Where Do We Come From? Where Are We? Where Are We Going?: Snob Zoning and the Eternal Questions

In her new book, Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate (Beacon Press, May 2013), longtime New York Times real estate journalist Lisa Prevost examines the exclusionary zoning policies that have left our cities and towns increasingly segregated by income and have dealt some crushing blows to the affordable housing movement. The decisions of community officials to place onerous (sometimes four-acre) lot requirements and various setback provisions, have blocked the construction of multifamily, mixed-income, and cluster housing in tony suburbs and bucolic country hamlets alike. Prevost centers her coverage on the Northeast, which has been the site of efforts to keep affordable housing out of pricy towns in the name of "low density" or preserving "local character." See Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Twp. of Mount Laurel, 336 A.2d 713 (1975) (holding that a municipality must use its land use regulation to create a variety of housing choices and cannot use its powers for discriminatory purposes); Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Twp. of Mount Laurel, 456 A.2d 390 (1983) (holding that municipality's land use regulation must affirmatively afford the opportunity of low and moderate income housing). Decades after the Mount Laurel decisions, many communities continue to devise subtle zoning policies that result in socioeconomic homogeneity.

Image Credit: Seabord Properties 

Prevost and Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey posit that this segregation is leading to increased levels of income inequality and fearful misunderstanding of people in other economic classes. The conscious decisions of residents of individual municipalities to isolate themselves into groups of "people like us" is having a larger affect on the entire nation as people of different income levels rarely rub elbows or share postal codes. The effects of these decisions is felt in stratified civil society organizations and is still routinely litigated in courtrooms. Last year, the Connecticut Fair Housing Center brought a lawsuit against the the Housing Authority in the predominately white Litchfield County town of Winchester, alleging that the Authority's policies systematically discriminated against minority applicants to its Section 8 program by limiting program applications to residents of the already very white county. See Carter et al v. Hous. Auth. of the Town of Winchester (D. Conn., filed Aug. 1, 2012). The Litchfield example is just one of many court battles over the future of the makeup of American communities. The proliferation of snob zoning, thoughtfully explored in Ms. Prevost's book, has led to a lack of mobility for those seeking affordable housing options across the country and signals further troubling exclusionary decisions made by America's zoning boards.