One issue disputed by environmentalists and poverty lawyers has been that of exclusionary zoning. Advocates of controlled land use have long supported legislative restrictions on indiscriminate development of land resources. Population density, with its correlates of air, water, and noise pollution, and of aesthetically offensive high-rise apartments, has often been cited as justifying drastic restrictions upon prospective users of existing sanitary facilities as well as use of other methods of development control. Local jurisdictions have used several techniques of exclusionary zoning, including prohibition of mobile homes and multi-family developments, and high minimum living space, lot-width, and lot-size requirements. An example of the prevalence of exclusionary zoning techniques is provided in four nonthern New Jersey counties, where 99.5 percent of the residential land was found by one study to be zoned for single families.¹

Those concerned with the unavailability of low-cost housing have decried the proliferation of exclusionary zoning controls, maintaining that such limits place decent housing far beyond the means of the poor and seal off people in the ghetto from achieving better standards of living. Civil libertarians point out that some zoning methods conflict with enlightened concepts of individual liberty. When single-family zoning ordinances have not defined "family," so-called "voluntary" families, groups of unrelated persons living together, such as communes, have found the courts liberal in including within the term those not genetically or legally related.² However, many ordinances have narrowly defined the limits of a "family" as including only persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption or a restricted number of unrelated persons living together, varying from two to four.³ The Supreme Court's recent decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas dealt with such an ordinance.⁴