Nuisance Abatement & Civil Rights: What Raytown's Code Enforcement Practices Reveal

Background

The use of the term "nuisance" in a legal context, and the concept of municipal nuisance abatement, are phenomena that are only a few decades old.¹ Legal scholars have described the term "nuisance" as vague almost to the point of being undefined. Municipalities have packed that term with a wide range of proscriptions regarding the appearance of a property, objects on the property, and activities engaged in on the property — all of these proscriptions implicating far more than items exclusively associated with harmful activity, such as bombs or stolen goods. The primary justification for these practices is maintaining property value.

However, in 2023, residents of Jackson County, MO saw a significant increase in their homes' appraised values and property taxes, creating a newsworthy backlash and prompting the County to implement a special appeal process in August. Property values experienced a significant increase during 2020 in a real estate market that has since favored the seller.² The property-value justification, in other words, is not holding up.

Along with this debunked justification, municipalities will cherry-pick data to support their positions. When financial or political motives lead a municipality to adhere to predetermined conclusions and seek data supporting those conclusions, it frustrates all potential discussion about the conflict at hand. And when a municipality is advocating for its use of force in this manner, the conflict devolves into a zero-sum game.

A notorious historical example would be Jim Crow laws: the exploitation of minorities was a motive in adhering to the conclusion that the races needed to be separated, and thus Scientific Racism was the accumulation of cherry-picked data used to justify the division. The main force behind desegregation was not some revelation that no race was superior to others — it was a large social movement that established that the Human Rights provided by the Constitution apply to all people and are the foremost law of the land, and that state and local government policies are not allowed to violate those Rights, regardless of their claims regarding more trivial matters like property values.³

When advocating for environmental sustainability and permaculture, there are many discussions to be had with municipalities regarding what kinds of plants are grown, how much, where, and for what purpose. At the same time, we must always require municipalities to prioritize civil rights for everyone, regardless of whatever other problems they purport to be solving. In the past century, society has developed efficient methods and tools for identifying discrimination despite earnest denials from those who facilitate it. In the full report accompanying this article, I apply these methods with the information I have available to identify several ways the City of Raytown has deviated from its own policies and procedures to violate civil rights — violations that invalidate any stated justification for their nuisance abatement practices.