The Houston, Texas Metropolitan Area ended the 20th century as the most racially integrated major city in America because, first of all, it never had zoning, the only major city to historically reject those laws.
The answer is that the rules were intended to make it all but impossible to build, not just in California but in much of blue-state America. The efforts of three generations of progressive reformers, seeking to address the problems of their eras, have created a regulatory regime in much of the country that has made it extraordinarily difficult to build new housing where it is needed most.
When we stop building homes where people want to live, Americans lose the chance to move toward opportunity. In a properly functioning economy, workers relocate to find better-paying jobs in faster-growing industries. In the U.S. today, workers instead often remain stuck where they are. As recently as 1970, one in five Americans moved each year. But after a half-century of steady decline, the Census announced in December that we had set a dismal new record, with scarcely one in 13 people relocating to a new home.
The Leftist/Marxist/Progressive movement always was and always will be about class and race.
And he knew that, in California, there was a legal tool to stop them. The first zoning laws in the U.S. had been adopted by California cities three decades earlier, to force out their Chinese residents. Racial discrimination was unconstitutional, but these cities found a workaround: They could exclude laundries, the primary source of employment for the Chinese. The ordinances were just a means “for getting rid of the Chinese,” as one of their authors confessed. By segregating the uses of land, cities discovered that they could segregate their populations by race.
The New Deal brought a second generation of reformers, who decided that neighborhoods could only qualify for the highest federal credit rating, and the loans that came with it, if they adopted strict zoning codes. They also worried that racial integration would depress property values, imposing losses on the government—so they insisted that properties come with private restrictive covenants limiting their sale to “the race for which they are intended.” (The Supreme Court would not rule such covenants unenforceable until 1948.) Separating land by use, class and race was now a matter of federal policy.
BONUS REAL ESTATE BREAKING NEWS !!
Since Donald Trump took office, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired thousands of federal workers in a push to reduce spending.
In the wake of those layoffs, droves of former federal employees have packed up their bags and put their homes on the market, causing the average listing price to sink, The Kobeissi Letter (TKL) reported.
In November, the median home in the nation’s capital was worth $699,000, according to Redfin.
By February, the median home value dropped 20 percent, bringing the price down to $560,000.
TKL found there are now nearly 8,000 homes listed for sale in the Washington, DC metro area, and almost half of them have been put on the market in the last 30 days.
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