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.

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.

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.

Since returning to Virginia as one of the country's smallest counties in the mid-19th century after almost 50 years as part of the District of Columbia, Arlington had largely remained quiet, minimally developed and rural.

[7] Three years later, the industrial and auto-related businesses in the area across U.S. Route 1 to the east of Aurora Highlands began being redeveloped into high-rise condominiums and office buildings, the beginnings of today's Crystal City.

[13][12] All the plaintiffs drove to work in Crystal City from outside the area, with the exception of Rudolph Richards, the lead plaintiff, who lived in Aurora Highlands one block outside the designated area and walked to work; he argued that the unconstitutionality of the ordinance arose from its practical effect of allowing his neighbors who might live in the permit zone to freely park in front of his house while he could not park in front of theirs.

Justice Richard Harding Poff wrote for a unanimous court that held the ordinance violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, without reaching the state constitutional argument.

[19] its decision cited precedents dating to 1889 holding it beyond a government's constitutional authority to give residents special permission to park vehicles, or forbid them from doing so, on streets near their homes.

Poff noted that a more recent state law, not before the court in the instant case, that allowed local governments to differentiate between the terms of parking permits offered to residents and nonresidents as long as it was open to all motorists.

The Massachusetts court considered Whisman and the same precedents it had, but found them "inapplicable to the case before us, which involves a congested urban area which has had substantial traffic and parking problems for years.

[27] "The decision appears to be a major step towards more rational transportation planning in urban areas" the William and Mary Law and Environmental Policy Review commented afterwards.

Four years later the Court decided a case that turned on exactly that issue, when the vacation and closure of part of a Memphis, Tennessee, street, argued to be for those reasons, came before it.

After it was granted, opponents sued, arguing the true motive was racial exclusion, to reduce through traffic in Hein Park from the predominantly Black neighborhoods to the north of Jackson.

Judges Damon Keith and John Weld Peck II found these strong enough to reverse, but Anthony J. Celebrezze dissented, agreeing that while the closure had disparately impacted the residents of neighborhoods to the north, the plaintiffs had not shown that the decision was racially motivated.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the dissenters, cited Richards for its general proposition that discrimination against nonresidents of an area or jurisdiction is not per se unconstitutional.

In an unpublished opinion, Judge Joel A. Pisano found the case identical to Richards, quoting from it at length, and rejecting the plaintiff's contention that the ordinance did not fulfill the borough's objectives as speculative.

California law reserved authority over public roads to the legislature, except where explicitly delegated, and the state had not granted any local or county government that power.

[44] In a case involving a different defendant several years later, the Court of Appeals affirmed its earlier ruling and struck down Bellerose's ordinance on the same grounds as Albany's, the municipality's lack of legal authority to impose it.

Chief Justice Ralph Cappy wrote for a majority of five that upheld a Stroudsburg ordinance imposing a time limit on nonresident parking in certain residential neighborhoods.

"Neither the stated purpose of the ordinance, nor its application, reveals a tyrannical abuse of authority with no logical intention", he wrote,[46] noting its similarity to the one at issue in Richards.

This is a distinction that is both artificial and clearly without merit.In addition, Larsen wrote, Pennsylvania's case law required that the police power operate equally on all, which the Stroudsburg ordinance—"penaliz[ing] some for conduct that others may engage in with impunity"—did not.

[f] He cited Richards to dispense with the plaintiffs' equal protection argument, noting that there were other instances where the U.S. Supreme Court had found its state counterparts to have applied tests too stringently in striking down laws under that provision,[g] as Virginia's had in that case.

Miller noted that while some residential parking cases had invoked the right to travel, as recognized during the 1960s by United States v. Guest[53] and Shapiro v. Thompson,[54] (as Housman later would), neither Richards nor Petralia had.

[66] Originally, the EPA had proposed a plan whereby drivers would only be allowed to drive into the core of the Boston metropolitan area, which had the worst transportation-related air quality problems, only on four of every five working days.

The ordinance at issue in Belle Terre, she noted, had directly targeted the latter, and explicitly mentioned it as requiring only a rational basis if it did not impair a fundamental constitutional right.

[69] And if even the First Amendment rights had to yield to protecting neighborhood character, as had been the case with the Detroit zoning ordinance upheld in Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc.,[70] which required adult movie theaters to be at least a thousand feet (300 m) from each other, certainly parking would also be subordinate to that interest, Miller argued.

The Virginia Supreme Court, in finding that the ordinance achieved its goals at "too dear" a constitutional price, had applied an impermissible balancing test, substituted its judgement for the county board's and exceeded the scope of proper review, she wrote.

Others had shown a preference for single-family housing over multiple-unit dwellings, to the point of sometimes not allowing any of the latter to be part of a residential permit zone, which tended to disproportionately impact poorer and minority residents.

[71] Text of Arlington County Board v. Richards is available from: Findlaw Google Scholar Justia Leagle Library of Congress Oyez (oral argument audio)