For more than a century, the people of the United States have been locked in a game of cat and mouse with the forces of separation and segregation. In

Bogus “Historic” Districts: The New Exclusionary Zoning?

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2021-10-20 18:30:08

For more than a century, the people of the United States have been locked in a game of cat and mouse with the forces of separation and segregation.

In 1917, the US Supreme Court banned explicit racial zoning but allowed zoning that banned apartments  or duplexes . Within a decade, bans on these lower-cost housing type s, which were theoretically race-blind but effectively locked out poorer people, had become popular in cities’ richest areas. In 1948, the court also struck down private contracts that required homeowners to sell or rent only to people of certain races. In the years that followed, duplex bans crept outward from those richer parts of town to cover most of the land in American cities. Here in Oregon, a 2019 state law has offered the next twist in the endless chase: duplex bans are currently being lifted in urban areas across the state.

In Portland, 2021 might go down in history as the beginning of the next phase of economic and racial segregation—the year that bogus “historic districts” replaced exclusionary zoning as the easiest way for a wealthier, whiter subset of the population to legally block change, diversity, and growth.

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