James Metzenbaum was stuck on a train from Washington – slowed by a snowstorm – convincing himself that his opponent had successfully persuaded the Supreme Court against his position within the last few minutes of oral argument. He had just argued in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty in defense of the city’s zoning plan. The poor weather meant he might not get back to his office in time to send a telegram asking Chief Justice William Howard Taft for more briefing before the weekend. So he improvised – opening the train car door, making eye contact with a man shoveling snow near the tracks, and tossing him a telegram wrapped in cash. The shoveler seems to have understood what was intended. He sent off the telegram, and a few days later the court granted Metzenbaum permission to file another brief.
Not long after that, the court granted a full rehearing, which was followed by a dramatic reversal in several justices’ positions. In a 6-3 decision, the court sided with Metzenbaum and in favor of Euclid’s power to pass comprehensive zoning, and against a local developer who had argued the town’s plan exceeded the city’s police power and destroyed the property’s value. Three justices dissented, though they never said why.
It was an odd start to the birth of modern zoning, and it happened almost exactly 100 years ago.
I. Geometry and government
Many people think the term “Euclidean zoning” takes its name from the Greek “father of geometry.” Instead, it takes its name from Village of Euclid, which upheld the power of cities to zone.
But the city at the center of that lawsuit was, in fact, named after the ancient mathematician. In 1796, six surveyors working in the Western Reserve in Ohio demanded better terms for their punishing work. Together they secured an agreement to jointly own a township in return for settling a few dozen families there. They named it for the man regarded as their profession’s patron saint. And while they eventually abandoned the town’s frigid winters, the name endured.
By the early 20th century, nearby Cleveland had become an industrial metropolis and Euclid was positioned to develop alongside it. Ambler Realty owned 68 acres between Euclid Avenue, a major road for storefronts, and the Nickel Plate railroad, a hub of industrial freight – meaning the property had enormous industrial potential. But in 1922, Euclid adopted an ordinance dividing the village by use, height, and area. Near the avenue, Ambler’s land could accommodate single- and two-family dwellings, but not apartments, shops, or factories, which were relegated farther back toward the tracks. The company alleged that land worth $10,000 an acre for industry would fetch no more than $2,500 for residential use.
Ambler challenged the ordinance under the Ohio Constitution and the 14th Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. Government could protect health and safety, Ambler said, but it could not confiscate an owner’s freedom to use its property when the property itself posed no danger to the public.
Comprehensive zoning was still a relatively new experiment. New York City’s influential 1916 resolution, which (among other things) sought to regulate the size and height of the city’s buildings, was only a decade old when Euclid reached the Supreme Court. To supporters, zoning promised to bring scientific order to urban growth. To opponents, it entrusted the future of a city to officials who could mistake their preferences for the public welfare or succumb to lobbying.
Ambler retained Newton D. Baker, a former Cleveland mayor and Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war during World War I. In overlapping litigation, he represented a Jewish orphanage seeking to build in University Heights, Ohio, where land-use restrictions became a tool of ethnic exclusion. Baker was thus acutely aware that a debate about the “residential character” of the city might actually be a debate about the people who wanted to reside there. Euclid’s attorney, meanwhile, was James Metzenbaum, who had helped draft the ordinance he was defending and lived on Euclid Avenue himself.
II. Litigation
The first round went to Baker. Federal District Judge David Westenhaver, Baker’s former law partner, struck down the ordinance in 1924. According to Westenhaver, the ultimate effect of Euclid’s plan was “to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life.” But in defending the rights of both the poor and property owners, Westenhaver revealed his own prejudices: He argued that Euclid’s plan could not possibly be constitutional given that the Supreme Court had just struck down exclusionary racial zoning, which he believed was even more beneficial.
The village took advantage of a rule allowing it to appeal directly to the Supreme Court, which heard argument on Jan. 27, 1926, in the old Senate chamber (the court would move to its current location in 1935). Only eight justices were present, since George Sutherland was resting in Charleston, South Carolina, with high blood pressure.
Neither party requested a transcript, so no one knows exactly what was said at argument. But Metzenbaum later recalled a lighter moment. After Chief Justice William Howard Taft asked why Metzenbaum alternated between the term “realtors” and “real estate men,” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes interjected that, judging from a case heard the previous week, one received more money than the other. Metzenbaum responded, “I presumed the distinction was about the same as that which exists between a statesman and a politician.” In Metzenbaum’s recollection, Taft shook with laughter, repeating the comparison.
By the time Baker finished his turn arguing, however, Metzenbaum’s good humor had evaporated. His anxiety followed him onto the train home, and, believing that Baker had misrepresented certain facts, he composed the telegram which would reach Taft by way of the snow shoveler. His worries were evidently justified. Justice Harlan Stone’s records show a 5–3 conference vote against the ordinance. But the court later agreed to hear the case again, perhaps so that Sutherland could sit for argument. The case was reargued on Oct. 12, almost exactly a century ago.
Additional argument admitted additional briefing. Cincinnati lawyer and planning advocate Alfred Bettman had missed the original amicus deadline. He sought permission to file late from Taft, whom he knew personally, and the court granted it, allowing his brief to be considered before the next argument date.
Bettman’s theory differed from Metzenbaum’s in important ways. The village’s lawyer argued for an expanding understanding of the state’s police power that would allow the government not just to regulate for public health and safety, but to promote the general welfare. Bettman, by contrast, argued that zoning was just like other nuisance laws, except it allowed localities to prevent nuisances from occurring in advance. Bettman’s theory threatened to say the quiet part out loud: certain defenders of zoning considered some people, rather than their property, a nuisance.
On Nov. 22, 1926, Sutherland announced the decision upholding Euclid’s ordinance. Taft joined him, along with Justices Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Edward Sanford, and Stone. Justices Willis Van Devanter, James McReynolds, and Pierce Butler dissented, but left no written opinion explaining why.
Sutherland’s most memorable illustration came from nuisance law: “A nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place—like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” It was not exactly a flattering analogy for those who wanted to live in the type of higher-density housing banned by Euclid’s zoning ordinance. Later, Sutherland described an apartment “very often” as “a mere parasite,” benefiting from the surroundings its presence would undermine. Apartments could obstruct air and sunlight, generate traffic and noise, diminish the attractiveness of neighboring homes, and reduce the area’s residential character, he said. Though the plan would burden some businesses and owners who were not nuisances themselves, such overbreadth didn’t render the law unconstitutional on its face. (Interestingly, Sutherland mentioned how suppressing density was a means of suppressing fires, a rationale that San Francisco had used to systematically exclude primarily Chinese-owned laundries from the area and that was rejected by the Supreme Court.)
While Ambler had argued the plan was diverting industrial development away from Euclid, Sutherland concluded it had merely confined that development to certain areas. And while Euclid was engaging in a relatively new and more intrusive form of regulating property, Sutherland (quoting another opinion) responded that, “[w]ith the growth and development of the State, the police power necessarily develops … to meet the changing conditions.”
At the same time, the majority left room for future challenges. Sustaining the ordinance’s general framework did not validate every zoning plan or every application. Two years later, Sutherland himself wrote for a unanimous court in Nectow v. City of Cambridge, invalidating a residential restriction where the factual findings showed no substantial relationship to public health, safety, convenience, or welfare.
But since then, courts have overwhelmingly approved zoning and afforded localities considerable deference in crafting it.
III. Postscript
Baker died on Christmas Day in 1937. The law firm that he helped found and that bears his name, Baker Hostetler, is one of the largest firms in the country, and buildings ranging from a public high school to a college dorm to a veteran’s hospital are named in his honor.
Metzenbaum turned his victory into a lasting professional identity, publishing “The Law of Zoning” in 1930. His wife, Bessie, had died in 1920, and he reportedly died on New Year’s Eve in 1960 trying to free his car from a snowbank while visiting her mausoleum.
Despite Euclid’s best laid plans, Ambler’s property eventually went to industrial use after all. During World War II, the federal government acquired the site to put up an aircraft engine and landing gear factory. The industrial complex now known as Nickel Plate Station sold for $18.5 million in June 2026. Apparently zoning could not predict what the community would need in the future.
A century after Euclid, the battle over zoning rages on. Proponents of zoning, as in Euclid, see it as a critical means of promoting public welfare and the surrounding environment. Opponents point to ample evidence that zoning has been used to exclude “undesirable” populations from certain parts of town, all while suppressing dynamism and inflating the cost of housing.
We have seen several Supreme Court cases establishing limits around zoning. In cases like Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard, the court limited the types of demands the government can make of property owners who apply for a development permit. And in Moore v. Cleveland, the court invalidated a zoning restriction that prevented a grandmother from living with her grandchildren. While the majority relied on the sanctity of the family, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote separately to emphasize that Euclid had “vastly diminished the rights of individual property owners,” but had not “totally extinguish[ed] them,” and thus zoning restrictions must have a meaningful relationship to the public welfare. But Euclid itself remains on firm ground, its holding having produced no written dissents but perhaps a century of consequences worth dissenting from.
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