458
Souter, J., dissenting
In examining claims that there are causal relationships between adult businesses and an increase in secondary effects (distinct from disagreement), and between zoning and the mitigation of the effects, stress needs to be placed on the empirical character of the demonstration available. See Metromedia, Inc. v. San Diego, 453 U. S. 490, 510 (1981) ("[J]udgments . . . defying objective evaluation . . . must be carefully scrutinized to determine if they are only a public rationalization of an impermissible purpose"); Young, 427 U. S., at 84 (Powell, J., concurring) ("[C]ourts must be alert . . . to the possibility of using the power to zone as a pretext for suppressing expression"). The weaker the demonstration of facts distinct from disapproval of the "adult" viewpoint, the greater the likelihood that nothing more than condemnation of the viewpoint drives the regulation.3
Equal stress should be placed on the point that requiring empirical justification of claims about property value or crime is not demanding anything Herculean. Increased crime, like prostitution and muggings, and declining property values in areas surrounding adult businesses, are all readily observable, often to the untrained eye and certainly to the police officer and urban planner. These harms can be shown by police reports, crime statistics, and studies of mar-3 Regulation of commercial speech, which is like secondary-effects zoning in being subject to an intermediate level of First Amendment scrutiny, see Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm'n of N. Y., 447 U. S. 557, 569 (1980), provides an instructive parallel in the cases enforcing an evidentiary requirement to ensure that an asserted rationale does not cloak an illegitimate governmental motive. See, e. g., Rubin v. Coors Brewing Co., 514 U. S. 476, 487 (1995); Edenfield v. Fane, 507 U. S. 761 (1993). The government's "burden is not satisfied by mere speculation or conjecture," but only by "demonstrat[ing] that the harms [the government] recites are real and that its restriction will in fact alleviate them to a material degree." Id., at 770-771. For unless this "critical" requirement is met, Rubin, supra, at 487, "a State could with ease restrict commercial speech in the service of other objectives that could not themselves justify a burden on commercial expression," Edenfield, supra, at 771.
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