San Francisco Slaughterhouses and American Proto-zoning

Abstract

Historians generally attribute the title of first municipal proto-zoning ordinance in the United States to a restriction on the locations of Chinese Laundries from Modesto, California, in 1885. Yet, a similar location restriction on slaughterhouses was approved in San Francisco in 1852 and revised in ensuing decades through political contestation and legal challenges. One of these cases, Ex parte Shrader, set an important legal precedent for later Chinese laundry cases and the transition from land use districting for nuisance control to land use districting as an exercise of the police power, an essential step for modern zoning.