The issue is the regularly scheduled activities bringing a large number of cars to the neighborhood, and the use of a vacant lot as a parking lot in a residentially-zoned area. As I noted before, most jurisdictions have specific, permit-requiring exceptions for religious and educational uses in residential-zoned locations — I don’t see anyone here complaining about the special *privileges* accorded to religious and educational groups, so it’s hypocritical to complain about limits and requirements placed on those special privileges. Local laws and regulations govern what the criteria are for triggering violations of a residential zoning code. If local residents don’t like those criteria, they should pressure their local politicians to change them, and if that doesn’t work, vote out the current set of polticians and get new ones.
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of property owners in residential areas DO want restrictions on activities that regularly attract numbers of cars and people that are not consistent with residential use of a property. These restrictions catch a lot of different uses, all of which *somebody* thinks they should be free to undertake, e.g. the practice of renting rooms in a single family homes to large numbers of laborers on an 8 hour shift basis, for sleeping. The zoning codes cannot discriminate between activities based on specific religious beliefs, but courts have routinely upheld permit requirements for religious and educational property uses in residential-zoned areas.
What’s lacking here is any evidence that the specific religious beliefs of the group in question was a factor in the citation. And there may well be more information that we don’t have, such as advertising of the meetings at the church, a pattern of increasing numbers of attendees, etc. I don’t buy that these regularly scheduled meetings were simply the pastor’s “friends”. If a Muslim imam moves into the neigborhood, and starts have a dozen or more of his “friends” from the mosque appear at his home for weekly Koran study meetings, I fully expect that a virtually identical investigation and citation would follow. Again, if the local residents wish to allow this sort of property use in their residential-zoned neighborhoods, without any permit requirements or other restrictions, they should use the political process to change the zoning regulations. And if the pastor wishes to hold regular religious meetings in his home, he should move to a mixed-use zoning area where this won’t be a problem.
Busybody.