Single-family zoning laws are just modern redlining. There is a better, freer solution

Housing issues have been in the news for years – and they should, as solving housing goes a long way toward solving many other problems. Why then do cities still cling to anti-development policies that are anchored in a very ugly past?

Take Kansas City, which saw its share of segregation through blockbusting east of Troost Avenue, racially restrictive covenants in Johnson County and redlining everywhere. Even urban renewal in the 1960s was little more than segregation in an economic development package, leaving many poor communities torn apart for highways.

We’ve all done that, right?

No. Local governments’ current land use stacks of single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes, setbacks and other restrictions are little more than modern-day redlining. As in the 20th century, the result is the same: prices are going up, supply is not keeping up with demand, and “those people” – once black and immigrant communities, but today apartment dwellers, young families, and the deserving. have a moderate income – have no place to live.

Zoning is often viewed as a matter of protecting public health and safety, or sometimes as a matter of neighborhood character. But we should all be clear: its origins centered on segregation.

When the Supreme Court ruled explicit racial segregation unconstitutional in 1917 (racially restrictive covenants would not be deemed unenforceable until 1948), proponents turned to exclusionary zoning for single-family homes. Segregationists realized that housing regulations could keep black people and immigrants away from predominantly white communities.

Single-family zoning drove up housing costs – a feature, not a bug. If they couldn’t shut people out, they would praise them.

Berkeley, California, has passed the country’s first single-family zoning ordinance. The 1916 effort, led by a local developer, focused on driving up housing costs to control the racial makeup of neighboring communities where his racially restrictive covenants could not reach. (Berkeley ended the zoning category in 2022.)

Today, about 75% of the land is devoted exclusively to single-family homes – probably the largest contributor to housing costs (and therefore housing and wealth inequality) in the United States. To the extent that zoning was deliberately segregationist – the evidence for this is overwhelming – it may be the most successful government program ever.

Anyone who thinks that a big, powerful government is necessarily a force for good should be aware of this.

Free-market conservatives, who otherwise rail against anyone who uses government power to enrich themselves at the expense of others, often applaud government zoning policies that increase the value of their own homes while driving up housing costs for others.

Fortunately, fears that relaxing zoning regulations will harm property values ​​are unfounded. If landowners can fit more units on one piece of land – such as duplexes, quadplexes or those six-unit apartment buildings found throughout Midtown – they can increase land values ​​while keeping home prices low. That’s exactly the kind of development that Kansas City has built.

Nolan Gray, city planner and author of “Arbitrary Lines, How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It,” cites Houston, Texas, as an example of how a city without zoning can take community concerns into account without driving up housing prices. to increase. and costs of living. Those who want to implement development restrictions at the neighborhood level can do so without infringing on property rights elsewhere.

Reformers like Gray argue that simply allowing “upzoning” as of right — a move to the next higher density level without needing government approval — is a simple way to increase density and lower housing prices. No one wants to build a high-rise home next to your 1920s Sears house. But they might want to add an additional living unit in the backyard, or build a duplex like the one along Meyer Boulevard in Brookside.

City leaders across the country are dealing with this problem, and many will be judged on what they do to address housing affordability. In Kansas City and elsewhere, zoning reforms offer the opportunity to improve what they undo.

Patrick Tuohey is co-founder of Better Cities Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on municipal policy solutions, and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to Missouri state policy work.