The Black Lives Matter movement has prompted a closer examination of the federal, state, and local policies that have systematically denied people of color the access to education, employment, public space, personal safety, and intergenerational wealth that so many others take for granted. One of these policies is single-family zoning, which many cities used as an explicit tool to racially segregate the U.S. beginning in the 1920s and, in the process, deny countless people of color access to homeownership, the most powerful wealth-building tool available to families.
Zoning policies in most U.S. jurisdictions were established in the 1920s; racially exclusionary zoning and restrictive covenants followed shortly thereafter. These policies prevented households of color from living in most neighborhoods, forcing them instead into less desirable areas such as industrial zones and neighborhoods lacking schools, parks, tree canopy, and quality housing stock. While Black people bore the brunt of these policies, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic, and Indigenous households were sometimes excluded as well.
In 1933, the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refinance home mortgages at risk of foreclosure due to the Great Depression. HOLC loans—amortized loans with lower interest rates than the then-prevalent interest-only loans in which the principal was due in full at the end of loan—made homeownership more accessible. However, HOLC also institutionalized the segregationist practice of redlining, the color-coding of neighborhoods by the level of investment risk. Lending regulators would produce city maps that denoted red areas as “hazardous,” yellow as “definitely declining,” blue as “still desirable,” and green as “best.” The hazardous areas typically were the same neighborhoods where households of color were forced to reside through racially exclusionary zoning and restrictive covenants. Households here consequently found it difficult or impossible to gain access to mortgage financing and, thus, the wealth-building capacity of homeownership. This limited their financial ability to move from the neighborhood even after racially exclusionary zoning and restrictive covenants were lifted.
Single-family zoning itself has played a role in this explicit government plan to segregate the country. When planned segregation through racially restrictive zoning was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court in 1917, St. Louis’s first planning engineer, Harland Bartholomew, proposed using single-family zoning to achieve the same end. The principle was simple: Make housing artificially expensive through minimum lot sizes and detached structures, and cities would segregate by class and race. Bartholomew would later take his idea to cities across the country.
Today, many fast-growing U.S. cities, such as Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Charlotte, continue this legacy by reserving 75% to 85% of their residential land for detached houses at suburban densities. This has the doubly negative impact of artificially constraining housing supply and driving up costs—forcing many lower- and middle-income families farther away from job centers and imposing on them long, costly, and carbon-intensive commutes. Not coincidentally, the zoning maps in these cities closely approximate the HOLC redlining maps with previously red areas now zoned largely for multifamily, commercial, and industrial uses and blue and green areas zoned for single-family. Because these cities have directed nearly all of their recent development to those red and yellow areas while putting single-family zones off-limits, many households of color have been displaced from their communities to locations further outside of the city.
Challenging the status quo of single-family zoning is contentious as, for many, the detached single-family home embodies the American Dream. This is an especially difficult discussion for many architects, including myself, who view stand-alone houses as among the more creative endeavors in practice, have made their living designing them, and who own one themselves. But we also must be honest about the segregationist consequences of creating cities where nothing else is allowed on vast land areas. We must be wary of the terms and arguments used to preserve that status quo, such as “neighborhood character,” which too often connotes “white” and “affluent” as much as it refers to urban design and building form.
As architects, we should acknowledge the legacy of single-family zoning as a tool for racial and class segregation—and we should be working to undo that legacy. This is all the more important given the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's recent decision to remove the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing provision (2015) of the 1968 Fair Housing Act legislation designed to help reverse the legacy of racial segregation in housing.
Our task as architects has always been to use our creativity and resourcefulness to find the optimal balance between competing priorities. Addressing the social inequities and environmental costs of the detached single-family home on a large lot while promoting livable neighborhoods is one immediate opportunity to do so. By thoughtfully introducing—or re-introducing—row houses, duplexes, triplexes, courtyard housing, and small apartment buildings into what are now single-family neighborhoods, we can make our communities more racially and economically diverse, walkable, and resilient, with increased opportunities for homeownership and reduced carbon emissions. And we can expand and diversify our potential client base in the process. As architects and respected members of our communities, we can start by advocating for these changes and helping our neighbors envision a more equitable and sustainable future for all.
Rick Mohler, AIA, is the co-recipient of a 2020 ARCHITECT R+D Award for ADUniverse. The views expressed above are his own.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
Call for Submissions. We regularly publish opinion columns that we think would be of service to our readers. Have a timely, relevant, and unexplored perspective or experience to share with the design community? Email [email protected] with a one-paragraph pitch. Due to the volume of submissions we receive, we are unable to respond individually to every pitch.
