618
Opinion of the Court
Takings Clause, which is to prevent the government from "forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole." Armstrong v. United States, 364 U. S. 40, 49 (1960).
Petitioner seeks compensation under these principles. At the outset, however, we face the two threshold considerations invoked by the state court to bar the claim: ripeness, and acquisition which postdates the regulation.
A
In Williamson County Regional Planning Comm'n v. Hamilton Bank of Johnson City, 473 U. S. 172 (1985), the Court explained the requirement that a takings claim must be ripe. The Court held that a takings claim challenging the application of land-use regulations is not ripe unless "the government entity charged with implementing the regulations has reached a final decision regarding the application of the regulations to the property at issue." Id., at 186. A final decision by the responsible state agency informs the constitutional determination whether a regulation has deprived a landowner of "all economically beneficial use" of the property, see Lucas, supra, at 1015, or defeated the reasonable investment-backed expectations of the landowner to the extent that a taking has occurred, see Penn Central, supra, at 124. These matters cannot be resolved in definitive terms until a court knows "the extent of permitted development" on the land in question. MacDonald, Sommer & Frates v. Yolo County, 477 U. S. 340, 351 (1986). Drawing on these principles, the Rhode Island Supreme Court held that petitioner had not taken the necessary steps to ripen his takings claim.
The central question in resolving the ripeness issue, under Williamson County and other relevant decisions, is whether petitioner obtained a final decision from the Council determining the permitted use for the land. As we have noted, SGI's early applications to fill had been granted at one point,
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