Zoning Law, Health, and Environmental Justice: What's the Connection?

Zoning laws determine what types of land uses and densities can occur on each property lot in a municipality, and therefore also govern the range of potential environmental and health impacts resulting from the land use. Zoning regulations are the most ubiquitous of the land use laws in the United States, as well as in many other countries. As such, they have far-reaching effects on the location of noxious uses, and any concomitant environmental or human health impacts. Zoning has enormous implications, in general, for shaping our environment, and because changes to zoning are made through a political process, it has possibilities for abuse. One zoning expert stated: I suppose what really disturbs me is that because zoning is the most universal of the legal tools for shaping the character of the municipality, any unwise use of the process has a far greater impact upon our national character than does the abuse of a less widely employed device.

[1]  Frank J. Popper,et al.  The Environmentalist and the LULU , 1985 .

[2]  David M. Trubek,et al.  Measuring the Invisible Wall: Land Use Controls and the Residential Patterns of the Poor , 1973 .

[3]  Michal Heiman,et al.  From ‘Not in My Backyard!’ to ‘Not in Anybody's Backyard!’ , 1990 .

[4]  Michael Dear,et al.  Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome , 1992 .

[5]  R. Lake,et al.  Negotiating local autonomy , 1994 .

[6]  T. L. Harper,et al.  The Centrality of Normative Ethical Theory to Contemporary Planning Theory , 1992 .

[7]  Nancy Fraser.  Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy , 1990 .

[8]  T. Webler,et al.  Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation , 1995 .

[9]  W. Dick.  Who Pays the Price? The Sociocultural Context of Environmental Crisis , 1995 .

[10]  Rebecca A. Johns,et al.  LEGITIMATION CONFLICTS: THE POLITICS OF HAZARDOUS WASTE SITING LAW , 1990 .

[11]  D. Kotelchuck,et al.  Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color , 1995 .

[12]  J. Maantay,et al.  Zoning, equity, and public health. , 2001, American journal of public health.

[13]  de Gert Roo,et al.  Integrated environmental zoning - An innovative Dutch approach to measuring and managing environmental spillovers in urban regions , 1996 .

[14]  J. Maantay,et al.  Mapping environmental injustices: pitfalls and potential of geographic information systems in assessing environmental health and equity. , 2002, Environmental health perspectives.

[15]  W. Freudenburg,et al.  NIMBYs and LULUs: Stalking the Syndromes , 1992 .