Facts
- Inez Moore lived in a single-family home in East Cleveland, Ohio, with her adult son and two grandsons who were first cousins (each the child of a different one of Moore’s children).
- A city housing ordinance restricted occupancy of a dwelling to a “family” defined narrowly to include only specified relatives and limited extended-family configurations.
- Under the ordinance’s definition, one grandson was deemed an “illegal occupant” because the two grandsons were cousins rather than siblings within the permitted categories.
- Moore refused to remove the grandson from her household.
- The City prosecuted Moore for violating the ordinance; she was convicted and sentenced to five days in jail and a $25 fine.
- State courts upheld the conviction, and Moore sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Issues
- Whether a municipal housing ordinance that narrowly defines “family” and criminalizes a grandmother’s cohabitation with certain grandchildren violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Decision
- The Supreme Court reversed Moore’s conviction.
- A plurality concluded the ordinance violated the Due Process Clause by intruding on constitutionally protected choices concerning family living arrangements, including extended-family cohabitation.
- The plurality distinguished prior precedent upholding restrictions on groups of unrelated occupants, reasoning that this ordinance regulated which relatives could live together and thereby operated directly inside the family.
- The plurality found the City’s asserted interests (overcrowding, traffic/parking, school costs) legitimate in the abstract but only tenuously related to the ordinance’s particular exclusions, given that larger households could qualify while Moore’s small household was criminalized.
- Justice Stevens concurred in the judgment on property-based grounds, reasoning the ordinance improperly constrained an owner’s use of her home by dictating which relatives could reside there.
- Dissents would have applied deferential review and upheld the ordinance as a permissible zoning measure.
Legal Principles
- The Fourteenth Amendment’s substantive due process protection for family life extends beyond the nuclear family and includes certain extended-family living arrangements with deep roots in American tradition.
- When government regulates family cohabitation by selecting which relatives may live together, courts must closely examine both the importance of the asserted governmental interests and the fit between those interests and the restriction.
- Land-use objectives such as limiting congestion or overcrowding do not justify criminalizing extended-family households where the ordinance’s classifications are poorly tailored to those objectives.
Conclusion
The Court held that East Cleveland could not, consistent with due process, enforce a narrow “family” definition that made it a crime for closely related extended family members to live together without a sufficiently strong and well-matched justification.