Evidence of a Past Reverberating in the Present
When studying urban planning in Canada years ago, I knew nothing about the racist origins of single-family zoning. After completing my master’s, I returned to the United States to work with the Baltimore County Department of Planning. Within days, my wife Christine and I experienced things that put into context what I’d later learn about racism and urban planning.
Before starting the job, we’d purchased a brick townhouse in a 1930s-era neighborhood called Rodgers Forge. When closing on the house, we discovered the deed included a restrictive covenant (a clause) that read,
No persons of any race other than the white race shall use or occupy any building or lot except domestic servants.
Deed for 33 Murdoch Rd, Baltimore, MD
In response to the dumbfounded looks on our faces, the real estate agent assured us the covenant was no longer enforced. Yet, during our two years in the neighborhood, we didn’t see a single Black resident despite living less than a mile from the Baltimore city line at a time (2002) when Blacks made up 65% of the city’s population. Covenant or no covenant, Blacks in the area appeared to know their place.
We didn’t have to go far from our home to find additional evidence of a past reverberating in the present. A few days after moving in, we took a walk to a grocery that was part of a strip mall. To get there, we walked five minutes to the edge of Rodgers Forge, then continued on into a circa-1930s, single-family neighborhood. A block in, we turned left onto a narrow lane, walked 50 yards, then came to the large boulder shown below that had been sunk into the ground to serve as a barrier.
A line of trees reinforced the barrier on either side of the boulder. Passing to the left of the boulder on a dirt path, we were again back on a paved road. Continuing down to a commercial street, we saw older duplexes and single-family homes built around 1915, and it quickly became apparent that we were looking at an isolated Black community.
Everyone on one side of the boulder was White. Everyone on the other side was Black. In hindsight, neither the racial covenant nor the boulder’s presence boded well for my prospects with the Baltimore County Department of Planning.
In the map below, the boulder is located where you see the red arrow. The street names are different on either side of the boulder. On the White side, it’s called Midhurst Road. On the Black side, it’s Schwartz Avenue.
All of this can be better understood in context. A 1961 U.S. Civil Rights Commission report describes how Baltimore County served as a “white noose” around the neck of Baltimore City.[i] Between 1955 and 1965, Baltimore lost 338 manufacturing firms, with most going to the county that surrounded it on three sides.[ii] Urban planners who did the bidding of county politicians made it difficult for Blacks to follow those jobs. They created exclusionary single-family zones to ensure that the only housing built would be unaffordable to most of the city’s Black residents.
If a Black real estate agent had a Black client who could afford a home, they’d phone a White agent who controlled the county’s listings. The White agent would routinely claim that either the property was under contract, or they couldn’t reach the seller.[i] For a time, the county even instructed real estate agents to inform the police chief if they sold the house to a Black buyer.[ii] The county also pushed Black residents out by rezoning the land on which their homes sat as either industrial or commercial.[iii] Rezoning encouraged White landlords to sell their property for more profitable uses and home demolition would follow.
The way in which Baltimore County’s politicians and planners operated was hardly unique. The Civil Rights report describes a national problem, and presents examples from across the nation noting that these practices had “a very substantial and far-reaching effect on Black residents.”[i] At the time I joined the county’s planning department twenty-eight years later, little had changed. Despite having recently elected a Democrat to Congress, Baltimore County’s inherently conservative White majority remained tacitly committed to using single-family zoning to enforce racial exclusion and segregating one socioeconomic group from the next. It’s a mindset that has been with us for a long time.
Racist Origin of Single-Family Zoning – Berkley, California
There’s a key difference between the origins of German and American zoning. Germans conceived of zoning to separate noxious industrial uses from human habitation. Americans conceived of zoning to separate people considered desirable from those considered undesirable. This practice began in Berkeley in 1916, long before California leaned left. That year, an influential developer named Duncan McDuffie led Berkeley’s efforts to create the nation’s first municipal ordinance to feature the exclusionary single-family residential zone classification.
McDuffie had a problem to solve. His real estate and development company—the largest in northern California—had developed three high-end residential neighborhoods in Berkeley.[i] He wanted to ensure only upper-income Caucasians could purchase those homes, so he added a restrictive covenant to all deeds which read, “…if prior to the first day of January 1930 any person of African or Mongolian descent shall be allowed to purchase or lease said property or any part thereof, then this conveyance shall be and become void….”[ii]
McDuffie, however, understood racial covenants had their limitations. People considered them legally enforceable for a finite number of years, after which time the properties would be unprotected. Another issue of particular concern to McDuffie was that his company had no control over land adjacent to his neighborhoods. He couldn’t slap covenants on property he didn’t own. Anyone could come along and build housing or commercial property of a sort that could draw precisely the kind of people McDuffie sought to exclude from his neighborhoods (i.e., Blacks and Asians).
He needed a mechanism to restrict who could occupy land he didn’t own. Six years earlier, in 1910, Baltimore enacted the nation’s first racial zoning ordinance, which outright banned Blacks from living where Whites didn’t want them. Racial zoning was the logical choice for McDuffie, as cities like Atlanta and St. Louis had adopted the practice, but in 1915, the NAACP challenged the practice.
And by the time McDuffie was aiming to “protect” his neighborhoods, the Supreme Court was weighing arguments regarding whether or not racial zoning violated the due process clause in the U.S. Constitution.
| Note: The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution enshrines the right to due process, and it’s what prevents the government—in theory—from violating fundamental rights to “life, liberty, or property” without following the “due process” of law. |
McDuffie, who was active in California state and local politics, was certainly aware of this case. The following year, the Supreme Court ruled that racial zoning was unconstitutional.[i] So, he came up with an alternate solution, which proved to be far more durable.
In March 1916, under McDuffie’s direction, Berkeley City Council passed Ordinance No. 452, which defined an exclusionary single-use zone classification for the first time in history. Few seemingly mundane words committed to paper have done more to shape American life than these:
Whereas the public interest and convenience of the City of Berkeley and the proper preservation of its public peace, health, and safety require the classification of said City into districts within some of which it shall be lawful and in others unlawful to erect, construct or maintain certain buildings to carry on certain trades, or callings and… Now be it Ordained by the Council of the City of Berkeley as follows:
SECTION I. Districts of Class 1 shall be that portion or those portions of the City of Berkeley in which no buildings or structure shall be erected, constructed or maintained which shall be used for or designed or intended to be used for any purpose other than that of a single-family dwelling.1
Berkeley Ordinance No. 452.
The ordinance defines other kinds of districts, such as the manufacturing district of the sort that Baltimore County later used to expel Blacks from the county, but the Berkeley ordinance’s significance lies with the single-family zone. Berkeley City Council subsequently designated its Elmwood Park neighborhood to be a Class 1 district, giving it the distinction of being the first single-family zone in the country.
Like racial zoning, single-use zoning was challenged in court. Unlike racial zoning, the Supreme Court deemed single-use zoning to be a valid use of what’s referred to as a local government’s “police powers.” This landmark court case considered the town of Euclid, Ohio’s use of single-use zoning to prevent a real estate company called Ambler Realty from selling off land for industrial use.
Neighboring Cleveland annexed land to expand its industrial capacity. Euclid neither wanted its land annexed nor used for industrial use. Ambler sued Euclid and lost in the Supreme Court, legitimizing single-use zoning as the law of the land in 1926.
As mass Black migration—out of the South to cities North and West— entered its second decade in the 1920s, municipalities across the country routinely used single-family zoning to “protect” high-end residential neighborhoods. Full protection was a two-step process. First, apply the single-family zone designation, then add restrictive covenants to the deeds before the sale of individual homes. Even as early as 1931, people well understood that single-use zoning was rooted in “racial hatred.” That year, a lawyer with the California Real Estate Association named W.L. Pollard wrote,
It may sound foreign to our general ideas of the background of zoning, yet racial hatred played no small part in bringing to the front lines some of the early districting ordinances which were sustained by the United States Supreme Court, thus giving us our first important zoning decisions.2
W.L. Pollard, 1931
Early and widespread adoption of single-use zoning took place in a context that simply didn’t exist in Germany, or anywhere else for that matter. Berkeley passed Ordinance 452 a year after the Great Migration began. Southern states were engaged in a multi-decade campaign of systematic terror, cementing in place the racial order that civil war and emancipation had threatened.
Whites lynched Blacks with regularity and purchased lynching postcards. Berkeley’s ordinance passed just two months before a young man name Jesse Washington was infamously tortured before a crowd of 15,000 on May 15, 1916, as a photographer affiliated with Kodak enthusiastically captured the spectacle.
In some parts of the country, children played lynching games.[i] Newly constructed Confederate monuments dominated public spaces, broadcasting racial contempt. Courts and businesses colluded to enslave men to meet the needs of business cycles. Perverse laws and violence excluded Blacks from mainstream life and stripped them of the right to vote.
Outside the South, thousands of towns were purging Blacks from their midst to function as “sundown towns” (i.e., no Blacks allowed after sundown), reflecting the hardening of attitudes in a nation that had jettisoned the promise of racial justice and embraced unfettered white supremacy.[ii]
Lest there be any question regarding the dominant mindset accompanying single-use zoning’s origins in 1916, that same year Americans were flocking to movie theaters to watch D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
This blockbuster film tells the story of how the Ku Klux Klan saved White civilization after our civil war and depicts Blacks as morally corrupt, predatory, sex-starved beasts. The film is nothing less than a masterclass in how to express racial hatred. Millions of White Americans enthusiastically flocked to see it, and it remained the country’s highest-grossing film for fourteen years until Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released Gone with the Wind.
It’s in this milieu that local governments across the country considered exclusionary single-family zoning to be the right tool for keeping the undesirables at bay.
References
- Ordinance No. 452. District Ordinance of the City of Berkeley. March 10, 1916. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c044977650&view=1up&seq=1 ↩︎
- Raphael Fischler “The Six Stories of Zoning.” In Zoning: A Guide for 21st-Century Planning. eds. Elliott Sclar, Bernadette Baird-Zars, Lauren Ames Fisher, and Valerie Stahl. (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2019) ebook. ↩︎
