City of Cleburne, Texas v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc.
United States Supreme Court
473 U.S. 432 (1985)
Cleburne Living Center (plaintiff) sought a special-use permit from the City of Cleburne (defendant) to build a supervised group home for up to thirteen mentally disabled adults, but the city denied the permit while not requiring similar permits for comparable uses like apartment buildings, boarding houses, dormitories, or nursing homes. The district court upheld the denial, but the court of appeals applied intermediate scrutiny, treating the mentally disabled as a quasi-suspect class, and invalidated the denial; the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
Whether a city's denial of a permit for a group home for mentally disabled persons violated the Equal Protection Clause, and whether review of that denial required intermediate scrutiny.