Zoned out

Banned Histories of Race in America

Whenever we talk about solving the housing and homelessness crisis, the problem always seems to come down to zoning. “What is zoning and why is it so difficult?” you might ask. Well, the reason zoning is so difficult isn’t because every city and town requires a unique and delicate municipal balance. It’s not because local leaders are fair-minded to a fault. It’s because zoning is an arbitrary system designed specifically for white supremacy and not too much after that.

The idea of zoning starts in Los Angeles in 1904. Racist city officials had claimed something or other about separating the “industrial” part of the city from the residential. That’s all well and good, but zoning was really about keeping the Chinese out of white neighborhoods and they got away with it because the “industrial” part of town was the area with Chinese-run laundries.

Soon, in 1910, as the Great Migration begins, racial zoning ordinances show up in Baltimore and spread over the east coast as fast as they could. By 1916 the “Father of Zoning” Edward Bassett was carving up New York City, talking about his work like, “improper uses caused injury to homogeneous areas and were especially productive of premature depreciation of settled localities.”

Or, in the words of Rutgers public policy professor Frank J. Popper, “The basic purpose of zoning was to keep Them where They belonged – Out. If They had already gotten in, then its purpose was to confine Them to limited areas. The exact identity of Them varied a bit around the country. Blacks, Latinos and poor people qualified. Catholics, Jews and Orientals were targets in many places. The elderly also qualified, if they were candidates for public housing.”

Soon zoning was spreading across the country like fire on a cross, and in 1917 it ended up in front of the Supreme Court. A ray of hope, the court ruled unanimously against a Louisville racial zoning ordinance that had banned interracial property sales! But, because they had ruled in favor of a white man selling his property to a Black man, the court was really saying that no one could tell a white man what to do with his property. Everything else was insignificant.

That’s how it went into practice, too, because banks and developers and various real estate people kept on with their bullshit racist zoning. Some places it turned into redlining. Largely, the power, land and money was further distilled into the same old white male hands. And now that the housing and homelessness crisis is all but permanent, we’ve all gotta pretend, like every other problem in this country, that it has nothing to do with its history.