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Constitutional Law Keyed to Rotunda
Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp.
Citation:
429 U.S. 252 (1977)
ProfessorTodd Berman
CaseCast™ – "What you need to know"
Facts
In 1971 respondent Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation (MHDC) applied to petitioner, the Village of Arlington Heights for the rezoning of a 15-acre parcel from single-family to multiple-family classification. MHDC planned to build clustered townhouse units for low and moderate-income tenants. The Village denied the rezoning request. MHDC sued alleging that the denial was racially discriminatory. Opponents of the rezoning argued that the area always had been zoned single-family and the neighboring citizens had built in reliance on that classification and that rezoning threatened to cause a measurable drop in property value of neighboring sites.
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