Split Apart: How Regulations Designated Populations to Different Parts of the City

The literature on US exclusionary zoning is well-known and I will not repeat its basic charges here. The classics include P. Davidoff and M. Brooks. “Zoning out the poor”, in Suburbia: American dream and dilemma, edited by P. Dolce. Garden City: Anchor, 1976; A. Downs, Opening up the suburbs: An urban strategy for America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973; C. Haar and J. Kayden (eds). Zoning and the American Dream: Promises still to keep. Chicago: Planners Press, 1989.

Inclusionary zoning and zoning for affordable housing is also widely discussed in the literature and I will not repeat the basics here. For example, D. Porter Inclusionary Zoning for Affordable Housing. Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute, 2004; M. Morris, Incentive Zoning: Meeting Urban Design and Affordable Housing Objectives. Chicago: Planners Press, 2000.

We should keep in mind that zoning rules are only part of a package of actions through which governments may pursue residential segregation. The reshuffling of the Parisian population during the Haussmann rebuilding frenzy in the 1800s and the consolidation of public housing in U.S. central cities in the 1900s have caused residential segregation more than zoning rules could.

Since Marduk was not real, the order was likely passed by the priests who ruled in his name.

With the growth of suburbs in American history, the roles of urban center and periphery were reversed. Rather than the city centers, it was the suburbs that became “walled off” (via zoning, that is).

Aristotle, Politics, Book II (Chapter VII) (circa 350 BCE) (translated by W. Ellis) Accessed on July 18, 2012 at http://​www.​gutenberg.​org/​files/​6762/​6762-h/​6762-h.​htm#2HCH0020

O. Robison, Ancient Rome, 15. The census at the end of the third century recorded 1790 domus and 44,300 insulae in Rome, according to L. Benevolo, The History of the City, 176.

Medieval cities, like ancient ones, exhibited clear signs of occupational specialization in space. Medieval streets often carried the names of the occupational groups that dominated them: the street of goldsmiths, the street of glassworks (see Sjoberg, G, The Pre-industrial City). But unless occupation intersected with nationality or ethnicity (as in the case of foreign merchants), this separation followed from social customs and the advantages linked to the proximity of similar economic activities, rather than from law. The only relatively modern example of a government attempt to legally segregate a city by profession (and caste) that I could find comes from St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1703, Peter the Great tried to segregate the city. The population was divided into three groups: the merchants and professional specialists, the shopkeepers and craftsmen, and the commoners, each with their own quarters. But according to M. Hugo-Brunt, The History of City Planning, the authorities failed to maintain the separation.

An Act for Erecting a Judicature for Determination of Differences Touching Houses Burned or Demolished in the Late Fire Which Happened in London (1667). Accessed on November 2, 2012 at http://​www.​museumoflondon.​org.​uk/​Exploreonline/​Past/​LondonsBurning/​Themes/​1405/​1408/​Page1.​htm

On his life and work, see G. Power, The advent of zoning. Planning Perspectives 4 (1989): 1–13.

This is about a century after such covenants had proliferated in London.

On private regulations, see: M. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American real estate industry and urban land planning. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987; D. Young, Common Interest Developments: A Historical Review of CID Development, 1996. Accessed on March 10, 2013 at http://​www.​uwec.​edu/​geography/​ivogeler/​w270/​cids.​htm; R. Fogelson, Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870–1930, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005; R. Fischler and K. Kolnik. American Zoning: German Import or Home Product?, 2006 Paper presented at the Second World Planning Schools Congress (Mexico City, July 11–16).

Cited by R. Brooks and C. Rose Racial Covenants and Segregation, Yesterday and Today, 2010, 4. Accessed on September 12, 2012 http://​www.​nyustraus.​org/​pubs/​0910/​docs/​Rose.​pdf

Unlike their twentieth-century counterparts, these ordinances were not comprehensive and citywide.

Cited by W. Pollard, Outline of the law of zoning in the United States. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 155, Part 2: Zoning in the United States (1931): 15–33.

Ibid., 18.

Bither was Director of the Manufacturers’ Association in Berkeley, California.

For instance, the neighborhood of Guilford Park, where no house could be occupied by “any person negro or of negro extraction.” Cited by R. Fogelson, 65.

Karst, K. L. Buchanan v. Warley 245 U.S. 60 (1917). Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, 1.

In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1) that privately induced racial housing segregation is legally unenforceable: “Private agreements to exclude persons of designated race or color from the use or occupancy of real estate for residential purposes… [are] violative of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” In reality, racist deeds became unlawful only after the Fair Housing Act of 1968. R. Brooks and C. Rose, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

On Bassett and zoning, see Toll, Zoned American, and Power, The Advent of Zoning, among many other sources.

Ibid.

Ibid., 72.

Some cities outside of New York and California, like Minneapolis, had similarly experimented with such zones.

On his life and work, see F. Akimoto, Charles H. Cheney of California. Planning Perspectives 18 (July) (2003): 253–275.

This example shows that, at least in the United States, the border between public and private regulations is ambiguous. In Berkeley and many other cities at the time, a municipality would create zoning rules, but they would take effect only if residents petitioned it to apply them to their neighborhood. A version of public-private partnership in rule-making exists today in Houston. See C. Berry, Land use regulation and residential segregation: Does zoning matter? American Law and Economics Review 3(2) (2001) 251–274; M. Lewyn, How overregulation creates sprawl (even in a city without zoning). Wayne Law Review 50 (2004) 1171–1208.

He was President of the Civic Art Commission.

Village of Euclid, v Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926).

The reasons I discuss are cultural. For an economic explanation of zoning, see W. Fischel, The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Affect Government Taxation, School Finance and Land-use Policies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. My interpretation comes closest to C. Perin Everything in Its Place: Social order and Land Use in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; M. Lees, Preserving property values? Preserving proper homes? Preserving privilege: The pre-Euclid debate over zoning for exclusively private residential areas, 1916–1926. University of Pittsburgh Law Review 56 (1994) 367–428; and Hirt, Home, Sweet Home.

The theories of the Chicago School are a good example.

See also R. Fischler, Health, safety and welfare: Markets, politics, and social science in early land-use regulation and community design. Journal of Urban History 24 (1998a) 675–719; R. Fischler, Toward a genealogy of planning: Zoning and the welfare state. Planning Perspectives 13 (1998b) 389–410.

Note that only a quarter of dwellings in the United Kingdom are detached homes and that, as earlier said, the English never employed exclusive single-family zoning as did the United States.

New York’s City Board of Estimate and Apportionment, New York City Building Zone Resolution, 20–22, 31.