One Black Family's Half-Century Descent into Exclusionary Zoning Hell
A team led by Arkansas architects kicks off this multi-part story on racial zoning measures and their poisoned legacy.
Written By Allison Quinlan, Hunter Adkisson, Airic Hughes & Drew Tiedeman
This piece was originally printed in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
The work introduced here explores the way explicitly racist zoning codes remain a dominant force in American cities, effectively reinforcing a modern society built to maintain white supremacy. In later installations, the authors will dig into the issues touched on here and detail how they impacted one family in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
The socioeconomic consequences of racial and exclusionary zoning in America cannot be understated. These codes and their subsequent lineage of blatantly racist urban policy have cost people of color an incalculable amount of economic opportunity, denying them equitable access to virtually every resource that builds generational wealth.
Racially motivated zoning was explicitly outlawed in 1919—private racial covenants, in 1954. Since then, discrimination has persisted, but in less explicit ways. To legally maintain homogeneous cities, the federal government pushed for the adoption of economic zoning measures that effectively supported segregation, even if they did not actually refer to race. Municipalities rezoned primarily Black neighborhoods to be commercial or industrial districts, for instance, lowering property values and ensuring only low-income families would buy homes there. At the same time, single-family zoning and minimum square footage requirements artificially increased the value of homes in primarily white neighborhoods. Such practices intentionally trapped low-income households (who were usually people of color) in areas of the city with lower property values. Although these kinds of tactics are less blatant today, all current zoning legislation owes its existence to a racially biased model of land-use planning.
As we’ll delve into more in later essays, the various acts of racially biased legislation outlined here have led to a society designed to extract Black value to subsidize white suburbs. In a 2021 Politico essay, Professor Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown Law argued that:
The segregation of affluence facilitates opportunity hoarding, whereby wealthy neighborhoods enjoy the best public services, environmental quality and private, public and natural amenities, while other communities are left with fewer, poorer-quality resources. Worse, suburban-favored quarters are subsidized by the people they exclude: Through income and other taxes, people of all racial and class backgrounds who live elsewhere help pay for the roads, sewers and other infrastructure that make these low-poverty, resource-rich places possible.(1)
This unconstitutional, inequitable, and unjust transfer of wealth remains commonplace today. Our current political acceptance and protection of suburban policies like single-family zoning represents complicity in this theft.
Meanwhile, cities across the South are struggling with an affordable housing crisis. Housing costs are rising faster than wages, and though a range of programs and plans seek to subsidize affordability back into housing, the segregation and unaffordability of American cities is not an accidental flaw in the system. Rather, it is the core feature of the mid-century zoning codes that still govern the majority of land in American towns and cities.
All current zoning legislation owes its existence to a racially biased model of land-use planning.
How outlandish it is, then, that anyone would be surprised by the lack of diverse and affordable housing in these same cities. We can’t subsidize our way out of the central intentions of the system that still rules us. That’s why through this essay series, we’ll explore the history, impact, and concrete actions needed to reverse the effects of mid-century zoning and urban planning efforts.
Two notable patterns emerge in our current economic system: First, wealth accumulates over time. And second, wealth builds more wealth. These realities have posed devastating problems for the Black population in this country. That’s because the extraction of Black labor prior to Emancipation and the strategic economic hobbling of Black Americans has denied them access to both the time and the wealth that their white counterparts have benefitted from. As of 2022, it is estimated that “for every dollar the average white American has, the average Black American has only about 17 cents.”(2)
We must aggressively confront the zoning legislation that even 100 years later is still based on unconstitutional and clearly racist foundations.
Writing racial inequality into law is egregiously unconstitutional. It openly and intentionally violates the inalienable rights that all Americans have equal protection to under the law. It is important to note that white people were the originators of current racial inequality in America and, regardless of individual involvement, have been its beneficiaries. They therefore have a duty to perform the significant administrative work of deconstructing laws perpetuating racial hierarchies. Today, in the wake of a renewed interest in social justice following the murder of George Floyd and others, we must aggressively confront the zoning legislation that even 100 hundred years later is still based on unconstitutional and racist foundations.
Our goal in this series is two-fold: First, we’re setting out to document a history that is not often taught in schools. Second, we want to highlight how the US government continues to economically cripple generations of Black Americans. This is not a past-tense conversation. The effects of racially motivated zoning are visible in every facet of our cities today.
The essays that follow will shed light on a range of issues at the intersection of zoning and race, including infrastructure, urban sprawl, generational wealth-building, redlining, and the GI Bill. As part of this, we will build on Richard Rothstein’s seminal book The Color of Law, which documents how these topics have played out on the national stage. And concurrently, we’ll personalize the policy impact of these issues through the lens of one family and their property in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
As long as we perpetuate a system that continues to uphold inequitable zoning and reinforces the generational wealth divide between Black and white Americans, we remain complicit in the continued racial injustices happening around us. It’s high time we stop.
Allison Quinlan and Hunter Adkisson are architects at Flintlock LAB in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Airic Hughes is a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Arkansas and leader of Visionairi Enterprises. Drew Tiedeman is the Flintlock LAB Fellow on Race and Zoning.
(1) Sheryll Cashin, “It’s Time to Dismantle America’s Residential Caste System,” Politico, September 12, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/12/ its-time-to-dismantle-americas-residential-caste-system-511150.
(2) Greg Rosalsky, “Why The Racial Wealth Gap Is So Hard To Close,” NPR, June 14, 2022, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/06/14/1104660659/why-the- racial-wealth-gap-is-so-hard-to-close.
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