Cite as: 535 U. S. 425 (2002)
Souter, J., dissenting
The inescapable point is that the city does not even claim that the 1977 study provides any support for its assumption. We have previously accepted studies, like the city's own study here, as showing a causal connection between concentrations of adult business and identified secondary effects.7 Since that is an acceptable basis for requiring adult businesses to disperse when they are housed in separate premises, there is certainly a relevant argument to be made that restricting their concentration at one spacious address should have some effect on sales and traffic, and effects in the neighborhood. But even if that argument may justify a ban on adult "minimalls," ante, at 436, it provides no support for what the city proposes to do here. The bookstores involved here are not concentrations of traditionally separate adult businesses that have been studied and shown to have an association with secondary effects, and they exemplify no new form of concentration like a mall under one roof. They are combinations of selling and viewing activities that have commonly been combined, and the plurality itself recognizes, ante, at 438, that no study conducted by the city has reported that this type of traditional business, any more than any other adult business, has a correlation with secondary effects
in a given neighborhood." 475 U. S., at 50. The city, however, does not appeal to that decision to show that combined bookstore-arcades isolated from other adult establishments, like the theaters in Renton, give rise to negative secondary effects, perhaps recognizing that such a finding would only call into doubt the sensibility of the city's decision to proliferate such businesses. See ante, at 438. Although the question may be open whether a city can rely on the experiences of other cities when they contradict its own studies, that question is not implicated here, as Los Angeles relies exclusively on its own study, which is tellingly silent on the question whether isolated adult establishments have any bearing on criminal activity.
7 As already noted, n. 1, supra, amicus First Amendment Lawyers Association argues that more recent studies show no such thing, but this case involves no such challenge to the previously accepted causal connection.
463
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