When talking about land-use in the United States, we are faced with an underlying question: how to address our history, which has affirmed white people’s access to wealthier suburbs while excluding People of Color? Nearly 90 years after the first redlining maps appeared, one can still observe the wide social and spatial disparities resulting from the policies of segregation that shaped our region. To address this, we need to do many things. First and foremost is to acknowledge and understand this history.

Housing segregation in our region did not happen by chance. It is the result of accumulated policy decisions over multiple generations that made segregation legal and allowed market forces to produce segregated city neighborhoods and suburbs. Federal policies pre and post-WWII influenced financial systems, and local approaches to land use control show us how segregation proliferated and later normalized within our region.

One of the programs that had the most influence in segregating neighborhoods was redlining, due to the changes it encouraged in the financing of new housing starting in the early 20th century. In 1933, The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) developed investment risk grade maps based on neighborhood racial make-up and building conditions to help lenders decide where the ​“safest” areas for investment were located. Any significant number of Black residents would almost always mean a rating of ​“hazardous” (the lowest possible) for a neighborhood. These neighborhoods were outlined in red on the HOLC maps, hence ​“redlining.” While HOLC did not actually invest or divest a significant amount of capital according to these maps, private entities adhered to them much more stringently to create widespread disparities in the neighborhoods that saw loans for new housing and those that did not, most clearly around race. This biased policy denied access to capital investment, which could improve the housing and economic opportunity of communities of color.

Alongside racialized divestment encouraged by HOLC’s lending guidelines, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed uniform standards that made single-family housing the standard for American suburbs during and after the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration. The National Housing Act of 1934 encouraged the construction of single family homes over multi-family homes, offered little in terms of assistance for building modernization of the existing housing stock, and required building and loan appraisals that favored suburban, white housing.

After ending the long practice of redlining in the 70s, unprecedented public-private partnerships undermined black homeownership through ​“predatory inclusion” practices, a term recently coined by author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. As Taylor describes, the federal government abdicated the responsibility of revitalizing redlined neighborhoods to the same financial institutions that restricted financing in redlined areas, allowing for more predatory economic interventions. Taylor concluded that this process set the precedent of overlooking fair housing principles for expedient private sector actions.

In addition to the disparate financial conditions made available to suburban and inner city homeowners, most suburban localities were given the ability to maintain racial and economic segregation through the use of exclusionary zoning barriers, most noticeably by imposing single family districts all across their jurisdictions. Most localities still do this by requiring large residential lots, high parking ratios, imposing onerous dimensional restrictions, and even occupancy requirements. In some cases, this practice also has the effect of artificially raising property values, which exacerbates the housing shortage in our region.

President Donald Trump’s recent decision to repeal the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH) further exposed the covert racism often associated with land use policy. The AFFH rule required local governments to proactively ensure fair housing in order to receive federal funding in exchange. It was designed to give more teeth to the Fair Housing Act in combating segregation, and was praised by civil rights groups at the time. While the administration had already made direct attacks aimed at undermining fair housing, this decision takes away leverage to enforce a key component of the Civil Rights movement.

As a direct result of these historical policies and failure to meaningfully advance fair housing, the Tri-state region allocates a disproportionate amount of land towards large single-family detached houses, primarily owned by wealthier white communities. The increasingly expensive housing market in combination with racial segregation is also a key factor in the wealth gap between Black and Latinx families and their white counterparts. The nexus between these policies and our segregated region can also be observed when examining the neighborhoods that received favorable HOLC grades and comparing those that were labeled as ​“high risk”. Areas that received favorable grades are still today, predominantly white, have higher incomes, and their housing stock has a higher share of single-family units. Conversely, neighborhoods that received high-risk grades, tend to have a higher percentage of People of Color, lower household incomes, and a higher share of overcrowded households (crowded living quarters). These patterns are somewhat weaker in areas that have experienced gentrification. But even after 90 years, significant disparities are still correlated with those historical risk grades.

We know that this type of development comes at great costs to people’s health, happiness, economic productivity, social equity, and the environment. Today most urbanists will agree that philosophies that promote urban sprawl, auto-dependent, and segregated communities should belong to history books, and only as a measure for future generations to learn how to avoid committing narrow-minded and racist policy decisions.

We must reexamine local zoning codes and regulations to encourage more compact forms of growth. In many cases that requires eliminating single-family zoning. This approach will allow for gentle density options that are missing from our housing stock, including Accessory Dwelling Units or converting single family structures into two-family houses. More importantly, we should be doubling our commitments to fair housing by strengthening the Federal, State, and Local laws that give leverage for advancing and enforcing it. We can do this by improving existing legal frameworks, as well as exploring new ways to make policy more proactive in advancing fair housing.