Claudia Mesnil Harris recently went live on Facebook (video here) about the upcoming Huntsville D1 city council and school board runoff election. Specifically, people in D1 are concerned about what relocating an alternative school will do to their property values.
The whole thing reminds me of a community meeting in “coexist” San Francisco where I heard wealthy, older homeowners say some of the most racist, classist, ignorant statements I’ve ever heard in real life about the idea of the city opening a navigation center for people experiencing homelessness in the vicinity of their investments, sorry, I meant homes.
This whole idea of people voting and lobbying to “protect muh property values” from anything associated with the “wrong kind” of people is deeply ugly, selfish, and short-sighted. It is a major part of why US neighborhoods are becoming increasingly economically segregated. And it’s a large part of why today’s neighborhoods are even more segregated by race than by income.
Since, in the US, zip code is destiny, residential segregation widens the racial wealth gap.
“Segregation is at the heart of racial disparities, including inequalities in public education, health and safety,” wrote University of Minnesota researchers.
This desire to exclude “undesirables” in order to prop up property values fuels support for exclusionary zoning. “Propping up property values is at the heart of why exclusionary zoning programs have been created in the first place, and a reduction in those values is the central fear about curtailing snob zoning,” wrote researcher Richard D. Kahlenberg.
But these building restrictions and the segregation they create entrenches intergenerational inequality while contributing to our low and declining rates of economic mobility.
“The life prospects of a young American depend more on the income and education of his or her parents than in almost any other advanced country,” writes Joseph E. Stiglitz for Scientific American. “When poor-boy-makes-good anecdotes get passed around in the media, that is precisely because such stories are so rare.”
Exclusionary zoning was created by and for white American homeowners to prevent non-white people from buying homes in their all-white neighborhoods and legally enforce racial residential segregation. But clearly anyone can lobby to exclude whoever and whatever they deem undesirable.
The fact that Americans depend on their homes not just for shelter, but as a financial investment that only grows in value by becoming less affordable for the next generation is deeply problematic. But the fact that homeowners can legally dictate what others can do with their property creates a situation where one person’s ability to retire competes with another person’s ability to access quality schools and jobs. It’s a deeply inefficient and immoral system that we never should have created.
But, as it stands, anyone caught doing this kind of politics in public should be informed about what exactly it is that they’re doing. And if they persist, well, to quote Maya Angelou – who, as a Black sex worker, is exactly the type of person these people would have tried to kick out of their neighborhoods – “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”