Ironic that 100 Years Later, Zoning Laws Designed for Racial Segregation Are Now Defended as ‘Progressive’ by Segregationists’ Liberal Grandchildren

Racial segregationists are laughing at from beyond the grave. Now their progressive grandchildren defend the regulations they passed to keep the country segregated.

It was deviously clever to set up all these regulations and then a permanent useful idiot constituency of young liberals defending them because they are too stupid to tell good laws from bad.

[Berkeley’s zoning code], which has been revised about once a decade, is the template for development in Berkeley. It contains rules and regulations about how land can be used, where building can occur, what kinds of structures can be built, and how many people can live where. But the bureaucratic guidelines set forth by the zoning plan conceal its history as a tool for racial and class-based discrimination.

The guidelines set out in the zoning code served for many decades to separate the poor from the rich and whites from people of color. Some neighborhoods were zoned to only allow single-family homes; these became havens for the white and wealthy. The code allowed apartment buildings and duplexes in other neighborhoods, turning them into places for people of color and those on the lower end of the economic scale.

In 1917, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Buchanan v. Warley decision that it was illegal for municipalities to use zoning for purposes of racial segregation. Yet because Berkeley’s zoning plan was not explicitly racial, the ruling did not stop Berkeley from being zoned for low-density in East Berkeley and high-density in the flats in order to maintain the racial and class order.

“The classic and explicit arguments for zoning were the need to ensure public safety and protect the health and the general welfare of the population,” wrote Hirt. However, “racial and class prejudices played a key part in the emerging zoning story, since it was minorities and the poor who were perceived as the greatest danger to property values in general and to single-family residential areas in particular.”

[Source]

Step 1: Create zoning regulations to keep minorities away from white neighborhoods.

Step 2: Watch white-owned property values skyrocket, deepening wealth inequality and creating nationwide racial segregation.

Step 3: 100 years later, their progressive grandchildren defend these laws because “regulations good,” “greedy developers bad,” “deregulation bad,” “gentrification bad.”

Step 4: Profit!

The irony is impossible to ignore.