White Supremacy and the Suburbs
Why we must abolish exclusionary single family residential zoning
If, as white people, we are going to ensure that the new-found popularity of Black Lives Matter and examination of systemic racism is a movement and not a simply moment, we must face some harsh truths. One of these truths– perhaps the most important – is the single biggest driver of systemic racism in the United States is exclusionary single-family residential zones, particularly in the suburbs. The exclusive single-family residential zone is the hub from which every other form of racial oppression radiates, from school segregation to the wealth gap to the over policing of Black communities with municipal paramilitary forces. I cannot stress this enough – we cannot dismantle white supremacy in this country without abolishing exclusionary single-family zoning.
Part 1 – Racism, Eugenics, and Zoning Codes
The history of zoning in the US stems from attempts to protect the property values of white landowners from declining. The argument put forth by economists, insurance actuaries, and real estate agents was that Anglo-American neighborhoods that saw an influx of Black people, Chinese immigrants, and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe caused a decline in property values. Using race “science” to inform their beliefs, they argued that these Black and immigrant families naturally were unclean, slovenly, and prone to mindless violence. As such, the argument goes, the presence of nonAnglo-Americans in a neighborhood were a public nuisance that would devalue white property.
To illustrate: The first zoning codes were used under public nuisance doctrine in San Francisco to prevent Chinese immigrants from opening laundromats in/near white neighborhoods -see Barbier vs. Connolly 1885 and Ex parte Quong Wu. From here, cities began instituting zoning codes to "preserve the character of the neighborhood”, designed to limit or prevent the types of housing typically associated with Black people and immigrants. Welch vs. Swasey upheld a Boston city ordinance that set height restrictions on buildings, eliminating the possibility of multistory housing developments. In Hadachuk vs. Sebastien, the court allowed Los Angeles to exclude certain “noxious” industries from some residential neighborhoods, allowing the city to place them near Black and immigrant communities, leading to the problems of environmental racism we face today. Minimum lot size restrictions reduced land available for development; minimum square footage requirements prevent the construction of smaller homes on a single lot. Finally, the restriction of single families to each lot prevented construction of smaller and inexpensive multifamily housing.
Some cities were explicit in their intentions. Baltimore passed a zoning code that explicitly prevented Black homeowners from purchasing homes in white majority neighborhoods while also preventing white homeowners from purchasing in Black majority neighborhoods, though in 1917, SCOTUS struck explicit anti-Black zoning down as a violation of the 14thAmendment in Buchanan vs. Warley. In 1916, New York City passed the first comprehensive zoning code that included all these restrictions; in 1926, the Court ruled comprehensive zoning legal in Euclid vs. Ambler Realty by expanding public nuisance doctrine to allow existing property owners to determine what kind of developments were a threat to the character of the community.
Part 2 – A Federally Designed Program of Social Control
The segregation of the suburbs was not an accident. It was a deliberate decision at every level of government intended to stave off the spread into the US of Europe’s worker uprisings and the spread of socialism by granting the racial privilege of land ownership to the same European immigrants that only a few years before were associated with public nuisance. The “Own Your Own Campaign”, started in 1916 by the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) and taken over by the Department of Labor in 1917 was the mechanism used to do this. Through this campaign, the government produced propaganda aimed at the white working class declaring it a patriotic duty to purchase a single-family home rather than renting. Under Secretary of Treasury Herbert Hoover, the federal government went further, using popular household magazines to warn potential homeowners of the problems of “racial strife” and declining property values in integrated communities. These publications, paid for by the federal government, drove interest in racial covenants that contractually bound segregation to the land in perpetuity.
Working with the Department of Commerce, NAREB enforced the implantation of racial covenants by refusing certification to realtors who would not include racial covenants in their suburban subdivisions. The NAREB’s worked to make the threat of property value decline a reality; realtors would tell homeowners that Black families were moving into the neighborhoods, then hire Black folks to act as potential home buyers in that neighborhood, creating a slew of panic selling, artificially lowing home sales so the realtors could purchase it at a low price.
The federal government then acted to subsidize white flights through the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration. These federal agencies would only provide loans and underwrite a mortgage for white people who were looking to buy in other all white neighborhoods/suburbs. Black people couldn't get approved for mortgages in their communities or in the suburbs. White people couldn't even get approved for mortgages in existing integrated communities. Without this access to these federal financial resources, homeownership was prohibitively expensive.
Through these programs, the federal government created a subsidized housing market for suburban land exclusively for white people and used this market to de-ethnicize and assimilate European immigrants into “white” identity, using racial privilege to create a white middle class that acts as a protective buffer between the ruling class and the most exploited among us, preventing true systemic reform. Through this market, white families have since been able to acrue generational wealth that has been by design denied to Black families. Further, because interest on mortgages is deductible on income taxes, white homeowners have received an annual federal subsidy that has likewise been denied to Black families. The result is the continued success of the marginalization of Black Americans unleashed by Jim Crow laws, almost 70 years after Brown ended legal race-based segregation. Until we address this legacy, abolish single-family residential zoning, and rid ourselves of half acre or more minimum lots, we will not be able to pull white supremacy in the 21st century out by its roots. The longer we resist and insist on retaining our racial privilege in the form of property on large exclusive residential lots the longer we remain complicit in the perpetuation of white supremacy.
Sources: Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America – David Freund, 2007
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America – Richard Rothstein, 2017
(Essay has been updated for grammar --7/12)