{"id":421,"date":"2011-11-16T16:32:18","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T20:32:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/?p=421"},"modified":"2011-11-16T16:32:18","modified_gmt":"2011-11-16T20:32:18","slug":"job-creation-held-not-a-sufficiently-compelling-government-interest-to-justify-refusing-to-rezone-industrial-property-for-church-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/2011\/11\/16\/job-creation-held-not-a-sufficiently-compelling-government-interest-to-justify-refusing-to-rezone-industrial-property-for-church-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Job creation held not a sufficiently compelling government interest to justify refusing to rezone industrial property for church use"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Religious Land Use-Institutionalized Persons Act, 42 U.S.C. \u00a72000cc, prohibits enforcing local zoning laws against religious institutions if those laws impose a “substantial burden” on the free exercise of religion and not justified by a compelling government interest that cannot be achieved in a less burdensome manner. The Ninth Circuit applied this statute to deny a city the power to exclude a church from moving to a larger building located in an area zoned for industrial use in the case of International Church of the Foursquare Gospel v. City of San Leandro<\/a>, 2011 WL 1518980 (9th Cir. 2011). Read article. <\/a>The church had become bigger over time and was looking for a new facility and hoped to move into an abandoned industrial building. The city hoped to attract a business to the site that would employ city residents and argued that its interest in promoting jobs was a compelling government interest justifying refusal to rezone the property for church uses even if this refusal imposed a substantial burden on religious freedom. The Ninth Circuit held both that job creation was not a compelling government interest that justified such a burden on religious freedom and that even if it was, there were less burdensome ways to achieve that result.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Religious Land Use-Institutionalized Persons Act, 42 U.S.C. \u00a72000cc, prohibits enforcing local zoning laws against religious institutions if those laws impose a “substantial burden” on the free exercise of religion and not justified by a compelling government interest that cannot be achieved in a less burdensome manner. The Ninth Circuit applied this statute to deny […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2199,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13476,18744,13527],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antidiscrimination-law","category-religious-freedom","category-zoning"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5SHi7-6N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2199"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jsinger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}