Zoning and segregation

[OSUPhantom]

^Affordable housing itself is somewhat a haze. Obviously, it's pretty easy to be for in principal. In practice it is much harder- look at any 40B proposal in the state. Affordability is also very much relative. For 40B I think it is 80% of AMI (Area medium Income), which in towns like Hingham and Cohasset mean that even affordable housing can be expensive.

I think this is an interesting conversation and find many takes presented on it here interesting.

Very true and a totally valid point. Defining affordable as relative based on area would certainly not be an ideal way to encourage mixed-income neighborhoods and I'm not too informed on the 40B proposal but if that's the way it works I think that's a major flaw.

Has it? I find the tone of this thread fairly thoughtful and ambiguous. Did I miss something?

Anyway, we don't like segregation by pernicious categories, but free people do a lot of self-segregating. Its not clear what is cause and what is cure and which is worse.

I could have misinterpreted but I saw it another way. But yes people do tend to want to live in areas with people like them. Whether it's race like Randolph, ethnicity like Southie, or sexuality like the South End, it's a natural instinct of people to want to form groups.

 

[Matthew]

Please explain how being forced to build a parking space that you don't want is "exposure to conditions necessary to pursue desired opportunities."

 

[Arlington]

Framed in this manner, zoning is very much related to freedom.

The original justification for why municipalities even had zoning power was that it was an exercise of the "Police Power" that all local governments had
(see Euclid vs Ambler ), specifically, the power to control "nuisance" (a concept where by you annoy people you aren't touching, essentially)

I think that it is good to be skeptical of what the majority can define as a nuisance and then by the inherent police power, restrict.

Majorities, (or, as often, vocal factions) don't have a good record as far as promoting freedom is concerned.

Sadly, on zoning the bar has always been pretty low (a "rational basis" test, mostly). Although happily (for Civil Libertarians), there's also Yik Wo vs Hopkins, which way back in 1886 said that facially-neutral laws can't be administered in prejudicial ways (in the original case, it was an anti-Chinese bias).

So Matthew's point is very much there: is the police power of zoning making us un-free, or in-particular, is it being applied in a racially-prejudicial way. I don't know the answer, but it is the kind of question that deserves a fair hearing, and perhaps a skeptical eye on what the majority concocts.

 

[Matthew]

Oh, you were thinking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I agree that this is a good example of taking certain kinds of property rights in order to give more freedom to other people, and that it was the right thing to do. But it's not the same as zoning. Quite the opposite, really.

The question being investigated is: do municipalities intentionally, but covertly, undermine the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the creation of certain zoning regulations? Or is the existence of significant remaining segregation due to something else?

I don't know the answer to this, and it seems like a very difficult matter to sort out, but I do appreciate the work so far.

 

[Matthew]

While reading a paper on the politics of zoning in SF I came across a reference to Barbara Flint's 1977 PhD dissertation on "Zoning and Residential Segregation".

Managed to dig it up from the archives, so I'm going to put that link here in case anyone else has interest in some light holiday reading.

 

[Matthew]

New article: How zoning restrictions make segregation worse.