Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series on the roots of America’s housing crisis. The first opinion examined how government policies have made housing unaffordable for too many. The second explored how racial exclusion remains embedded in today’s housing market. This piece traces those patterns back to a pivotal Supreme Court case that reshaped zoning — and locked generations out.
After the Supreme Court struck down Louisville’s Baltimore-style racial zoning law in 1917, the notion that local governments could mandate that neighborhoods be segregated by race seemed dead. All people, white and black alike, had a property right to buy and sell homes from and to whom they wished and where they wanted. The lawsuit striking down racial zoning was the NAACP’s first great success.
But the victory of rights in property against the desire to prevent the wrong class of person from moving next door was short-lived. Shortly before the Louisville ordinance was found unconstitutional, another method called “comprehensive zoning” was developed, which would achieve similar results without any explicit racial restrictions. First seen in two cities on opposite coasts — Berkeley, California, and New York City — this style of zoning segregated areas not by race but by use, which was often based on the economics of racial and class segregation. Berkeley residents passed their ordinance to stop an African-American dance hall, while in New York, merchants along Fifth Avenue felt threatened by Jewish garment factories and the proliferation of tenement housing.
In 1922, Euclid, Ohio, a sleepy suburb of Cleveland, adopted its version of comprehensive zoning — a measure that would face a legal challenge that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. At the time, Euclid was largely undeveloped but stood in the path of Cleveland’s expanding footprint. The city fathers did not want any more industry and especially did not want the march of apartment buildings — and their immigrant factory workers — to invade the town. Most of the town, therefore, was zoned for large-lot residential use. That made it practically impossible for minority and immigrant working-class people to live in Euclid. When the ordinance was challenged in federal court, the trial judge spelled it out: “The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped area of 16 square miles in a strait-jacket…. the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life…. It is a matter of income and wealth, plus the labor and difficulty of procuring adequate domestic service.”
The judge liked both the Euclid ordinance and the discredited racial zoning of Louisville, claiming that there is a “blighting of property values and the congestion of population, whenever [minorities] invade a residential section,” although he didn’t use the word “minorities.” Nevertheless, because Euclid’s law was similar to Louisville’s, the judge reluctantly found Euclid’s zoning to be unconstitutional.
His reluctance was unfounded. This time, the prejudices of the patricians on the Supreme Court prevailed.
Writing for the court, Justice George Sutherland opined that apartment houses were like parasites “monopolizing the rays of the sun” and “depriving children of the privilege and quiet and open spaces for play.” Ultimately, the apartment houses that Euclid’s ordinance prohibited were nuisances because “A nuisance may be merely the right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” The pigs were the immigrants that would otherwise have occupied Euclid’s sunlit streets.
Justice Sutherland would not have welcomed affordable housing in his neighborhood. From this point onward, this type of zoning was called “Euclidian zoning.” It segregated land by use – with large-lot single-family housing covering most of the territory, commercial and industrial districts elsewhere, and multi-family housing in a separate area altogether. With so few places to build affordable housing, demand outstrips supply, and working-class families struggle to find decent housing.
The ramifications of the court’s decision in Euclid reached far beyond that most ordinary suburb. The language used by the Supreme Court in affirming Euclid’s zoning ordinance turned out to be a gateway drug to bigoted exclusionary zoning laws far and wide for decades to come. This was not bigotry with an iron fist; it was more subtle bigotry that wore a velvet glove while writing and defending the pages of the nation’s zoning codes. What was born in Baltimore and died in Louisville was reincarnated in Euclid.
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