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A headline that unfortunately has become painfully commonplace in America is “Local affordable housing project killed by local residents.” It’s basically America’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Precisely this scenario took place In an affluent neighborhood of Florence, SC, as portrayed in a recent feature in the New York Times. Developers set out to build 60 subsidized apartments in the community of just under 40,000. The chairman of the City Council was enthusiastic. Then the neighbors found out. They gathered—I’m not kidding—at the local country club, and vowed to block the development. Nine days later, the same chairman of the City Council who praised the development helped deliver a fatal blow to the project. This was not public housing or Section 8, meaning the project was not intended for the poorest tenants, just subsidized under the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which goes to developers in exchange for keeping rents lower than area median. Nevertheless, the City Council voted 8-0 to halt construction and change the zoning in the area from mixed-use to single-family only.
In most of America’s affluent communities, zoning rules bar low-income housing developments, or any multifamily housing, in what’s known as “exclusionary zoning.” But Florence County’s zoning code actually permitted the construction of the subsidized apartments in the proposed area. So what happened? As so often occurs, opponents of the project were mostly wealthy and White. Based on area demographics and incomes, most of the tenants in the subsidized apartments would have likely been Black. When they got up to voice their dissent, White objectors repeated an all-too-common sentiment: “We are not opposed to the development — we are opposed to the location of this development.” A quite literal variation of “Not In My Back Yard.” The public dissenters were very quick to assure each other and the Council that this wasn’t about race. But a different conversation amongst other opponents unfolded on Facebook, where one local resident claimed that subsidized housing serves “sorry lazy people” and another wrote “the only thing that protects us from high crime is distance.” Another person wrote that if low-income people want to move to a place like Florence then they have to do so by “working hard [and] saving,” calling the entire concept of low income housing “woke crap.” Whew!
Local (mostly White) resistance to affordable housing developments (or any multifamily housing projects, really) is a shameful constant of American civic life, and is as common in blue states as it is in red ones. It has been a highly-successful tool in maintaining segregation in the decades since Brown vs. Board of Education became the law of the land. The city of Florence is now at the center of a lawsuit for the City Council’s abrupt reversal on the development, which the developers say violates the Fair Housing Act of 1968 because, in effect, the City Council’s decision keeps Black residents out of a majority-White community. According to MIT Professor of Urban Planning Justin Steil, residential segregation by race has only decreased slightly since then, and economic segregation has increased, in part because the affluent increasingly wall themselves off in wealthy enclaves, maintained by exclusionary zoning. In a time of a national housing crisis where millions of Americans are disproportionately rent-burdened (spending over 30 percent of household income on rent), exclusionary zoning has been repeatedly found to raise rents by limiting the housing supply. In the largest study of its kind, a Harvard research project found that the children of families who move from a low-opportunity to a high-opportunity neighborhood saw an average lifetime earnings increase of almost $200,000. The wealthy hoarding opportunity and pulling up the drawbridge to keep out other hard working Americans through exclusionary zoning is a sin so grave that the Florence, SC case has us rooting for a [shivers] developer.
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