Court: Door displays are protected
OLYMPIA – A ban on apartment door displays in public housing projects is an unconstitutional violation of free speech, the state Supreme Court said Thursday.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court agreed that the Seattle Housing Authority’s restrictions on signs, flags, and other exterior door displays constituted an illegal government ban on speech.
The housing authority, however, may try to reinstate the ban by changing its leases to spell out that it controls the exterior of apartment doors.
Seattle Housing Authority officials had banned signs and other displays from the outside of doors. Officials said the displays looked cluttered, damaged the publicly owned apartments and included offensive material such as pornography and swastikas.
A group of residents challenged the ban, claiming that it violated their First Amendment rights. On Thursday, the state’s highest court agreed, citing a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protected the right to display “residential signs.”
The court’s majority, led by Justice Charles Johnson, dismissed the housing authority’s argument that landlords control the outside surface of an apartment door, not the resident.
“In the eyes and minds of tenants and the public, the outer surface of the door represents the outer boundary of the tenants’ homes. … It does not matter that SHA tenants lease and do not own the unit,” Johnson wrote for the court.
Housing officials could have solved some of their problems with residents’ apartment door displays by enacting regulations that don’t restrict the content of a door sign or other posting. But instead, the authority put in place a total restriction that “bans too much speech,” the court said.
Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and Justices Richard Sanders and Susan Owens signed the majority ruling. Justice Pro Tem C.C. Bridgewater, sitting in for Justice Bobbe Bridge, also joined the majority.
The housing authority – a government entity created under state law – operates public housing projects for poor people, partially paid for with federal money. There are about 5,300 such low-income public housing units in Seattle. Its ban on door displays was among the rules tied to each resident’s lease.
The housing authority’s lawyer, James Fearn Jr., said officials might be able to reinstate the ban after amending leases to specifically state that the outside of apartment doors remains under control of the landlord, not the tenant.
“I think we can perfectly legitimately amend our leases to make it clear that the exterior of the doors remain housing authority property,” Fearn said.
In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Barbara Madsen broadly disagreed with the court’s majority opinion.
Instead of a legal test for “residential signs” controlled by government rules, Madsen said the court should have analyzed which type of “forum” exists in the public housing project’s corridors. In this case, apartment doors wouldn’t qualify as a public forum, even though they’re owned by the government, Madsen wrote.
The dissent also said majority justices ignored precedent that points to landlords having control over apartment doors, rather than the tenants. Madsen was joined by Justices Tom Chambers, Mary Fairhurst and James Johnson.