by Christina Sandefur
December 26, 2018
This month, the Minneapolis City Council voted to
eliminate single-family zoning and allow duplexes and
triplexes in every neighborhood. Easing citywide zoning restrictions to this
degree is a novel move for a major U.S. municipality, especially when over half
the city is zoned single-family only. Meanwhile, Oregon could become the first to ban
single-family zoning statewide. This has broad support
from the Speaker of the House Tina Kotek (D-Portland), who is pursuing
legislation that would end single-family zoning in cities of 10,000 or more.
These changes will have profoundly positive
consequences for housing affordability, a problem that was largely created and
exacerbated by regulations that make it prohibitively
expensive to build, improve, or own housing. They will
also help to undo decades of race and class segregation.
Nearly a century ago, the Supreme Court upheld the validity
of zoning. This not only took the choice of how to use
land from its owner and gave it to the majority of the community, but it also
had disastrous implications for racial minorities, who were systematically
excluded from neighborhoods. As Timothy Sandefur and I discuss in our book Cornerstone of Liberty,
many zoning laws—developed and embraced by Progressives—were designed to remove
those deemed “undesirable” by their neighbors, including immigrants and people
of different races and socioeconomic statuses. Cities nationwide, from Atlanta
and Louisville to Chicago and San Francisco, all implemented racial zoning practices.
Although the Supreme Court struck down explicit
race-based zoning in 1917, cities employed indirect
methods, from expulsive zoning to eminent domain.
Indeed, recent studies have shown that zoning policies continue to bear a
strong relationship to racial segregation. Today,
about half of Los Angeles
is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, which has both worsened the
city’s affordable housing crisis and created and perpetuated racial inequity.
Government
uses zoning to impose other preferred social values on the general public. For
example, so-called “obesity zoning”
attempts to impose health and lifestyle choices on the public by restricting
the number of fast food restaurants allowed within a given area. The federal
Centers for Disease Control have published recommendations for
local officials, including “changing the locations where unhealthy competitive
foods are sold,” “limit[ing] advertisements of less healthy foods,” and creating
“traffic calming approaches (e.g., speed humps and traffic circles)” to
encourage people to walk instead of drive. Of course, such zoning restrictions shut
down locally owned businesses, restrict consumer choice, and reduce the value
of property zoned for business uses.
NIMBYs and bureaucrats often defend
restrictive zoning policies in the name of “preserving neighborhood character.”
But as zoning’s troubled history illustrates, such a descriptor is often a
thinly veiled code for eradicating “undesirables,” and determining who is and
is not suitable to stay in a given neighborhood is not the proper function of
government. Cities should focus their zoning efforts on enforcing legitimate
rules against nuisance instead of passing broad restrictions that impose
bureaucrats’ preferred aesthetic and social values and violate the rights of
property owners and tenants. It’s
encouraging to see that, after all these years, local and state lawmakers are
finally starting to understand that it’s very dangerous to allow government to
decide whom we can invite into our private homes.
Christina
Sandefur is the Executive Vice President at the Goldwater Institute.
