[ If you care about social justice, you have to care about zoning.
Taking on exclusionary zoning also begins to address two other
challenges the Biden administration has identified: the housing
affordability crisis and climate change.] [[link removed]]

THE ‘NEW REDLINING’ IS DECIDING WHO LIVES IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD  
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Richard D. Kahlenberg
April 19, 2021
New York Times
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_ If you care about social justice, you have to care about zoning.
Taking on exclusionary zoning also begins to address two other
challenges the Biden administration has identified: the housing
affordability crisis and climate change. _

Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Bettmann and
Abstract Aerial Art,

 

Housing segregation by race and class is a fountainhead of inequality
in America, yet for generations, politicians have been terrified to
address the issue. That is why it is so significant that President
Biden has proposed, as part of his American Jobs Act, a $5 billion
race-to-the-top competitive grants program
[[link removed]] to
spur jurisdictions to “eliminate exclusionary zoning and harmful
land use policies.”

Mr. Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison
“minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements and prohibitions
on multifamily housing.” The Biden administration is off to an
important start, but over the course of his term, Mr. Biden should add
sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.

Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly
local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand
themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice,
respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single
step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the
government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and
classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public
schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial,
economic and political lines.

Economically discriminatory zoning policies — which say that you are
not welcome in a community unless you can afford a single-family home,
sometimes on a large plot of land — are not part of a distant,
disgraceful past. In most American cities, zoning laws prohibit the
construction of relatively affordable homes — duplexes, triplexes,
quads and larger multifamily units — on three-quarters
[[link removed]] of
residential land.

In the 2020 race, Mr. Biden said he was running to “restore the
soul of our nation,”
[[link removed]] which
had been damaged by President Donald Trump’s embrace of racism
[[link removed]].
Removing exclusionary barriers that keep millions of Black and
Hispanic people out of safe neighborhoods with strong schools is
central to the goal of advancing racial justice. Over the past several
decades, as the sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted
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Black people have been integrated into the nation’s political life
and the military, “but the civil-rights movement failed to integrate
Black Americans into the private domain of American life.”

Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities
shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in
1917, is what activists call the “new redlining
[[link removed]].”
Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white
and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that
inequality.

While exclusionary zoning laws are especially harmful to Black people,
the discrimination is more broadly rooted in class snobbery — a
second problem Mr. Biden highlighted in his campaign. As a proud
product of Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden said he would value the dignity of
working people and not look down on anyone. The elitism Mr. Biden
promised to reject helps explain why in virtually all-white
communities like La Crosse, 
[[link removed]]Wis.,
efforts to remedy economic segregation have received strong pushback
from upper-income whites, and why middle-class Black communities have
sometimes shown fierce resistance
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low-income housing.

If race were the only factor driving exclusionary zoning, one would
expect to see such policies most extensively promoted in communities
where racial intolerance is highest, but in fact the most restrictive
zoning
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found in politically liberal cities, where racial views are more
progressive. As Harvard’s Michael Sandel has noted, social
psychologists have found
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highly-educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are
unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less
educated.” Class discrimination helps explain why, despite a 25
percent decline
[[link removed]] in
Black-white residential segregation since 1970, income
segregation has more than doubled
[[link removed]].

By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working
class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr.
Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are
more politically divided from each other than working-class whites and
working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s
Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted
these two groups against each other, but every once in a while,
America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class
people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William
Barber II calls
[[link removed]] “fusion
politics.”

It happened in 1968, when Mr. Biden’s hero Robert Kennedy brought
together
[[link removed]] working-class
Black, Latino and white constituencies in a presidential campaign that
championed a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism.
It happened again in 1997 and 2009 in Texas, when Republican
legislators representing white working-class voters and Democrats
representing Black and Hispanic constituencies came together
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then to defend) the Texas top 10 percent plan to admit the strongest
students in every high school to the University of Texas at Austin,
despite the opposition of legislators representing wealthy white
suburban districts that had dominated admissions for decades. And a
similar coalition appears to be coming together in California, over
the issue of exclusionary zoning. State Senator Scott Wiener, who has
been trying to legalize
[[link removed]] multifamily
living spaces, told me that Republican and Democratic legislators
representing working-class communities have supported reform, while
the opponents have one thing in common: They represent wealthier
constituents who “wanted to keep certain people out of their
community.”

Taking on exclusionary zoning also begins to address two other
challenges the Biden administration has identified: the housing
affordability crisis and climate change. Economists from across the
political spectrum
[[link removed]] agree
that zoning laws that ban anything but single-family homes
artificially drive up prices by limiting the supply of housing that
can be built in a region. At a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has
left many Americans jobless and people are struggling to make rent or
pay their mortgages, it is incomprehensible that ubiquitous government
zoning policies would be permitted to make the housing affordability
crisis worse by driving prices unnaturally higher.

Likewise, there is widespread agreement
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laws banning the construction of multifamily housing promote damage to
the planet. Single-family-exclusive zoning pushes new development
further and further out from central cities, which lengthens commutes
and increases the emissions of greenhouse gases. This is an especially
big problem for employees who cannot work remotely at a computer.
Families should always have the freedom to make personal choices about
their living arrangements, but as the planet heats up, it is bizarre
that government would explicitly prohibit construction of the most
environmentally friendly options.

It is clear that the federal government has the authority to act on
this issue. While zoning laws are locally constructed, the federal
government has long cited its powers to regulate interstate commerce
as a rationale for pursuing important aims: combating racial
discrimination in zoning, protecting religious institutions
[[link removed]] from
discriminatory zoning and overriding zoning laws to site cellphone
towers.

Enactment of Mr. Biden’s proposal for federal grants to encourage
local reforms would be an important first step and could provide a
significant incentive for change, just as President Barack Obama’s
race-to-the-top program for education helped alter state and local
behavior toward charter schools. But there are many other additional
opportunities Mr. Biden should explore.

In December 2020, the Century Foundation, where I work, assembled more
than 20 of the nation’s leading thinkers on housing over Zoom —
elected officials, civil rights activists, libertarians and
researchers — to discuss eight possible options. The alternatives
included reinstating and strengthening the Obama administration’s
2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule that requires local
governments to begin taking steps to dismantle segregation, as well as
Mr. Obama’s 2013 guidance making clear that unjustified policies
that have a racially discriminatory “disparate impact” are illegal
even absent discriminatory intent. Another set of policies would
require states, cities and counties receiving existing federal funding
for public infrastructure and housing to develop strategies to reduce
exclusionary zoning.

But Mr. Biden should go even further and create what is known as a
private right of action — comparable to the one found in the 1968
Fair Housing Act — to allow victims of economically discriminatory
government zoning policies to sue in federal court, just as victims of
racial discrimination currently can. This Economic Fair Housing Act,
which I have proposed
[[link removed]] and the
Equitable Housing Institute has developed into statutory language
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makes clear that state-sponsored economic discrimination is wrong,
whether or not it has a racially disparate impact. And because it is
wrong, the law should apply in every town and state in the country —
not just those that want to participate in the new federal funding
programs Mr. Biden’s proposal would provide.

For important historical reasons, being a class snob is not held in
the same disrepute as being a racist. But in the context of
exclusionary zoning laws, the message of the racist and the class snob
is cut from the same cloth: Black families and working-class families
are so degraded that the state should sponsor laws to make it illegal
for anyone to build the types of housing they can afford. As we begin
to come out of a pandemic in which grocery clerks, health care workers
and truck drivers were recognized as everyday heroes, government
discrimination against them must end.

Blue cities and states — most notably Minneapolis
[[link removed]] and Oregon
[[link removed]] —
have recently led the way on eliminating single-family exclusive
zoning, as a matter of racial justice, housing affordability and
environmental protection. But conservatives often support
[[link removed]] this
type of reform as well, because they don’t want government
micromanaging what people can do on their own land. At the national
level, some conservatives have joined liberals in championing reforms
like the Yes in My Backyard Act
[[link removed]], which
seeks to discourage exclusionary zoning.

While democratic egalitarianism and the liberty to be free from
government interference are values that are typically in tension with
each other, in the case of exclusionary zoning reform, they point in
the same direction. Perhaps for that reason, surveys suggest it is
popular. In a 2019 Data for Progress poll
[[link removed]], for example,
voters were asked, “Would you support or oppose a policy to ensure
smaller, lower-cost homes like duplexes, townhouses and garden
apartments can be built in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods?”
Supporters outnumbered opponents two to one. After decades of federal
inaction on this issue, Congress must move boldly to embrace the
country’s anti-racist and anti-elitist mood to remove
state-sponsored barriers that divide the nation’s people.

_[RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG (@RickKahlenberg
[[link removed]]) is a senior fellow at the
Century Foundation and the author of “Tearing Down the Walls: How
the Biden Administration and Congress Can Reduce Exclusionary Zoning
[[link removed]],”
from which this essay is adapted.]_

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