This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 15th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Zoning is a way to control who does what, where.

What about when zoning dictates how many or how few people can live in

the same home? Maurice Thompson is a constitutional attorney in Ohio with the

1851 Center for Constitutional Law.

We spoke about a case where a state constitution took down a baseless restriction on the use of

private property.

This case began when a landlord from Bowling Green, Ohio called us.

The landlord had been threatened by the city with enforcement of this 40 year old ordinance because he had four college students living in a four bedroom house that he had rented to them and the city said,

look, you have 10 days to throw these people out because you're in

violation of our ordinance that holds that only three people if they're unrelated can live in the same house

no matter how big that house is and if you don't do that

we will prosecute you for a first-degree misdemeanor which is 180 days in jail and

we will find you $500 a day which is over the course of an annual lease more

than most houses in this town happen to be worth. Why does that ordinance exist?

That ordinance is not at all unusual. You might be surprised to learn that there are

thousands of such ordinances throughout the United States. They are prominent in smaller towns, they're prominent in smaller towns.

They're prominent in college towns.

And these ordinances began to exist in the 1970s

when local governments began more and more to attempt to use zoning for social

engineering purposes rather than for strict land use purposes. As

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