Good morning. I wrote this for another publication but thought some people here might get some value out of it – so here it is.
Laws built on racism permeate our social, financial and justice systems and the cost to society is enormous (incalculable). We have no idea how much richer our country might have been if racism had not been written into our laws.
Since the 1965 Civil Rights Act, lawyers have been trying one case after another. Courts are backed up for years on end, testing one law after another and setting precedents necessary to weed racism out of our systems. In the meantime, people kept building their lives around racist laws.
In 100 years, the U.S. went from a predominantly rural country of 76.2 million persons in 1900 to a mostly urban-suburban population of 281.4 million in 2000. Take note, in 1900, 70% of all black Americans lived in the south.
As white people moved into cities in search of factory jobs, filth, pollution, crime and overcrowding were rampant. A new discipline known as urban planning emerged and the American land-use system followed. Zoning was the foundation for the land-use system and in 1926, the Supreme Court made zoning legally enforceable.
Suddenly, in what is known as the largest peaceful migration in human history, the end of WWI saw African Americans moving out of the Jim Crow South and into northern cities in search of work and freedom from lives of fear and terror. The response was rapid and decisive.
Cities all across the country enacted segregation through zoning – meaning racism was literally planned. Everything from schools, hospitals, fire and police departments, city services, streets, street lights, taxation, trash pick-up, etc. was located according to city plans – including legally enforceable racial segregation.
To fill the unmet need for housing, banks, financial institutions, insurance, real estate (aka F.I.R.E.) industry and the uber-wealthy established development companies, then appealed to the federal government for cheap capital (in the form of cheap loans, grants and tax breaks). Local government used eminent domain and zoning to clear land (of poor people, low-income homeowners and small businesses).
Soon enough, zoning maps were a game board. As elected officials decided what zone would get the most, the least or nothing at all, the investment and dis-investment of taxpayer money turned into a vicious cycle – invest and build, abandon, relocate the poor and invest again.
Philadelphia city planners once told me, that they were finally able to enact change, by demonstrating 50 years of forced internal migration - of black people - from one zone to another.
Cities, counties and states allocating tax revenue by zone created massive inequality. Moving police departments out of one zone to another enabled crime to flourish. The redlining practices of the financial, insurance and real estate industry (aka FIRE) guaranteed people of color could never afford to leave their zone.
Just as Black Codes, the KKK and later, Jim Crow laws had trapped black people in the rural south, northern cities trapped black people inside their zones.
Instead of trees, schools and businesses, cities hired police to keep black and poor people inside their zone. The only time white city people saw black people was when black people were working menial jobs – maids, janitors, trash pick-up, clean-up, or digging ditches, gardens and graves, etc.
Getting rid of zoning won’t solve the problems racism created. America needs a new land-use system. Urban planners have been working on this for years. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to persuade un-informed and inexperienced city council members to try something different. It is even harder to convince people running for local office to get themselves some training.
It took a committed group of citizens 15 years to convince our city to replace zoning with form-based codes. Interestingly enough, CRT work on land-use was explained to our community at the beginning of our new planning process. Because several hundred local citizens knew what had happened to drag us down, we were able to correct course.
15 years later, the difference is almost unbelievable. Our city went from dying, broke and boarded up - with an awful meth problem - to a thriving city with hundreds of new high-paying jobs, foreign investors in cutting edge farming and ranching, new businesses, parks with year-round programs, clean streets, fiscally sound local government, low crime, hundreds of new affordable housing units (including financing programs for low-income families buying single-homes or condos). We built a new hospital, high school, school district offices, city hall, library and police department. Our once low-performing schools have been designated Distinguished Schools. The brain drain is over. Our kids are staying, not leaving.
When people ask what they can do about racism, I suggest they find a place in local government that really interests them, then dig in for the long haul. Learn how local government works, then get to work. This is America and citizens run this country. But only when we are willing to work for what we want.
As I said, it took 15 years to change course in our little community. As things turned out, the unpaid work of citizenship is the most satisfying work of all.
