Kiichiro Sato/AP Photo
Studies have shown that exclusionary zoning is largely responsible for the economic segregation that keeps poor families out of middle-class neighborhoods.
For the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has been busy trying to scare what he calls the “Suburban Housewives of America” into thinking that Vice President Biden’s support for fair housing efforts will bring crime to the suburbs and reduce property values.
In a big step backward, Trump revoked an Obama-era fair housing regulation that spelled out requirements for the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” provision of the Fair Housing Act. When they passed the act in 1968, lawmakers recognized that ending housing discrimination was not enough; communities receiving federal funds should also take affirmative steps to undo the lasting harm of decades of housing discrimination by coming up with plans to reduce segregation.
In repealing the regulation, Trump tweeted, “I am happy to inform all of the people living in their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”
Standing firmly on the side of government laws that exclude people based on income, Trump said he opposed efforts to “eliminate single-family zoning,” and claimed that progressive efforts to legalize duplexes, triplexes and apartment buildings could bring new residents to the suburbs “so your communities will be unsafe.”
In a tweet that received the most attention, Trump urged “Suburban Housewives of America” to read an opinion article which claimed Biden has a “plan for a federal takeover of local zoning laws.” In short, Trump falsely claimed, Biden, wants to “Abolish Suburbs.”
Political pundits debated whether Trump’s effort to woo white suburban women with thinly-veiled racial appeals would work in an era when police killing of Black people has raised white consciousness about the corrosive effects of racism. “Are ‘Suburban Housewives’ listening?,” asked Jennifer Weiner in The New York Times. “Or are they too busy organizing protests, posting links to bail funds and discussing antidotes for tear gas?”
Mostly left out of the discussion, however, have been the voices of another group of women: low-wage Black and Latino would-be suburban mothers who want safe neighborhoods and good schools for their kids but are now largely shut out of high opportunity neighborhoods by local governments’ zoning.
Family Photo
KiAra Cornelius and her children
Consider, for example, KiAra Cornelius, an African American single mother who until not long ago lived in a dangerous neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. As I outline in a new report for The Century Foundation, Cornelius, who works as a claims analyst at United Healthcare, has two school-age children, a daughter, KiMarra, and a son, Senoj. Cornelius was living in the south end of Columbus a few years ago when she suffered a couple of difficult setbacks. First, the basement in the home she was living in flooded, causing a serious mold issue. On top of that, she and her children were in a car accident, sending her to the hospital. The kids were fine, she said, but the bills started piling up, so she moved in with her mother, her mother’s fiancé, and Cornelius’s siblings a few blocks away.
Cornelius had grown up in south Columbus but says the community deteriorated over time. “It’s definitely not the same anymore,” she says. “It can be dangerous,” with “gang-related activity” and trash littering the sidewalks. Before the basement flood, Cornelius would drive her children to her mother’s home a few blocks away because she worried that if they walked, they might “get crossed up” as an “innocent bystander.”
The local public schools in Cornelius’s south Columbus neighborhood have struggled over time. At Siebert Elementary School, where 91 percent of students come from low-income households, just 27 percent are proficient in reading, 29 percent in math, and 13 percent in science. Cornelius opted to send her kids to a charter school—Columbus Arts and Technical Academy in South Columbus—but students performed only somewhat better there, and Cornelius desperately wanted a better neighborhood and school for her kids. In particular, she wanted more academic challenges for her son, Senoj, a straight-A student.
Cornelius liked the idea of living in one of Columbus’s suburban neighborhoods with high-performing public schools, but they were out of her price range. Many Americans would chalk this fact up to the realities of a free-market in housing. But in Columbus, as in most of America, where people live and what’s affordable has been socially engineered by government for decades—and continues to be today.
While racially restrictive covenants were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court and redlining was outlawed by the U.S. Congress, economic discrimination continued unabated.
In the 1920s, more than two-thirds of Columbus-area subdivisions contained covenants preventing properties from being sold to Black people. In the 1930s, the federal government exacerbated race and class segregation in Columbus when it issued “redline” maps that advised against insuring mortgages in areas that had large Black populations. While racially restrictive covenants were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court and redlining was outlawed by the U.S. Congress, economic discrimination continued unabated—a practice that disproportionately hurts Black and Hispanic residents.
To this day, for example, local government exclusionary zoning policies that ban the construction of less expensive housing in the form of apartment buildings and other multifamily units are pervasive. As Jason Reece of Ohio State University notes, “We have a Fair Housing Act, but if they’re not caught discriminating by race … they can still discriminate by class. We’ve learned that if they do that with zoning, they get the same effect. This is why we have so much economic segregation.”
After racially restrictive covenants were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1948, the late Iowa State University professor Patricia Burgess documented, developers in Columbus and the surrounding suburbs doubled down on socioeconomically “restrictive covenants” that prohibited land from being used to build houses below a certain price or size. Burgess found that “subdivisions aimed at the upper middle class” imposed minimum square-footage requirements and often banned one-story homes.
Zoning laws codified these new restrictive covenants, Burgess said. Zoning ordinances, she wrote, often “protected rich from poor and white from Black.” In that way, “planning served the private interest.”
Single-family zoning excludes people by barring the construction of more affordable, multifamily units. It artificially increases the price of housing in communities by limiting the overall supply of units available to meet consumer demand. Dense housing is also more affordable than single-family homes because land costs are cheaper for the developer; and because apartments have fewer exterior walls, which keeps construction costs lower.
Studies have shown that exclusionary zoning is largely responsible for the economic segregation that keeps poor and working-class families out of middle-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. A 2010 study of 50 metropolitan areas by Jonathan Rothwell of the Brookings Institution and Douglas Massey of Princeton University found that “a change in permitted zoning from the most restrictive to the least would close 50 percent of the observed gap between the most unequal metropolitan area and the least, in terms of neighborhood inequality.”
Limiting areas to single-family homes is only the most blatant mechanism for excluding families of modest means. Developer Michael Kelley of Kelley Companies notes that some suburban Columbus communities require that apartments have brick façades, which are more expensive than something like vinyl siding and put the apartments “out of the price range of anything affordable.” Just as Southerners kept people out of voting booths with literacy tests, so the “brick façade” requirement becomes a more sophisticated way of keeping low-income families out of suburban apartments.
Amy Klaben, an attorney and a former nonprofit housing developer, says some Columbus suburbs discourage developments with large numbers of three- or four-bedroom apartments because they don’t want units that will accommodate parents with children. In essence, these suburbs will only approve housing units that are expensive enough so that “the property taxes generated cover the cost of the children in schools.” Moreover, in central Ohio, Klaben says, landlords can discriminate based on source of income, refusing to take any Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher recipients.
Klaben and Kelley considered filing a lawsuit that would go after exclusionary zoning that makes it so difficult to build affordable housing in high opportunity areas. But lawsuits are expensive and difficult to win, since economic discrimination remains legal. Instead, in the short term, they decided to do something that did not require court action: giving a small number of families the help they need to overcome exclusionary zoning.
Based on research from Harvard University professor Raj Chetty’s finding that when children moved with their families to a better neighborhood before age 13, they later earned 31 percent more as adults than a control group that made no such move, Klaben, Kelley, and others created Move to PROSPER, a pilot program to provide rental support for 10 Columbus-area low-wage single mothers and their young children— giving them a chance to live in one of four high opportunity suburbs of Columbus.
When the program was launched in March 2018, Klaben said some skeptics asked: “Is anybody going to want to move to these suburban areas and leave their neighborhoods behind?” The expectation was that applicants might face discrimination based on class or race in the suburbs and not want to move away from their support networks.
Then the applications began to flow in. By June 2018, the program had more than 300 applicants for the 10 spots. The program was harder to get into than Harvard. When selections were made, the group’s household income ranged from $23,000 to $37,500 (a range at or below 50 percent of the area’s median income). Seven of the mothers were African American, two were white, and one Latina. Participants began moving into their new apartments in August 2018.
IT WAS WHILE LIVING WITH HER MOTHER in south Columbus that KiAra Cornelius, searching the web around 2:00 am, came across the Move to PROSPER program. She qualified, and with Move to PROSPER’s support, she was able to move to an apartment in Gahanna, a middle-class suburb of Columbus. The neighborhood is clean and safe and the kids are free to walk around. “It’s just a total difference” from south Columbus, she says.
And the schools are stronger. She says Senoj is receiving the challenge he needs at Goshen Lane Elementary. At the school, 69 percent of students are proficient in reading, 73 percent in math, and 79 percent in science . Cornelius’s daughter, KiMarra, has also benefited from attending the high-performing Gahanna South Middle School, where 75 percent of students are proficient in reading, 67 percent in math, and 89 percent in science. The teachers push her “the extra step” in a way they didn’t at her charter school.
Cornelius says the Gahanna schools have more resources and smaller classes. Gahanna parents are actively involved. Parents organized, for example, to get an app that allowed families to know when school buses would be arriving. Teachers are also very diligent about reaching out. “I swear I get an email every day” from teachers, Cornelius says. “They really keep you in the loop about what’s going on.”
Cornelius also likes the student diversity. At the Columbus charter school, 78 percent of students were African American like her daughter, but at Gahanna South Middle School, the Black population constitutes 26 percent of the student body, so KiMarra is stretched to go beyond “her comfort zone” and meet students of many different races and ethnicities. At the school, 59 percent of students are white, 7 percent Hispanic, 6 percent two or more races, and 3 percent Asian. “I’m proud of her for stepping outside the box, hanging with different people … just to learn different things about how other cultures work.” She says: “The Gahanna school has definitely given her a more diverse world.” Cornelius reports that her kids have not faced discrimination in Gahanna.
Cornelius says of the new schooling opportunities for her kids: “It is much, much better.”
OF COURSE, CORNELIUS WAS ONE of just 10 mothers who benefitted from Move to PROSPER, and most cities don’t have similar programs. That’s why the fight between Trump and Biden over fair housing and exclusionary zoning is so important.
Biden supports the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing policy to address the legacy of racial discrimination, and he would go even further to reduce economic discrimination. Biden has endorsed Sen. Cory Booker’s Housing, Opportunity, Mobility and Equity (HOME) Act, to provide federal incentives for communities to reduce exclusionary zoning. Under Booker’s proposal, states, cities and counties receiving funding under the federal Community Development Block Grant program for public infrastructure and housing would be required to develop strategies to reduce barriers to housing development and increase their supply of housing. Plans could include authorizing more high density and multifamily zoning and relaxing lot-size restrictions. The goal is for affordable housing units to comprise not less than 20 percent of new housing stock.
While Trump is banking on the idea that “single-family” zoning laws are untouchable in American politics, in 2019, the city of Minneapolis, and the state or Oregon, both took on this sacred cow as discriminatory. In Minneapolis, where 70 percent of residential land had been reserved for single-family homes, legislation was enacted to open up the opportunity to build more affordable duplexes and triplexes. Oregon likewise passed a statewide ban on single-family zoning in cities with populations of at least 10,000 residents.
Opening up the suburbs to moms like KiAra Cornelius and her children doesn’t threaten America’s “Suburban Housewives.” Rather, it makes suburbs stronger, fairer, and more just.
