Why Black People Must Pay Attention to Zoning
Zoning laws have kept non-White families out of White communities and formed the foundations of redlining and segregation we know today. These efforts have become much more common and complex.
Dr. G.S. Potter | Senior Editor
This nation was birthed out of a battle - or more accurately a genocide - for who had the authority to control the land. What was once in the care and stewardship of the Indigenous, was stolen through war and deception, and lost to the control of White colonizers. Under the auspices of manifest destiny and eminent domain, White powers decided who was able to live on the land, where they were able to live on it, and what was done with it, the spaces above it, and the spaces below it. In the youth and adolescence of this nation, control of land was achieved through blood and force.
Today, it is achieved through zoning.
Until the Civil War, White people in the United States had full control of both land and policy. They were rewarded for the murder of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black peoples. And while the wars against the Indigenous would continue after the end of the Civil War, the passage of the Reconstruction Acts would usher the United States into a new era where White people continued to dominate politically and socially, but they no longer held a monopoly on power and privilege.
White people could no longer own Black people. Black people were granted citizenship, protection from discrimination and the right to vote. While these rights would not be extended to the Indigenous until 1924, the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments dealt a significant blow to the unchallenged authority of white people. Black folks now had legal pathways to challenge white power. As a result, White people had to figure out new ways to control Black folks – and anyone that wasn’t White.
The Golden Era of Lynching and the rise of Jim Crow stand as proof that the strategies they deployed were as violent as they were legislatively and judicially effective. The soldiers of the Confederacy became the foot soldiers of the Klan. The strategists of the white supremacists became legislators and policy makers. Soon, the battle for who controlled the land transitioned from a federal pursuit to a state and local level cold war.
White people did not want non-White people to live or own businesses in their communities, and federal authority no longer protected that desire - or enforced the law that said it must. As Richard Rothstein notes in his book ”The Color of Law” …
We typically think of the Thirteenth Amendment as only abolishing slavery. Section 1 of the Thirteenth Amendment does so, and Section 2 empowers Congress to enforce Section 1. In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.
Although the 1866 law had already determined that housing discrimination was unconstitutional, it gave the government no powers of enforcement. The Fair Housing Act provided for modest enforcement, and civil rights groups have used this law, rather than the earlier statute, to challenge housing discrimination. But when they did so, we lost sight of the fact that housing discrimination did not become unlawful in 1968; it had been so since 1866. Indeed, throughout those 102 years, housing discrimination was not only unlawful, but was the imposition of a badge of slavery that the Constitutions mandates us to remove.
With no intervention from federal authorities, local politicians quickly designed policies to prevent people of color from existing on or owning what they saw as their territory. One of the first experiments with city-wide segregation was an attempt by White people in San Francisco to push out Chinese residents in 1885. In the late 1800’s, one of the main industries owned and operated by Chinese migrants was laundromats. In efforts to push out Chinese migrants the city used local land use policies to push out their laundromats. This form of anti-Chinese legislation was ultimately found to unconstitutional, but the strategy to use city-level land use and zoning legislation to advance white supremacy took hold. With the Supreme Courts’ approval of race based segregation through the ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, white supremacy based zoning legislation took control of the housing market.
In 1910, Baltimore became the first city to formally pass a zoning law specifically geared at separating racial groups. More specifically, the laws were designed to keep Black families out of White communities. City by city, zoning laws became a tool to keep non-White families out of White communities forming the foundations of redlining and segregation as we know all of that today. Efforts to use strategies against communities of color have become both more common and more complex.
What Zoning Laws Do
Zoning laws dictate where people live, what can be built, how many housing units can be built, how big something can be built, what areas could be poisoned, what areas could be susceptible to flooding, how high a building could be built and what can and cannot be done to property and the buildings that exist on it. They also largely dictate how much properties are worth and when the values of those properties will change.
There are residential, commercial, and industrial zoning laws. There are single family zoning and mixed-use zoning laws. There are historical zoning and environmental zoning laws. There is agricultural and rural zoning laws. While there are now many ways to keep BIPOC folks out of White neighborhoods and forced into hazardous, toxic, and wealth-scarce environments, one thing hasn’t changed: The benefits of zoning are still reserved for the very few, the very wealthy and the undeniably White.
The conversation is still overwhelmingly run by wealthy, White property developers working through the local city councils and state politicians that they fund. When developers want certain communities to stay segregated, they stay segregated. When developers what to displace the local BIPOC community to turn a profit, that’s exactly what they do. There are often community organizations, especially in large cities, that try to place pressure on those with wealth and authority from outside of the system, but rarely are they invited to the table to inform the actual decision-making process. As a result we see housing fad after fad that are designed to strip city and state coffers of funding allocated to solve the housing crisis and redirect that money into the hands of the developers and property owners that are responsible for creating it.
The newest fad in zoning, for example, is called Inclusionary Zoning. As one organization describes in their recent report, Inclusionary Zoning (or “IZ”) is ….
… a policy that incentivizes developers to allot a fraction of new housing units to low- and moderate-income (LMI) families. These programs have the potential to increase homeownership among families of color in neighborhoods from which they have historically been excluded. If executed correctly, and coupled with other housing programs and policies, IZ policies can create opportunities for families of color to accumulate.
In addition to inclusionary zoning, upzoning is another policy trend that seeks to, “increase development and density by undoing exclusionary zoning laws.” Upzoning is also often coupled with discussions surrounding inclusionary zoning. The idea is that if zoning created segregation, then upzoning will end it.
Pay Attention
What the overwhelmingly White community of urbanists that promote this idea don’t talk about, though, is the fact that over generations, communities of color have built their own spaces of inclusion, opportunity and family within these zones. They have built spaces of love and commitment outside of the walls of the racist communities that have pushed them outside of their own cul-de-sacs. Inclusionary zoning advocates and upzoning warriors typically are not fighting battles to turn golf courses and upscale estates into affordable housing. They aren’t talking about including Black children in White schools. They aren’t talking about inviting Black and Brown men and women into their social circles and homeowner associations. They want to take land from poor BlPOC communities and give it to their own people for their own purposes. They are looking to displace BIPOC community members, buy their properties at a low cost, and flip them for Whiter, wealthier residents. They do this in the name of ending segregation, nonetheless.
This is why Black folks, and all BIPOC folks, should pay attention to zoning. It is the extension of the American Genocide and the Civil War. BIPOC communities are under attack. We need to work together to protect ourselves.
As zoning trends shift form exclusionary zoning practices to less regulated and more “inclusionary” practices, we need to demand that protections be put in place at the local and state levels to ensure that wealthier and Whiter residential neo-colonizers are not given control over the land we have built communities and families with. We need to ensure that communities are allowed to reap the benefits of investment without suffering the fate of displacement. And we need to see inclusionary zoning and upzoning for what they are. They are strategic efforts made by wealthy and White powers to take control of land for their own profit. These efforts are shrouded in the language of equality, but they are rooted in the war against Black people, Brown people, and the Indigenous for control of the land and who lives on it.
If Black communities want control of their communities, they need to take control of the zoning debate. They need to pass policies that provide protections and opportunities for prosperity that can both defend themselves from developers and real estate corporations, and they need to push policies that advance their own agendas. If we want to protect our communities from white supremacy and its continued attack on our families and communities, we need to win the zoning wars.