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Full Opinion
MOORE
v.
CITY OF EAST CLEVELAND, OHIO.
Supreme Court of United States.
*495 Edward R. Stege, Jr., argued the cause for appellant. With him on the brief were Francis D. Murtaugh, Jr., and Lloyd B. Snyder.
Leonard Young argued the cause for appellee. With him on the brief was Henry B. Fischer.[*]
MR. JUSTICE POWELL announced the judgment of the Court, and delivered an opinion in which MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL, and MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN joined.
East Cleveland's housing ordinance, like many throughout the country, limits occupancy of a dwelling unit to members *496 of a single family. § 1351.02.[1] But the ordinance contains an unusual and complicated definitional section that recognizes as a "family" only a few categories of related individuals. § 1341.08.[2] Because her family, living together in her home, fits none of those categories, appellant stands convicted of a criminal offense. The question in this case is whether the ordinance violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[3]
I
Appellant, Mrs. Inez Moore, lives in her East Cleveland home together with her son, Dale Moore, Sr., and her two grandsons, Dale, Jr., and John Moore, Jr. The two boys are first cousins rather than brothers; we are told that John *497 came to live with his grandmother and with the elder and younger Dale Moores after his mother's death.[4]
In early 1973, Mrs. Moore received a notice of violation from the city, stating that John was an "illegal occupant" and directing her to comply with the ordinance. When she failed to remove him from her home, the city filed a criminal charge. Mrs. Moore moved to dismiss, claiming that the ordinance was constitutionally invalid on its face. Her motion was overruled, and upon conviction she was sentenced to five days in jail and a $25 fine. The Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed after giving full consideration to her constitutional claims,[5]*498 and the Ohio Supreme Court denied review. We noted probable jurisdiction of her appeal, 425 U. S. 949 (1976).
II
The city argues that our decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 416 U. S. 1 (1974), requires us to sustain the ordinance attacked here. Belle Terre, like East Cleveland, imposed limits on the types of groups that could occupy a single dwelling unit. Applying the constitutional standard announced in this Court's leading land-use case, Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U. S. 365 (1926),[6] We sustained the Belle Terre ordinance on the ground that it bore a rational relationship to permissible state objectives.
But one overriding factor sets this case apart from Belle Terre. The ordinance there affected only unrelated individuals. It expressly allowed all who were related by "blood, adoption, or marriage" to live together, and in sustaining the ordinance we were careful to note that it promoted "family needs" and "family values." 416 U. S., at 9. East Cleveland, in contrast, has chosen to regulate the occupancy of its housing by slicing deeply into the family itself. This is no mere incidental result of the ordinance. On its face it selects certain *499 categories of relatives who may live together and declares that others may not. In particular, it makes a crime of a grandmother's choice to live with her grandson in circumstances like those presented here.
When a city undertakes such intrusive regulation of the family, neither Belle Terre nor Euclid governs; the usual judicial deference to the legislature is inappropriate. "This Court has long recognized that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U. S. 632, 639-640 (1974). A host of cases, tracing their lineage to Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390, 399-401 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534-535 (1925), have consistently acknowledged a "private realm of family life which the state cannot enter." Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158, 166 (1944). See, e. g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113, 152-153 (1973); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 231-233 (1972); Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645, 651 (1972); Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629, 639 (1968); Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); id., at 495-496 (Goldberg, J., concurring); id., at 502-503 (WHITE, J., concurring); Poe v. Ullman, 367 U. S. 497, 542-544, 549-553 (1961) (Harlan, J., dissenting); cf. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 12 (1967); May v. Anderson, 345 U. S. 528, 533 (1953); Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, 316 U. S. 535, 541 (1942). Of course, the family is not beyond regulation. See Prince v. Massachusetts, supra, at 166. But when the government intrudes on choices concerning family living arrangements, this Court must examine carefully the importance of the governmental interests advanced and the extent to which they are served by the challenged regulation. See Poe v. Ullman, supra, at 554 (Harlan, J., dissenting).
When thus examined, this ordinance cannot survive. The city seeks to justify it as a means of preventing overcrowding, *500 minimizing traffic and parking congestion, and avoiding an undue financial burden on East Cleveland's school system. Although these are legitimate goals, the ordinance before us serves them marginally, at best.[7] For example, the ordinance permits any family consisting only of husband, wife, and unmarried children to live together, even if the family contains a half dozen licensed drivers, each with his or her own car. At the same time it forbids an adult brother and sister to share a household, even if both faithfully use public transportation. The ordinance would permit a grandmother to live with a single dependent son and children, even if his school-age children number a dozen, yet it forces Mrs. Moore to find another dwelling for her grandson John, simply because of the presence of his uncle and cousin in the same household. We need not labor the point. Section 1341.08 has but a tenuous relation to alleviation of the conditions mentioned by the city.
III
The city would distinguish the cases based on Meyer and Pierce. It points out that none of them "gives grandmothers any fundamental rights with respect to grandsons," Brief for Appellee 18, and suggests that any constitutional right to live together as a family extends only to the nuclear family— essentially a couple and their dependent children.
To be sure, these cases did not expressly consider the family relationship presented here. They were immediately concerned with freedom of choice with respect to childbearing, e. g., LaFleur, Roe v. Wade, Griswold, supra, or with the rights *501 of parents to the custody and companionship of their own children, Stanley v. Illinois, supra, or with traditional parental authority in matters of child rearing and education. Yoder, Ginsberg, Pierce, Meyer, supra. But unless we close our eyes to the basic reasons why certain rights associated with the family have been accorded shelter under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, we cannot avoid applying the force and rationale of these precedents to the family choice involved in this case.
Understanding those reasons requires careful attention to this Court's function under the Due Process Clause. Mr. Justice Harlan described it eloquently:
"Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound.[8] No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.
*502 ". . . [T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This `liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, . . . and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment." Poe v. Ullman, supra, at 542-543 (dissenting opinion).
Substantive due process has at times been a treacherous field for this Court. There are risks when the judicial branch gives enhanced protection to certain substantive liberties without the guidance of the more specific provisions of the Bill of Rights. As the history of the Lochner era demonstrates, there is reason for concern lest the only limits to such judicial intervention become the predilections of those who happen at the time to be Members of this Court.[9] That history counsels caution and restraint. But it does not counsel abandonment, nor does it require what the city urges here: cutting off any protection of family rights at the first convenient, if arbitrary boundary—the boundary of the nuclear family.
*503 Appropriate limits on substantive due process come not from drawing arbitrary lines but rather from careful "respect for the teachings of history [and] solid recognition of the basic values that underlie our society."[10]Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S., at 501 (Harlan, J., concurring).[11] See generally Ingraham v. Wright, 430 U. S. 651, 672-674, and nn. 41, 42 (1977); Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath, 341 U. S. 123, 162-163 (1951) (Frankfurter, J., concurring); Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45, 76 (1905) (Holmes, J., dissenting). Our decisions establish that the Constitution protects the sanctity of the family precisely because the institution of the family is deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition.[12] It is through the family that we inculcate and *504 pass down many of our most cherished values, moral and cultural.[13]
Ours is by no means a tradition limited to respect for the bonds uniting the members of the nuclear family. The tradition of uncles, aunts, cousins, and especially grandparents sharing a household along with parents and children has roots equally venerable and equally deserving of constitutional recognition.[14] Over the years millions *505 of our citizens have grown up in just such an environment, and most, surely, have profited from it. Even if conditions of modern society have brought about a decline in extended family households, they have not erased the accumulated wisdom of civilization, gained over the centuries and honored throughout our history, that supports a larger conception of the family. Out of choice, necessity, or a sense of family responsibility, it has been common for close relatives to draw together and participate in the duties and the satisfactions of a common home. Decisions concerning child rearing, which Yoder, Meyer, Pierce and other cases have recognized as entitled to constitutional protection, long have been shared with grandparents or other relatives who occupy the same household— indeed who may take on major responsibility for the rearing of the children.[15] Especially in times of adversity, such as the death of a spouse or economic need, the broader family has tended to come together for mutual sustenance and to maintain or rebuild a secure home life. This is apparently what happened here.[16]
Whether or not such a household is established because of personal tragedy, the choice of relatives in this degree *506 of kinship to live together may not lightly be denied by the State. Pierce struck down an Oregon law requiring all children to attend the State's public schools, holding that the Constitution "excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only." 268 U. S., at 535. By the same token the Constitution prevents East Cleveland from standardizing its children—and its adults—by forcing all to live in certain narrowly defined family patterns.
Reversed.
MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, with whom MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL joins, concurring.
I join the plurality's opinion. I agree that the Constitution is not powerless to prevent East Cleveland from prosecuting as a criminal and jailing[1] a 63-year-old grandmother for refusing to expel from her home her now 10-year-old grandson who has lived with her and been brought up by her since his mother's death when he was less than a year old.[2] I do not question that a municipality may constitutionally zone to *507 alleviate noise and traffic congestion and to prevent overcrowded and unsafe living conditions, in short to enact reasonable land-use restrictions in furtherance of the legitimate objectives East Cleveland claims for its ordinance. But the zoning power is not a license for local communities to enact senseless and arbitrary restrictions which cut deeply into private areas of protected family life. East Cleveland may not constitutionally define "family" as essentially confined to parents and the parents' own children.[3] The plurality's opinion conclusively demonstrates that classifying family patterns in this eccentric way is not a rational means of achieving the ends East Cleveland claims for its ordinance, and further that the ordinance unconstitutionally abridges the "freedom of personal choice in matters of . . . family life [that] is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U. S. 632, 639-640 (1974). I write only to underscore the cultural myopia of the arbitrary boundary drawn by the East Cleveland ordinance in the light of the tradition of the American home that has been a feature of our society since our beginning as a Nation—the "tradition" in the plurality's words, "of uncles, aunts, cousins, and especially grandparents sharing a household along with parents and children . . . ." Ante, at 504. The line drawn by this ordinance *508 displays a depressing insensitivity toward the economic and emotional needs of a very large part of our society.
In today's America, the "nuclear family" is the pattern so often found in much of white suburbia. J. Vander Zanden, Sociology: A Systematic Approach 322 (3d ed. 1975). The Constitution cannot be interpreted, however, to tolerate the imposition by government upon the rest of us of white suburbia's preference in patterns of family living. The "extended family" that provided generations of early Americans with social services and economic and emotional support in times of hardship, and was the beachhead for successive waves of immigrants who populated our cities,[4] remains not merely still a pervasive living pattern, but under the goad of brutal economic necessity, a prominent pattern—virtually a means of survival— for large numbers of the poor and deprived minorities of our society. For them compelled pooling of scant resources requires compelled sharing of a household.[5]
*509 The "extended" form is especially familiar among black families.[6] We may suppose that this reflects the truism that black citizens, like generations of white immigrants before them, have been victims of economic and other disadvantages that would worsen if they were compelled to abandon extended, for nuclear, living patterns.[7] Even in husband and wife households, 13% of black families compared with 3% of white families include relatives under 18 years old, in addition *510 to the couple's own children.[8] In black households whose head is an elderly woman, as in this case, the contrast is even more striking: 48% of such black households, compared with 10% of counterpart white households, include related minor children not offspring of the head of the household.[9]
I do not wish to be understood as implying that East Cleveland's enforcement of its ordinance is motivated by a racially discriminatory purpose: The record of this case would not support that implication. But the prominence of other than nuclear families among ethnic and racial minority groups, including our black citizens, surely demonstrates that the "extended family" pattern remains a vital tenet of our society.[10] It suffices that in prohibiting this pattern of family living as a means of achieving its objectives, appellee city has chosen a device that deeply intrudes into family associational rights that historically have been central, and today remain central, to a large proportion of our population.
Moreover, to sanction the drawing of the family line at the arbitrary boundary chosen by East Cleveland would surely conflict with prior decisions that protected "extended" family *511 relationships. For the "private realm of family life which the state cannot enter," recognized as protected in Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U. S. 158, 166 (1944), was the relationship of aunt and niece. And in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534-535 (1925), the protection held to have been unconstitutionally abridged was "the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control" (emphasis added). See also Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 232-233 (1972). Indeed, Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 416 U. S. 1 (1974), the case primarily relied upon by the appellee, actually supports the Court's decision. The Belle Terre ordinance barred only unrelated individuals from constituting a family in a single-family zone. The village took special care in its brief to emphasize that its ordinance did not in any manner inhibit the choice of related individuals to constitute a family, whether in the "nuclear" or "extended" form. This was because the village perceived that choice as one it was constitutionally powerless to inhibit. Its brief stated: "Whether it be the extended family of a more leisurely age or the nuclear family of today the role of the family in raising and training successive generations of the species makes it more important, we dare say, than any other social or legal institution . . . . If any freedom not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights enjoys a `preferred position' in the law it is most certainly the family." (Emphasis supplied.) Brief for Appellants in No. 73-191, O. T. 1973, p. 26. The cited decisions recognized, as the plurality recognizes today, that the choice of the "extended family" pattern is within the "freedom of personal choice in matters of . . . family life [that] is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment." 414 U. S., at 639-640.
Any suggestion that the variance procedure of East Cleveland's Housing Code assumes special significance is without merit. This is not only because this grandmother *512 was not obligated to exhaust her administrative remedy before defending this prosecution on the ground that the single-family occupancy ordinance violates the Equal Protection Clause. Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U. S. 365 (1926), the leading case in the zoning field, expressly held that one attacking the constitutionality of a building or zoning code need not first seek a variance. Id., at 386. Rather, the matter of a variance is irrelevant also because the municipality is constitutionally powerless to abridge, as East Cleveland has done, the freedom of personal choice of related members of a family to live together. Thus, the existence of the variance procedure serves to lessen neither the irrationality of the definition of "family" nor the extent of its intrusion into family life-style decisions.
There is no basis for an inference—other than the city's self-serving statement that a hardship variance "possibly with some stipulation(s) would probably have been granted"—that this grandmother would have obtained a variance had she requested one. Indeed, a contrary inference is more supportable. In deciding to prosecute her in the first place, the city tipped its hand how discretion would have been exercised. In any event, § 1311.02 (1965), limits the discretion of the Board of Building Code Appeals to grant variances to those which are "in harmony with the general intent of such ordinance . . . ." If one of the legitimate objectives of the definition of "family" was to preserve the single (nuclear) family character of East Cleveland, then granting this grandmother a variance would be in excess of the Board's powers under the ordinance.
Furthermore, the very existence of the "escape hatch" of the variance procedure only heightens the irrationality of the restrictive definition, since application of the ordinance then depends upon which family units the zoning authorities permit to reside together and whom the prosecuting authorities choose to prosecute. The Court's disposition of the analogous situation in Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), *513 is instructive. There Texas argued that, despite a rigid and narrow statute prohibiting abortions except for the purpose of saving the mother's life, prosecuting authorities routinely tolerated elective abortion procedures in certain cases, such as nonconsensual pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. The Court was not persuaded that this saved the statute, THE CHIEF JUSTICE commenting that "no one in these circumstances should be placed in a posture of dependence on a prosecutorial policy or prosecutorial discretion." Id., at 208 (concurring opinion). Similarly, this grandmother cannot be denied the opportunity to defend against this criminal prosecution because of a variance procedure that holds her family hostage to the vagaries of discretionary administrative decisions. Smith v. Cahoon, 283 U. S. 553, 562 (1931). We have now passed well beyond the day when illusory escape hatches could justify the imposition of burdens on fundamental rights. Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645, 647-649 (1972); Staub v. City of Baxley, 355 U. S. 313, 319 (1958).
MR. JUSTICE STEVENS, concurring in the judgment.
In my judgment the critical question presented by this case is whether East Cleveland's housing ordinance is a permissible restriction on appellant's right to use her own property as she sees fit.
Long before the original States adopted the Constitution, the common law protected an owner's right to decide how best to use his own property. This basic right has always been limited by the law of nuisance which proscribes uses that impair the enjoyment of other property in the vicinity. But the question whether an individual owner's use could be further limited by a municipality's comprehensive zoning plan was not finally decided until this century.
The holding in Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U. S. 365, that a city could use its police power, not just to abate a specific use of property which proved offensive, but also to create and implement a comprehensive plan for the use *514 of land in the community, vastly diminished the rights of individual property owners. It did not, however, totally extinguish those rights. On the contrary, that case expressly recognized that the broad zoning power must be exercised within constitutional limits.
In his opinion for the Court, Mr. Justice Sutherland fused the two express constitutional restrictions on any state interference with private property—that property shall not be taken without due process nor for a public purpose without just compensation—into a single standard: "[B]efore [a zoning] ordinance can be declared unconstitutional, [it must be shown to be] clearly arbitrary and unreasonable, having no substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals, or general welfare." Id., at 395 (emphasis added). This principle was applied in Nectow v. Cambridge, 277 U. S. 183; on the basis of a specific finding made by the state trial court that "the health, safety, convenience and general welfare of the inhabitants of the part of the city affected" would not be promoted by prohibiting the landowner's contemplated use, this Court held that the zoning ordinance as applied was unconstitutional. Id., at 188.[1]
With one minor exception,[2] between the Nectow decision in 1928 and the 1974 decision in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 416 U. S. 1, this Court did not review the substance of any zoning ordinances. The case-by-case development of the constitutional limits on the zoning power has not, therefore, taken place in this Court. On the other hand, during *515 the past half century the broad formulations found in Euclid and Nectow have been applied in countless situations by the state courts. Those cases shed a revelatory light on the character of the single-family zoning ordinance challenged in this case.
Litigation involving single-family zoning ordinances is common. Although there appear to be almost endless differences in the language used in these ordinances,[3] they contain three principal types of restrictions. First, they define the kind of structure that may be erected on vacant land.[4] Second, they require that a single-family home be occupied only by a "single housekeeping unit."[5] Third, they often *516 require that the housekeeping unit be made up of persons related by blood, adoption, or marriage, with certain limited exceptions.
Although the legitimacy of the first two types of restrictions is well settled,[6] attempts to limit occupancy to related persons have not been successful. The state courts have recognized a valid community interest in preserving the stable character of residential neighborhoods which justifies a prohibition against transient occupancy.[7] Nevertheless, in well-reasoned opinions, the courts of Illinois,[8] New York,[9] New Jersey,[10]*517 California,[11] Connecticut,[12] Wisconsin,[13] and other jurisdictions,[14] have permitted unrelated persons to occupy single-family residences notwithstanding an ordinance prohibiting, either expressly or implicitly, such occupancy.
*518 These cases delineate the extent to which the state courts have allowed zoning ordinances to interfere with the right of a property owner to determine the internal composition of his *519 household. The intrusion on that basic property right has not previously gone beyond the point where the ordinance defines a family to include only persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Indeed, as the cases in the margin demonstrate, state courts have not always allowed the intrusion to penetrate that far. The state decisions have upheld zoning ordinances which regulated the identity, as opposed to the number, of persons who may compose a household only to the extent that the ordinances require such households to remain nontransient, single-housekeeping units.[15]
*520 There appears to be no precedent for an ordinance which excludes any of an owner's relatives from the group of persons who may occupy his residence on a permanent basis. Nor does there appear to be any justification for such a restriction on an owner's use of his property.[16] The city has failed totally to explain the need for a rule which would allow a homeowner to have two grandchildren live with her if they are brothers, but not if they are cousins. Since this ordinance has not been shown to have any "substantial relation to the public health, safety, morals, or general welfare" of the city of East Cleveland, and since it cuts so deeply into a fundamental right normally associated with the ownership of residential property—that of an owner to decide who may reside on his or her property—it must fall under the limited standard of review of zoning decisions which this Court preserved in *521 Euclid and Nectow. Under that standard, East Cleveland's unprecedented ordinance constitutes a taking of property without due process and without just compensation.
For these reasons, I concur in the Court's judgment.
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER, dissenting.
It is unnecessary for me to reach the difficult constitutional issue this case presents. Appellant's deliberate refusal to use a plainly adequate administrative remedy provided by the city should foreclose her from pressing in this Court any constitutional objections to the city's zoning ordinance. Considerations of federalism and comity, as well as the finite capacity of federal courts, support this position. In courts, as in hospitals, two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time; when any case comes here which could have been disposed of long ago at the local level, it takes the place that might well have been given to some other case in which there was no alternative remedy.
(1)
The single-family zoning ordinances of the city of East Cleveland define the term "family" to include only the head of the household and his or her most intimate relatives, principally the spouse and unmarried and dependent children. Excluded from the definition of "family," and hence from cohabitation, are various persons related by blood or adoption to the head of the household. The obvious purpose of the city is the traditional one of preserving certain areas as family residential communities.
The city has established a Board of Building Code Appeals to consider variances from this facially stringent single-family limit when necessary to alleviate "practical difficulties and unnecessary hardships" and "to secure the general welfare and [do] substantial justice . . . ." East Cleveland Codified Ordinances § 1311.02 (1965). The Board has power to grant variances to "[a]ny person adversely affected by a decision of *522 any City official made in the enforcement of any [zoning] ordinance," so long as appeal is made to the Board within 10 days of notice of the decision appealed from. § 1311.03.
After appellant's receipt of the notice of violation, her lawyers made no effort to apply to the Board for a variance to exempt her from the restrictions of the ordinance, even though her situation appears on its face to present precisely the kind of "practical difficulties and unnecessary hardships" the variance procedure was intended to accommodate. Appellant's counsel does not claim appellant was unaware of the right to go to the Board and seek a variance, or that any attempt was made to secure relief by an application to the Board.[1] Indeed, appellant's counsel makes no claim that the failure to seek a variance was due to anything other than a deliberate decision to forgo the administrative process in favor of a judicial forum.
(2)
In view of appellant's deliberate bypass of the variance procedure, the question arises whether she should now be permitted to complain of the unconstitutionality of the single-family ordinance as it applies to her. This Court has not yet required one in appellant's position to utilize available state administrative remedies as a prerequisite to obtaining federal relief; but experience has demonstrated that such a requirement is imperative if the critical overburdening of federal courts at all levels is to be alleviated. That burden has now become "a crisis of overload, a crisis so serious that it threatens the capacity of the federal system to function as it should." *523 Department of Justice Committee on Revision of the Federal Judicial System, Report on the Needs of the Federal Courts 1 (1977). The same committee went on to describe the disastrous effects an exploding caseload has had on the administration of justice:
"Overloaded courts . . . mean long delays in obtaining a final decision and additional expense as court procedures become more complex in the effort to handle the rush of business. . . . [T]he quality of justice must necessarily suffer. Overloaded courts, seeking to deliver justice on time insofar as they can, necessarily begin to adjust their processes, sometimes in ways that threaten the integrity of the law and of the decisional process.
"District courts have delegated more and more of their tasks to magistrates . . . . Time for oral argument is steadily cut back . . . . [T]he practice of delivering written opinions is declining.
.....
". . . Courts are forced to add more clerks, more administrative personnel, to move cases faster and faster. They are losing . . . time for reflection, time for the deliberate maturation of principles." Id., at 3-4.
The devastating impact overcrowded dockets have on the quality of justice received by all litigants makes it essential that courts be reserved for the resolution of disputes for which no other adequate forum is available.
A
The basis of the doctrine of exhaustion of administrative remedies was simply put in Myers v. Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp., 303 U. S. 41, 50-51 (1938), as
"the long settled rule of judicial administration that no one is entitled to judicial relief for a supposed or *524 threatened injury until the prescribed administrative remedy has been exhausted."
Exhaustion is simply one aspect of allocation of overtaxed judicial resources. Appellant wishes to use a residential property in a manner at variance with a municipal housing code. That claim could have been swiftly and inexpensively adjudicated in a municipal administrative tribunal, without engaging cumbersome federal judicial machinery at the highest level. Of course, had appellant utilized the local administrative remedies and state judicial remedies to no avail, resort to this Court would have been available.[2]
The exhaustion principle asks simply that absent compelling circumstances—and none are claimed here—the avenues of relief nearest and simplest should be pursued first. This Court should now make unmistakably clear that when state or local governments provide administrative remedial procedures, no federal forum will be open unless the claimant can show either that the remedy is inadequate or that resort to those remedies is futile.
Utilization of available administrative processes is mandated for a complex of reasons. Statutes sometimes provide administrative procedures as the exclusive remedy. Even apart from a statutory command, it is common sense to permit the simple, speedy, and inexpensive processes of the administrative machinery to sift the facts and compile a complete record for the benefit of any reviewing courts. Exhaustion avoids interruption of the administrative process and allows application of an agency's specialized experience and the broad discretion granted to local entities, such as zoning boards. *525 Indeed, judicial review may be seriously hampered if the appropriate agency has no chance to apply its experience, exercise its discretion, or make a factual record reflecting all aspects of the problem.
Most important, if administrative remedies are pursued, the citizen may win complete relief without needlessly invoking judicial process. This permits the parties to resolve their disputes by relatively informal means far less costly and time consuming than litigation. By requiring exhaustion of administrative processes the courts are assured of reviewing only final agency decisions arrived at after considered judgment. It also permits agencies an opportunity to correct their own mistakes or give discretionary relief short of judicial review. Consistent failure by courts to mandate utilization of administrative remedies—under the growing insistence of lawyers demanding broad judicial remedies—inevitably undermines administrative effectiveness and defeats fundamental public policy by encouraging "end runs" around the administrative process.
It is apparent without discussion that resort to the local appeals board in this case would have furthered these policies, particularly since the exercise of informed discretion and experience by the proper agency is the essence of any housing code variance procedure. We ought not to encourage litigants to bypass simple, ine