The Lasting Impact of Industrial Changes and Zoning on Housing and Equity
When tracing the story of housing and inequity in the United States, we start to see the roots of how redlining, land use and zoning policies were the tools of choice to divide communities and exploit land for the profits of a chosen few, oftentimes hand in hand with industrial growth.
Several of today’s problems with the lack of housing and lack of access to housing come from oppressive policies built to disenfranchise communities of color. Looking at the lack of housing today, we must act to reverse the impact of discriminatory policies enacted in the past.
The original goal of zoning codes was to protect certain communities from environmental challenges that arose from pollution and industry. A landmark case in 1916 occurred in New York, where the construction of the ironically-named Equity Building, a towering behemoth of a structure, led the City of New York to create one of the first zoning plans in the country – creating protections focused on access to light and air for neighbors, codifying some height limits, and separating residential and commercial uses. The creation of the zoning plan gave certain people, more often than not white landowners, a tool to fight back against pollution and commercial buildings brought upon by the Industrial Revolution.
Prior to 1916, the idea of zoning, and its use to limit what could be built and where, wasn’t a new concept. In 1885, San Francisco banned public laundries – then an industry predominantly operated by Chinese immigrants – from most parts of the city. While this attempt was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1886, this would be a sign of what would come with the idea of zoning.
The rise of the zoning plan concept as a tool to protect white neighborhoods and districts from threats, real and perceived, would gain traction as a tool of racial segregation and property speculation across the United States. Instead of protecting a community’s right to clean air, water, and natural light, cities and planners wrote land use policies that protected the value of private property by controlling the evolution of the neighborhood, and thus the future value of their property.
The most obvious and damaging way this happened was through redlining, where banks and the American government (primarily through the Federal Home Loan Insurance Program and the Home Owners Loan Corporation) insuring them, mapped neighborhoods based on racial make-up and set strict policies determining who could or could not borrow money to purchase a home. When looking at the old HOLC maps and modern zoning maps, disparities that were encoded over a century ago become concerningly clear.
Today, we see that areas that were deemed “risky” for investment by HOLC are the areas where there’s a demonstrable lack of resources and investment today. For example, HOLC described the area now known as East Los Angeles as “literally honeycombed with diverse and subversive racial elements. It is seriously doubted whether there is a single block in the area which does not contain detrimental racial elements, and there are very few districts which are not hopelessly heterogeneous in type of improvement and quality of maintenance.” This mindset would influence which neighborhoods would have infrastructure and homes built, codifying divides across race and class through zoning.
These disparities would become further entrenched with the post-WWII boom driving several factors. The rise of the automobile would fuel a desire for gasoline and freeways, especially as people began to associate cars with freedom. Combined with new technology making mass production possible, this would fuel the spread of urban sprawl and freeways, which promised to transport the new American middle class (almost exclusively white) from the dirty city where they worked to their tiny castle with a private yard and garage.
Urban sprawl came to define many American cities and suburbs, leading to enormous greenhouse gas emissions, years of our lives wasted in traffic, and tremendous isolation. On top of that, many American cities used the freeways to decimate the communities of color they had intentionally abandoned and disinvested from. All of these plans and policies continued to build wealth of white property owners, and by the time redlining was eliminated as a policy with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, most of the land in most American cities was already owned, the equity already going to white families.
Fast forward to today – we see that the value of land that could be purchased by people of color was limited by the zoning and land use rules made along the way. The impacts of this era of policy can explain most of the racial wealth gap today in the United States.
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Today, we are arguably amid a third industrial revolution, spurred by renewable energy and combined with the communication tools made possible by the internet and artificial intelligence. Coupled with the gift of hindsight, now is the time to address the impacts of how policies like land use have been used to exclude communities of color and drive opposition to creating homes, both in Southern California and across the United States.
To start changing the status quo, our housing policy, both in Los Angeles and across the country, has to be the following:
More equitable. At no point in the history of the United States has land use policy not been a tool of the rich and the white. We need to start by acknowledging that this has been oppressive from its start, and look at abolishing zoning all together while maintaining protections for people and planet. On top of that, engaging communities in making decisions around land use is key to provide transparency and input from those most affected by changes in neighborhoods such as freeways.
More centered on people over corporations. In the past few years there have been egregious examples where corporations have driven zoning policy in Los Angeles. For example, in the last few years a proposal has been circulating to increase the size of Fire District 1 here in Los Angeles in the name of wild fire protection. FD1 currently covers a lot of downtown Los Angeles, and would impose higher fire safety requirements that require apartments and buildings be built from concrete rather than wood frames, as is common in the industry. This proposal has been backed by an advocacy organization tied to the concrete industry, which has donated to several councilmembers over the years. If passed, this would increase emissions in the region by a huge amount, and would make most housing development in downtown Los Angeles unviable – and affordable housing impossible.
More efficient. Los Angeles County has a lot of work to be done to address regulations that prioritize single-family homes and corporations over community housing and density. For example, there are regulations carved out for larger businesses that, if applied to developers of affordable housing, can create flexibility to create more homes for the unhoused. Additionally, over 70% of land in Los Angeles County is zoned for single-family homes, disincentivizing density-focused construction (like apartments) that could house more people than a single house could.
Logan O’Phelan
Logan O’Phelan is the Director of Operations for Holos Communities, overseeing the sustainable growth of the organization, including doubling the number of staff and net assets and purchasing Holos Communities’s own office, and overseeing getting that office fully self-sustaining with solar and batteries.
You can read Logan’s full bio here.