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Jim Lane

(11,175 posts)
11. Churches are indeed subject to zoning regulations -- mostly.
Tue Aug 29, 2017, 12:10 PM
Aug 2017

If the zoning ordinance restricts a particular part of town to residential use only, and it's applied uniformly to include all religious institutions, and if there's enough land elsewhere where a church/synagogue/temple/mosque/ashram can be built, then the religious institutions are subject to it and it's not a violation of the Free Exercise Clause.

Considerations of the Constitution (and, more pragmatically, the political power of churches) do, however, impose some constraints that don't benefit nonreligious uses. There's a federal statute,
the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, that can be used to challenge some zoning exclusions as applied to religious uses.

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