INTRODUCTION

This chapter explains, illustrates, and evaluates the legal system employed in the United States to regulate the use of privately owned land and provides an illustrative checklist of the components of the system. The checklist is intended to facilitate a comparison of the U.S. system with land use regimes in other countries. The chapter also describes how, in recent years, this system has evolved to meet the challenge of urban sprawl through innovative smart growth measures and how it has dealt with recent threats to local natural resources through the advent of local environmental laws and standards.

The U.S. system of land use control was based on English law precedents. The English system established strong private property rights that were limited initially by a few common law doctrines created and enforced principally by the courts. Gradually a system of regulating building construction and particularly noxious, or inappropriately located, land uses evolved at the local level. There was no “national” land use system in England at the time of the creation of the federal republic in the United States.

Under the U.S. system of government, states retained the power to define and limit property rights, including the right to use the land and its natural resources. From that reservoir of authority, states have delegated land use control principally to local governments, including the power to create land use districts that dictate how cities, towns, and villages and their surrounding regions develop.