Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/Mnsj4
The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.
Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.
Seems like such a long walk of a premise. Suburbs use zoning to keep out multifamily to keep property values high and keep poor people out and that means keep black people out but this one is majority Democrats so the story is “Democrats can be racist too?”
Probably wouldn’t get the same number of clicks but you could write this entire article about basically any suburb.
I don’t think the author’s point is that these wealthy, liberal suburbs are intentionally excluding black people from their neighborhoods. I think their point is that there is a certain hypocrisy to these people who evidently present themselves as inclusive and welcoming and socially progressive, but who support policies whose net effect is massively exclusionary. It may not have the spittle of a red-hatter shouting, “We need to build a wall!”, but the effect zoning policies have on inequality and de facto segregation is difficult to overstate.
I think the point of the article is simply to call attention to the harmful web of strict zoning laws cities and suburbs across America have and their effects, and the angle of “liberal suburb hypocrisy” is a compelling angle for exploring this issue. If anything, motivating a sense of hypocrisy might be a good way to finally get people to rethink zoning, at least amongst the very people who put up “in this house, we believe” signs. I suspect most people who put up such signs care very deeply that they’re perceived as progressive, and articles like this can help point out that those policies they support are anything but progressive.
Edit: I think the article serves as a good reminder that, while progress may be effectively deadlocked at the federal level for the foreseeable future, there’s still a ton of systemic issues that need to be fixed in (and pertaining to) progressives’ backyards. Sure we won’t likely see a sane SCOTUS again for years, nor will we see universal healthcare, nor will we see lobbying abolished, or climate change solved… or much of anything on a long list of federal issues. But we still have massive local issues, even in overwhelmingly blue cities and districts, that are feeding the status quo of inequality, de facto segregation, and the housing crisis.
There is nothing wrong with pointing out the hypocrisy.
It’s no coincidence that most exclusionary/racist zoning happens in Democratic areas
