Less than seventeen percent of all developed, housing-oriented land in Cuyahoga County is zoned for multi-family use. Eleven cities in the county ban renters altogether. These findings, from the latest Fair Housing Center study, suggest a pattern of exclusionary land-use practices that continue to limit the mobility of poor and non-White families across the region, particularly to cities with the highest levels of services and amenities.
Exclusionary zoning is systemic (seen across geographies and social groups), institutional (placed within organized and bureaucratic practices that ensure it outlasts individuals), and intentionally persistent (the choice to continue the practice is sustained only by local communities’ choices not to change it). And, according to the Housing Center’s Michael Lepley, that’s exactly why they spent months on their first comprehensive zoning study.
“This has been in the pipeline for 3 to 4 years,” the senior research associate told Scene. “For us, we’re really interested in attacking the structural forces that cause racial segregation. None of us in this agency do much about zoning but we had heard enough that we thought that it probably contributed to race and class segregation. We’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”
Lepley told Scene that the fair housing community often talks about the impact of zoning codes but seeing the concrete evidence will now allow them to speak openly with cities and the county about how they can make their jurisdictions more accessible and equitable.
Does that mean that single-family homes and homeownership are inherently racist? Lepley is quick to discourage that sort of rhetoric.
“On social media people can be really incendiary about that issue, and thats not what this is about. It’s very important to distinguish between the structure of the single family house and the land-use regulation type which is the exclusive single-family use district. The purpose of it is class homogeneity and that class is the white, middle and upper class. Almost 60 percent of the county is zoned so that the most preferential use is only single-family homes. The result of that is exclusion.”
Several cities buck the usual trend of low-income and non-White families moving mostly to areas that have mixed-housing options. Specifically, the majority of Lakewood’s developed land is zoned for multi-family use while only 4 percent of Bedford Heights and only 6.7 percent of Maple Heights, both majority African American communities, are zoned for multi-family use. This pattern could be due to the combined impact of Southern and Eastern settlement patterns as well as the relative affordability of the homes in Maple Heights and Bedford Heights due to the smaller lot sizes.
Lepley notes that despite the exceptions, the pattern persists, especially when you reach the outer ring suburbs where single-family zoning is combined with large-lots, making housing unaffordable to many.
Another factor worth considering is that multi-family zoning can also produce unaffordable housing units, even when those spaces aren’t single-family homes. So, where do luxury apartments come in?
“I don’t understand enough about the apartment market to say that luxury apartments are a part of this specific process,” says Lepley. “But in a general sense, our housing market from top to bottom exists in a system [in which] some people are preferred and have power in that system and some people are exploited in that system. In this report, I was thinking about the intent of zoning codes and I think that for most developers, if they bought a bunch of tracts and built single family homes, the original intent of those homes was for sale and the assumption was that single family homes favor and are for owners, whether or not that’s the market that they fall in. Codes were implemented at the same time as development and it was clearly to protect the owners living in single family homes.”
In order to counteract the effects of exclusionary zoning, the report suggests a three-pronged approach: 1) state prohibition of exclusionary zoning practices; 2) county, state and federal level restrictions on funds for local services in areas that are exclusionary; and 3) a regional property tax sharing system that can equalize some of the disparate outcomes, such as highly inequitable public school systems.
For more information, read the full report here.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2020.
So, is it the City’s plan to completely eliminate ALL zoning in the entire City of Cleveland???
Apparently they’ve already commissioned a consultant six figures to study this. If City Clowncil has their way, they will rubberstamp their approval to whatever Taxin Jackson puts forth no matter how detrimental to the city!!!
So now if you want to work hard, save and buy a house of your own in a big lot, you have to accept a section 8 trash heap next door.
Got it.
Private land developers were the ones who employed covenants to restrict who could purchase a single family home in a particular development. The fact that the zoning only allowed single family houses has nothing to do with that.
Redlining, or the process by which the government graded the quality of neighborhoods by age of housing, quality of schools, safety, demographic makeup, etc., made conventional financing and insurance more difficult or even impossible is more at fault for segregating neighborhoods by race than zoning itself. If zoning by itself is responsible for segregation, it would be economic segregation because of things like lot size, minimum dwelling unit size, etc.
What modern critics of zoning tend to forget is how destructive real estate developers and industry were to decent, old, innercity neighborhoods suffering the pressure of industrial and commercial expansion and crowding. Eventually, the real estate development industry created the system by which individuals could build equity and wealth through a mortgage. It is the denial of the ability to qualify for a mortgage, the inadequacy of income, and private developer’s restrictive covenants more than zoning itself that has created the current problem. Critics of zoning regulations tend to be pro-development real-estate investors and developers (think Donald Trump), who want to get rid of any regulations that might decrease their profits and ability to exploit land and people.
Cleveland’s old zoning code required adequate space around dwelling units, including multi-family dwelling units so that there would be natural light and ventilation for the residents and so that the developers would not build buildings that were crowded too closely together… the attempt now is to get rid of those requirements and pack-in the boxy houses and apartments, leaving no room for light and air and no room for trees among the buildings.
Hannah, you’re scum to write this. Why don’t you live next to the scum and see how good your life is.
Putting rotten apples in a good barrel only rots the other apples. Wise up Hannah. It’s a fact. Cuyahoga county deteriorates because of the constant spreading of the rot in the name of equality. That’s pure bullshit and you know it. You’re pretty rotten to write this stuff. Shame on you.
@stop making excuses not everyone on vouchers turns their home into a trash heap, from your comment i can yell you have probably live out beyond the inner ring suburbs never even lived next to some one who was using a voucher to find better schools and safer neighborhoods. This will probably go over your head but if someone can move out to the suburbs, send their child to well funded schools, that child can go on to college maybe even get a writing job at scene or the plain dealer and move back to the city to buy a home next to the trash heap where you lay your head and write a scathing editorial about the terrible garbage person living next door…oh, I see what you did there.