently zoned for single-family development; that an excessive amount of vacant land is zoned for commercial and industrial uses; that where multi-family housing has been permitted, the Town has imposed covenants or obtained the agreement of the developer to limit the number of bedrooms; and that the zoning ordinance requires an additional 1,000 square feet per bedroom where more than one bedroom is proposed in the MF-1 zoning district and an additional 1,000 square feet of site for each additional bedroom in the MF-2 district. All of these restrictions on multi-family development are alleged to have a disproportionately harsh impact on low income persons and particularly minority groups who must rent rather than purchase. The Town has no housing authority, it has refused to support privately sponsored federally subsidized housing, and it has refused to apply for federal grants for community development. According to plaintiffs, these policies preclude Town residents and others in the metropolitan area from obtaining decent housing in the community.

In their first cause of action plaintiffs maintain that the zoning policies described violate the requirement in Town Law § 261 that zoning be in furtherance of the general welfare; in the second cause of action that it deprives plaintiffs of equal protection of the law as secured by the New York State Constitution, Art. 1, Section 11; in the third that it violates the requirement of Town Law § 272-a that zoning be in accordance with a master plan designed to promote the general welfare; and in the fourth that it constitutes a violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution and of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1982, 1983 and 3601 et seq. The plaintiffs seek a declaration of the invalidity of the zoning ordinance and "land use mapping" policies of the Town, further relief enjoining the defendants from pursuing policies and practices which deny decent and equal housing opportunities to plaintiffs and those they represent and judgment directing the defendants to take various affirmative steps to alleviate current deficiencies so as to provide them with the housing opportunities they seek.

The Motion to Dismiss for Failure to State a Cause of Action

On a motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action, all of the allegations of the complaint are deemed to be true (Rainbow Shop Patchogue Corp. v Roosevelt Nassau Op. Corp., 34 A.D.2d 667, 310 N.Y.S.2d 231) and, together with all reasonable inferences, must be viewed in a light most favorable to plaintiffs. The concern is not whether plaintiffs can prove a cause of action but whether they have alleged one (Sanchez v. Village of Liberty, 49 A.D.2d 507, 375 N.Y.S.2d 901). If any one of plaintiffs' four causes of action can be sustained as a matter of pleading, the instant motion must be denied in its entirety since it is addressed to the complaint as a whole (Smith v. Lavine, 44 A.D.2d 570, 353 N.Y.S.2d 41).

Exclusionary zoning has been defined as land use control regulations which singly or in concert tend to exclude persons of low or moderate income from the zoning municipality (2 Anderson, American Law of Zoning (2d ed.) ( § 8.02)). As early as 1924 the exclusionary impact of comprehensive zoning was recognized at the federal district court level when in the course of nullifying the zoning ordinance of the Village of Euclid, Ohio, Judge Westenhaver observed that "(I) n the last analysis the result to be accomplished (by zoning) is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or station in life." (Ambler Realty Co. v. Euclid, 297 F. 307, 316 (D.C.Ohio 1924)).

The Euclid ordinance had been attacked because it excluded, inter alia, business uses and apartment houses from a residential district. When the case reached the Supreme Court the ordinance was sustained (see Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, 47 S.Ct. 114, 71 L.Ed. 303 (1926)) on the theory that it served the general welfare of the public because it tended to improve fire protection, reduce street congestion, decrease noise which produces or intensifies nervous disorders, and preserve a more favorable environment for the raising of children. Euclid was the first action involving comprehensive zoning regulations ever to reach the Supreme Court and, in the decades which followed, the Court's rationale in the case has been the seminal source of jurisprudential authority for the approval of zoning regulations which have an exclusionary effect of one type or another.

In New York, minimum lot area restrictions (Levitt v. Incorporated Vil. of Sands Point, 6 N.Y.2d 269, 189 N.Y.S.2d 212, 160 N.E.2d 501), restrictions on apartment buildings in residential districts (Wulfsohn v. Burden, 241 N.Y. 288, 301, 150 N.E. 120, 123-124; Fox Meadow Estates, Inc. v. Culley, 233 App.Div. 250, 252 N.Y.S. 178, aff'd, 261 N.Y. 506, 185 N.E. 714) and even aesthetic considerations (see People v. Stover, 12 N.Y.2d 462, 240 N.Y.S.2d 734, 191 N.E.2d 272; Chusud Realty Corp. v. Village of Kensington, 40 Misc.2d 259, 243 N.Y.S.2d 149, aff'd, 22 A.D.2d 895, 255 N.Y.S.2d 411) have been upheld as reasonably related to the public welfare where they do not impose too great a hardship on the individual property owners. Traditionally, litigation contesting the validity of zoning regulations has involved competition between the general welfare concept characterized by the perception of certain types of exclusionary restrictions as beneficial and the rights of landowners to obtain a reasonable return on their property (see Matter of National Merritt, Inc. v. Weist, 41 N.Y.2d 438, 393 N.Y.S.2d 379, 361 N.E.2d 1028) or to prevent its devaluation as a consequence of spot zoning to enhance the value of the property of others (Buckley v. Fasbender, 1 N.Y.2d 681, 150 N.Y.S.2d 204). Within this narrow framework, the right of individuals to obtain adequate affordable housing in any particular community remained unrecognized until the relatively recent past.

The defendants concede that exclusion is at the core of comprehensive zoning, but they deny that plaintiffs' housing difficulties are its...