Land Use and Planning

The firm provides representation for its clients in hearings and other proceedings before boards and councils concerned with licensing, zoning, planning and land use issues. The firm also has experience in litigating a wide range of real estate conflicts, such as eminent domain matters, private condemnation, suits, mechanic's lien suits, quiet title, partition actions and contract disputes.

In the United States, governments started regulating land use, or human activity on land, when Americans migrated from rural to urban areas. As urban populations grew, cities enacted land use laws to manage the competing needs and land uses of the residential and business sectors.

Land use laws come from different sources. The federal government regulates land use mainly through statutes, such as the National Environmental Policy Act (42 U.S.C. § 4321 et seq) and the National Historic Preservation Act (16 U.S.C. § 461 et seq). Local governments (cities and counties) regulate land use primarily through zoning ordinances. Finally, private citizens may also regulate land use through nuisance lawsuits or entering into contracts which impose restrictive covenants on land. For example, a land deed may include a restrictive covenant that limits the use of land to the building of single family homes.

Governments regulate land use in many different ways. One of them is through zoning. Usually, a municipality will develop a comprehensive land use plan to map out land development within its boundaries. As part of this plan, the municipality will delineate areas of land into different zones and assign distinct land uses for each zone. Zoning ordinances generally divide land use into several categories including residential, commercial, industrial, or agricultural usage. Within these categories, some municipalities make further distinctions, such as segregating industrial districts into heavy industrial and light industrial districts, or dividing residential districts into single-family residence, low-density multiple family residence, medium-density multiple-family residence and high-density multiple-family residence districts.

Through zoning, the municipality seeks to distance incompatible uses of land. For instance, an owner of real estate in a residential zone would very likely be forbidden from building a factory upon the land because the noise and pollution from the factory would interfere with the residential use of the surrounding parcels of land.

Zoning ordinances may also restrict an owner from constructing too large of a building on a piece of land. Such ordinances limit a building's size (in terms of square feet), height and shape, as well as the distance a building is set back from the street and surrounding property lines. However, an applicant seeking to construct a building that does not comply with existing use restrictions or structural requirements may still proceed if the municipality grants the applicant a variance to depart from the zoning ordinance.