Exclusionary Zoning Arguments Haven't Changed in 94 Years

Greater Greater Washington (an excellent urban planning and transportation blog in the DC area) just re-ran a fascinating article from 2019 about the history of the city's zoning and some of the stark class and racial divisions within the district. Similar stories played out all over America, but this is an unusually detailed account in part because of the involvement of Harland Bartholomew, one of the most prominent urban planners of the early 20th century and arguably one of the people who most shaped the course of America’s radical suburban experiment. It's well worth a read. Here’s the link.

I'm particularly struck by the below excerpt about a century-old argument for putting wealthy neighborhoods full of single-family homes under glass, because it's fundamentally the same argument used today by many activists opposed to new housing. The boldface emphasis is mine:

By 1926, however, the agitation for a change of zone to authorize apartments was so great that the commissioners were almost persuaded to make some concessions. Bartholomew then suggested that a detailed study of land use in the entire city should be made, as well as a determination of how much land was absorbed each year by the construction of new apartment houses.

The extensive land-use survey took more than a year to complete but enabled Brownlow and Kutz to stand firm against the real estate men. To the surprise of the commissioners and the consternation of those who wanted a zoning change, the survey revealed that less than one percent of the city was actually used for apartment houses and that there was a considerable amount of vacant land zoned for such structures in other parts of the city.

I have routinely heard slow-growth or anti-development advocates use this argument in public forums in recent years. It’s usually framed like this, "We don't need to change any zoning to allow infill development, because there is already more than enough zoned capacity for our next 30 years of projected growth.”

There are a number of things wrong with the "zoned capacity" argument—among them the fact that just because a piece of land is zoned to allow some particular density of development doesn't mean that project would ever happen or be financially viable on that site. (For just a few examples of the “zoned capacity” debate in the wild, try Seattle, Vancouver, Austin, and this more theoretical take on why it doesn’t tell you what you think it does about a city’s potential for growth.)

But the piece I'm struck by in this GGWash article is the extent to which “zoned capacity” is wielded as basically a Separate But Equal argument, akin to those used for segregation. If I may paraphrase:

"There's already room for apartments elsewhere in town, so we shouldn't have to allow any apartments to be built in our high-end neighborhood full of single-family houses."

A slightly more blunt / crude version of this is basically:

"There's room for the poor (or non-white) elsewhere, so we shouldn’t have to allow any of them to live near us."

Of course, apartment development is not synonymous with poor people—many apartments are high-end, and that’s at least as true now as it was in 1926. But that doesn’t diminish the point that when you only allow one type of home to be built in a neighborhood, you predictably get a homogenous mix of residents as well, in terms of socioeconomics, age, race, and family/living situation.

That homogeneity might be desirable from the perspective of an upper-class resident in an upper-class neighborhood, but the flip side of it is that for there to be neighborhoods into which homeowners / the rich / whites are concentrated, there must be neighborhoods into which renters / the poor / non-whites are concentrated. And as with all forms of segregation, separate is never actually equal.

I have two final observations of interest from a Strong Towns perspective. This approach to zoning also destabilizes a city’s long-term financial resilience. By tending to separate people from each other by social class, it leads to increased traffic and infrastructure needs as service and office workers alike see their commutes grow longer. And by concentrating new construction in some neighborhoods while all but forbidding it in many others, it leads to the “trickle or fire hose” effect, in which a small portion of a city receives the brunt of disruptive, out-of-scale new construction—a fire hose blast of cataclysmic money from developers and investors—while far greater areas are left untouched.

Separate is never actually equal.

Cover photo: A house in northwestern Washington, DC, the wealthiest quadrant of the city and the part that has predominantly been zoned to prohibit apartment buildings.

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