Cite as: 535 U. S. 425 (2002)
Souter, J., dissenting
ket value, all of which are within a municipality's capacity or available from the distilled experiences of comparable communities. See, e. g., Renton, supra, at 51; Young, supra, at 55.
And precisely because this sort of evidence is readily available, reviewing courts need to be wary when the government appeals, not to evidence, but to an uncritical common sense in an effort to justify such a zoning restriction. It is not that common sense is always illegitimate in First Amendment demonstration. The need for independent proof varies with the point that has to be established, and zoning can be supported by common experience when there is no reason to question it. We have appealed to common sense in analogous cases, even if we have disagreed about how far it took us. See Erie v. Pap's A. M., 529 U. S. 277, 300-301 (2000) (plurality opinion); id., at 313, and n. 2 (Souter, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). But we must be careful about substituting common assumptions for evidence, when the evidence is as readily available as public statistics and municipal property valuations, lest we find out when the evidence is gathered that the assumptions are highly debatable. The record in this very case makes the point. It has become a commonplace, based on our own cases, that concentrating adult establishments drives down the value of neighboring property used for other purposes. See Renton, 475 U. S., at 51; Young, supra, at 55. In fact, however, the city found that general assumption unjustified by its 1977 study. App. 39, 45.
The lesson is that the lesser scrutiny applied to content-correlated zoning restrictions is no excuse for a govern-ment's failure to provide a factual demonstration for claims it makes about secondary effects; on the contrary, this is what demands the demonstration. See, e. g., Schad v. Mount Ephraim, 452 U. S. 61, 72-74 (1981). In this case, however, the government has not shown that bookstores containing viewing booths, isolated from other adult establishments, in-
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