Exclusionary Zoning

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings In light of recent debate over upzonings and leveraging markets as means of expanding housing opportunity, I review the evolution of exclusionary zoning practices in the United States and provide an intellectual history of scholars’ research into these practices. In the context of early 20th-century racial and class tension, American elites coveted the ability to use the states’ police powers to sort out cities by housing type and gained this ability with legislative and judicial support for local land use zoning schemes that controlled residential densities and building forms. Many 20th-century U.S. planners upheld the resulting socially sorted city as an ideal outcome of good zoning practice. But in the postwar decades, a new breed of equity-focused advocacy planner sought to address racial ghettoization by using zoning reforms and other measures to open exclusive areas to low- and moderate-income housing. Wider shifts in housing policy since the 1970s and the increasing attention of economic scholarship to the myriad impacts of American zoning practices have, however, diluted the original equity-focused agenda of exclusionary zoning scholarship.Takeaway for practice Given the need for a common effort against business-as-usual zoning in the United States, planners can assert the ethics of the planning profession in debates about American zoning practices. Scholarly and professional efforts to dismantle exclusionary zoning can return to their roots in housing advocacy, becoming one part of a multipronged agenda aimed at expanding housing opportunity by a variety of means.

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