An era of growth and movement within the U.S. prompted new policies to address the changing faces and places of many citizens. Local governments began to exert considerable influence over the allocation of space within their jurisdictions, passing zoning laws that clearly delineated acceptable land use and residential patterns. Many of these zoning rules either explicitly or implicitly restricted BIPOC from living in desirable neighborhoods with better amenities. Racial covenants further limited options by attaching deed restrictions to properties preventing their lease or sale to members of designated races or ethnicities, which state and federal courts upheld as permissible. By the start of the Great Depression, residential segregation had become the norm across much of the United States.

Legend

  •   Hindered racial equality
  •   Mix of helped and hindered racial equality
  •   Helped advance racial equality
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    The continued oppression of Black Americans and other communities of color in the Jim Crow South, coupled with increased demand for industrial labor in cities in the North and West, prompted the relocation of an estimated 1.6 million Black Americans between 1910 and 1940. Many lived in multifamily buildings, which quickly flourished across urban areas as a convenient and affordable housing option for the rapidly expanding populations of industrial workers and their families. Yet BIPOC still faced rampant discrimination and racialized violence in their new communities, limiting their options for where to live and relegating them to the least desirable neighborhoods and housing stock.

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    While the first local zoning law was passed in Los Angeles, CA in 1908 to delineate residential from industrial districts, it did not take long for other municipalities to see the potential in such policies to enforce racial segregation. Two years later, Baltimore, MD adopted such an ordinance, prohibiting members of a particular race from owning or occupying housing on a block with a majority population of another race. Dozens of other cities soon followed suit and developed similar zoning regulations, including some in the North with small but growing BIPOC populations.

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    A ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court finds a Louisville, KY racially-restrictive zoning ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the 14th amendment’s freedom of contract clause permitting individuals to enter into legal and business transactions – including to sell or rent a home – without imposition by government. While the ruling invalidated similar racial restrictions on housing in effect in other cities, many local governments chose to either ignore the ruling or find other ways to segregate neighborhoods by race, including through exclusionary zoning rules and by encouraging restrictive covenants on the sale or rental of properties to BIPOC households.

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    While the St. Louis zoning plan made no explicit mention of race, it drew boundaries around different classes of neighborhoods to align with the existing and expected future settlement patterns of white and Black residents. White neighborhoods were classified as ‘first residential’, in which only single-family homes could be built, to preserve property values and prevent Blacks from moving into those neighborhoods. Some existing Black neighborhoods, meanwhile, were classified as industrial, which permitted the building of factories and other hazardous facilities near BIPOC-occupied homes.

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    Organized within the U.S. Department of Commerce and chaired by its secretary, Herbert Hoover, the Advisory Committee on Zoning was created to assist municipalities with crafting zoning policies to guide future development. Though not explicitly stated, a goal of the Committee and the model zoning ordinances it developed were to preserve racialized segregation following the Buchanan ruling. The Committee recommended municipalities enact economic zoning to clearly delineate residential from industrial/commercial zones and to prohibit multifamily housing in new residential neighborhoods, which served to restrict access to such neighborhoods, particularly among BIPOC-led households.

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    In a pair of rulings, the Supreme Court upheld both the practice of racially restrictive covenants (Corrigan v. Buckley) and exclusionary zoning by housing type (Village of Euclid, OH v. Amber Realty Co). The first codified the rights of individual property owners to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity in private transactions (in contrast to the prohibition on state-enforced discrimination in zoning in Buchanan), while the second found no explicit racial bias in zoning rules that restricted land use and development of specific structures. Both rulings allowed these exclusionary practices to continue and further residential segregation.

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