Matt Yglesias makes an argument that's been strangely absent from progressive discourse: the strongest case for zoning reform isn't economic efficiency — it's racial justice. Housing policy, he argues, is where structural racism runs deepest, not criminal justice. This isn't a new claim; scholars like Richard Rothstein and Jessica Trounstine have made it for years. But Yglesias goes further, suggesting the progressive movement has systematically ignored this history — and that the political coalition needed to actually pass zoning reform may be incompatible with the racial justice framing.
The Forgotten Precedent
The first major anti-segregation victory at the Supreme Court wasn't Brown v. Board of Education. It was Buchanan v. Warley in 1917 — a case striking down explicit racial zoning, decided all the way before the heyday of the civil rights movement. Yglesias argues this history matters because 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. Precisely because this happened before the Civil Rights Act, it was not unwound by the events of the early 1960s and remains a huge deal today.
It's relatively easy to find books like Rothstein's "The Color of Law" or Trounstine's "Segregation by Design" that are making these points about land use and racial inequality. It's not like this is some big secret. So why isn't it a bigger activist focus?
The Coalition Problem
One answer is that the YIMBY movement has tended to move away from emphasizing the racial justice angle. YIMBYism originated in some very progressive cities, so the question of how to win left-wing people over to the cause loomed large in the early days of the movement. That involved a lot of appeals to racial justice considerations, which some people criticized on the grounds that it's bad overall politics. 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 of the big land-use-reform success stories have involved bipartisan coalitions that see it as a win-win policy change, and injecting concepts like structural racism into the mix is not helpful for that. Connecticut for a while was an outlier on this and the state's main housing-advocacy group was literally called Desegregate CT, but they have recently renamed themselves Pro-Homes Connecticut after many months of thoughtful conversations with coalition members.
Yglesias acknowledges that Connecticut's pattern of land use policy is promoting segregation. But it's also true that their pattern of land use policy is making public sector pensions hard to sustain and putting upward pressure on property tax rates. The point is to build as broad a coalition around the policy goal as possible.
Why Criminal Justice Took Priority
The other thing is that unfair racial profiling by police officers is a really big deal, specifically to relatively successful African-Americans. They're the ones who are most likely to find themselves looking "out of place" in the "wrong" neighborhoods and falling under suspicion. Every Black man Yglesias meets in media or politics or academia has stories about this — up to and including Senator Tim Scott — and many of the Black women worry about their sons and brothers and husbands, so it looms large in the discourse.
But there's another dynamic at play: it's always easier to push yourself into lanes where you're avoiding coalition tensions. Twenty years ago, it was mainstream to say that improving K-12 school quality was an important racial justice issue. But there's no way to have a robust agenda for improving K-12 schools that doesn't involve some tensions with teachers unions.
If you focus on housing reform, you end up in some battles with environmentalists, but mostly you end up in a conceptual battle with people who don't like to admit that less regulation and more capitalism is sometimes the answer. If you focus on criminal justice reform, of course, you get tensions with police union stakeholders. Because cops are right-wing and teachers are left-wing, in some sense it would be more reasonable to pick a fight with teachers — who are still going to vote for Democrats anyway — than with cops. But from a coalition-management standpoint, it's the opposite.
Housing policy was built on racist foundations, and we never tore them up. We just stopped talking about it.
Critics might note that framing housing as the primary driver of structural racism risks minimizing the very real harms of policing and mass incarceration. The two systems reinforce each other, and some activists argue that criminal justice reform has more direct, immediate impacts on Black communities than zoning policy.
Bottom Line
Yglesias's core argument is strong: the academic consensus on housing and racial inequality is clear, and the activist movement hasn't caught up. His biggest vulnerability is strategic — he admits the racial justice framing might hurt the political coalition needed to actually pass reform. That tension is unresolved, and it's the most interesting part of the piece.