Arlington County Board v. Richards

Arlington County Board v. Richards
Supreme Court of the United States
Decided October 11, 1977
Full case name	Rudolph Richards et al v. County Board of Arlington County, Virginia
Docket no.	76-1418
Citations	434 U.S. 5 (more) 98 S.Ct. 24 54 L.Ed.2d 4 1977 U.S. LEXIS 26
Case history
Prior	231 S.E.2d 231 (Va., 1977)
Subsequent	Reh denied, 434 U.S. 976, 98 S.Ct. 535, 54 L.Ed.2d 468
Holding
Local ordinance limiting parking in a designated area during business hours to residents and visitors only was rationally related to public goals of improving quality of life, protecting neighborhood character and reducing dependence on automobile usage; legal distinctions between residents and non-residents are sometimes inevitable and do not by themselves violate the Equal Protection Clause. Supreme Court of Virginia reversed.
Court membership
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Potter Stewart Byron White · Thurgood Marshall Harry Blackmun · Lewis F. Powell Jr. William Rehnquist · John P. Stevens
Case opinion
Per curiam
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Amdt. XIV

Arlington County Board v. Richards, 434 U.S. 5 (1977), is a United States Supreme Court decision on the application of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to municipal parking restrictions. In a unanimous per curiam opinion, the Court held that a residential zoned parking system requiring permits for daytime parking in the Aurora Highlands neighborhood of Arlington County, Virginia, with those permits limited to residents, their guests and those who came to their homes for business purposes had a rational basis and was thus constitutional. Its decision overturned the Virginia Supreme Court.^[1]

The ordinance upheld the first such program in a major U.S. metropolitan area,^[2] which had been adopted by the county three years earlier in response to national and local concerns. The former was an effort by urban planners and government agencies to reduce automobile use, and conversely encourage the use of public transit and carpooling to address traffic congestion and air pollution concerns. Locally, Aurora Highlands residents were complaining about increasing spillover parking on their streets by workers commuting to nearby Crystal City from elsewhere in the Washington metropolitan area.

Suit was brought by several plaintiffs. Most were drivers who routinely parked in Aurora Highlands; the lead plaintiff, Rudolph Richards, lived a block outside of the area designated by the ordinance. While he was able to walk to work, he argued that it was unconstitutional since it allowed residents of the designated area to park in front of his house while he could not park in front of theirs. The trial court and the Virginia Supreme Court agreed,^[3] but the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided the case purely based on the parties' briefs without granting certiorari,^[1] found the law a permissible way of carrying out the stated objectives of preserving the neighborhood character and residents' quality of life and that legal distinctions between residents and nonresidents of a particular area are not necessarily the invidious discrimination it had held to be forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The decision resolved a difference of opinion among state high courts, as earlier in the year the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had held a similar scheme in that state to be constitutional, mildly criticizing its Virginia counterpart in the process.^[4] After the decision, local governments felt more freedom to impose locally targeted parking and traffic rules. The Court has not revisited Richards since then, although it and other courts have relied on its holding that distinctions on the basis of residency, not just in parking but in taxation policy and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, do not by themselves offend the Constitution. Legal commentary has accepted this conclusion, but there has been concern in the planning community that it has enabled, through qualifications on the definition of residency, the entrenchment of residential racial segregation in some areas.