The racial justice case for zoning reform is stronger than many activists realize, Matt Yglesias argues. The housing movement has largely abandoned emphasizing racial justice to build broader coalitions — but this retreat has left a critical gap in progressive policy advocacy.
A quick look at history reveals something important: the first-ever big anti-segregation victory at the Supreme Court was actually a case striking down explicit racial zoning, decided in 1917 — well before the civil rights movement's peak. Land use policy in the United States was set up under conditions of deep and profound racism, often with the explicit goal of promoting de facto segregation.
Because this happened before the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, it was not unwinded by those landmark reforms and remains a huge deal today. Books like Richard Rothstein's "The Color of Law" and Jessica Trounstine's "Segregation by Design" make these points clearly. It's not some big secret.
So why isn't this a bigger activist focus?
Why Housing Reform Hasn't Centered Racial Justice
One answer is that the YIMBY movement has deliberately moved away from emphasizing the racial justice angle. YIMBYism originated in progressive cities, so the question of how to win left-wing people over loomed large. That involved appeals to racial justice — which some critics (including Yglesias) thought was bad politics overall.
The concern, as Yglesias frames it, is strategic: if people develop the impression that the purpose of zoning reform is to help African-Americans while making white people worse off, that's going to mean zoning reform doesn't happen. Most big land-use-reform success stories have involved bipartisan coalitions that see it as a win-win policy change. Injecting concepts like structural racism into the mix is not helpful for building that coalition.
Connecticut was an outlier — their main housing advocacy group was literally called Desegregate CT, but they recently renamed themselves Pro-Homes Connecticut after thoughtful conversations with coalition members. The pattern of land use policy in Connecticut is indeed promoting segregation and making property tax rates harder to sustain. But naming the organization after that goal would limit the coalition they'd need to actually win.
The other direction — over-emphasis on criminal justice reform — has different origins, Yglesias contends. It's always easier to push yourself into lanes where you're avoiding coalition tensions. Twenty years ago, it was mainstream to say improving K-12 school quality was an important racial justice issue. But there's no way to have a robust agenda for schools that doesn't involve some tensions with teachers unions.
If you focus on housing reform, you end up in battles with environmentalists but mostly conceptual battles with people who don't like admitting that less regulation and more capitalism is sometimes the answer. If you focus on criminal justice reform, you get tensions with police union stakeholders.
The Real Stakes
Unfair racial profiling by police officers is a really big deal to relatively successful African-Americans. They're the ones most likely to find themselves looking "out of place" in the "wrong" neighborhoods and falling under suspicion. Every Black man Yglesias has met in media or politics has stories about this — up to and including Senator Tim Scott. Many Black women worry about their sons and brothers and husbands, so it looms large in the discourse.
Yglesias holds relatively tough-on-crime views, but he maintains this is a legitimate complaint. The law-and-order community does itself a disservice by not acknowledging it as such.
Conversely, an important but actually kind of narrow complaint about racial profiling allowed people with fundamentally unsound views about crime and policing to hijack the banner of racial justice in a way that doesn't accord with real interests at play.
Critics might note that Yglesias's framing — treating racial justice messaging as mere coalition strategy rather than a moral imperative — risks reducing the lived experience of housing discrimination to a political calculation.
The point, Yglesias argues, is simply this: in electoral terms, all the juice is in moderating on key issues. Then if you win, you get to govern and you need to try to do a good job. The case for zoning reform through a racial justice lens isn't about politics — it's about acknowledging that housing policy was designed under racist conditions and still produces unequal outcomes today. That case exists, but it hasn't been made effectively enough to move the broader progressive movement. Some would argue, however, that the very coalition-building approach Yglesias favors has been tried for decades without producing the sweeping zoning reform he envisions, suggesting the incrementalist path has its own track record of failure.