Book Review - The Color of Law
This is the first entry in our Book Review series. In this series, we review a book on urbanism and cities and try to apply its lessons to Pittsburgh.
Today, we are reviewing Richard Rothstein’s book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America”
Every American city, Pittsburgh included, is deeply segregated. There are Black and mostly Black neighborhoods. There are white and mostly white neighborhoods.
In his 2017 book, “The Color of Law”, Richard Rothstein argues that this segregation is not accidental or incidental, but as a result of government policies intended to cause segregation. Specifically, zoning laws.
“Segregation in every metropolitan area in this country was created by racially explicit government policy, designed to create racial boundaries”
The 9 minute YouTube video below, compiled by NowThis out of talks Rothstein has given, summarizes the argument of his book neatly.
A central thesis of Richard Rothstein's "The Color of Law" is that zoning was adopted to enforce segregation without explicitly referring to race.
By zoning certain areas of a city with large minimum lot sizes and big setbacks, those areas could be certain to have a severely restricted supply of housing and require a large amount of land to buy a house, pushing up housing prices, simultaneously enriching the homeowners (at the expense of the rest of the city, since infrastructure costs per capita go down and tax revenue per capita goes up as density increases, so cities pay more to maintain these areas and receive less in revenue than they do from similar areas with less restrictive zoning) AND intentionally exclude poorer groups, which are disproportionately Black.
Let’s apply this thesis to the city of Pittsburgh. We’ll discuss three maps.
The first is the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) map of Pittsburgh. The HOLC was a New Deal government backed corporation to provide refinancing for home buyers in the late 1930s. (The maps are often called "Redlining maps" - though this is a misnomer, the actual FHA "redline maps" had red lines on them [See Footnote - Redlining], the FHA maps predated the HOLC maps by a few years, and those maps were destroyed by the FHA during the Nixon administration)
The neighborhoods on the map are colored by how risky they were regarded as places to offer loans for buying houses. Red means the neighborhood is no good, Green means easy access to low interest capital. You can click through and see the comments by the map makers on what made an area good or bad, including the level of infiltration by “Negroes” and other “undesirables”.
Pittsburgh zoning map
The second map is the modern zoning map of Pittsburgh. It is much more fragmented than the HOLC map, but many of the contours are the same. The most exclusive neighborhoods, where it’s most difficult to buy or build a home, are zoned “R1D - VL” - single family residential, detached, very low density. To build a home here, you need to be able to purchase a lot of at least 8,000 square feet, and you are only allowed to build one housing unit on the lot - no ADUs, duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, etc. No commericial buildings are allowed.
In comparison, UNC - Urban Neighborhood Commercial - is one of our less restrictive districts. To build a home in this district, there are no minimum lot sizes and no setbacks, you can build duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings, and it is mixed use, so some commercial buildings are allowed.
You can click through to the map and see what zoning districts are in what neighborhoods.
Racial Dot Map of Pittsburgh
The third map is the racial dot map of Pittsburgh based on the 2020 census. Each dot represents 6 people. The legend on the left hand site of the map provides the color coding for each race. Pittsburgh’s two largest racial groups are white people (colored brown on this map) and Black people (colored yellow on this map). You can click through to examine more closely which neighborhoods have which racial makeups.
We can see from these maps that there is a clear correlation between the HOLC maps and initial segregation of the city to the modern zoning code and current racial segregation of the city. Modern day neighborhoods with exclusive zoning are much whiter and more likely to be colored Green or Blue on the HOLC map than modern day neighborhoods with less exclusive zoning. And modern day neighborhoods that are mostly or largely Black are less exclusively zoned today and more likely to be colored Red or Yellow on the HOLC map.
Let’s explore one specific example of intentionally racist housing restrictions that slowly morphed into the modern day zoning code.
Schenley Farms
Pittsburgh's Schenley Farms (their website) is a part of the neighborhood of Oakland, with expensive, single family homes on large lots. Initially, this area was part of the large estate inherited by Mary Schenley from her grandfathers William Croghan and James O'Hara. Homes started being built there in the 1880s and 1890s. Since they were built before the zoning code existed, the area was initially bound by intentionally racially exclusive deed restrictions. By 1914, the plots were mostly built out to where they are today. By 1928, it was zoned Single Family to replace the expiring deed restrictions.
By the 1930s, it is section B11 on the HOLC map, which notes its lack of infiltration by "Negroes" and other "undesirables". You can compare it with neighboring areas C14, Schenley Heights, ("d. Negro - Yes; 10% e. Infiltration of - Negro") and D10, Hill District ("Concentration of negro and undesirables, very congested.")
The 1958 zoning code continued these exclusive practices and further supplemented those practices by making it a historic district in 1982. The newest version of the zoning code, the 1999 version, continues to designate it R1D-VL (Single Family Residential, Very Low density) - the most restrictive of the zoning subdistricts. That requires minimum lot sizes of 8,000 square feet, setbacks of 30 feet from exterior side, front, and rear, and height restrictions of 40 feet, with only one housing unit per lot. In comparison, the neighboring Schenley Heights (predominantly R2-M) and Hill District (RM-M) are much less restrictive.
The 2020 racial dot map reveals it to be overwhelmingly white, with a Black population of approximately 0, a stark difference from the neighboring Schenley Heights (predominantly R2-L) and Hill District (RM-M), which are overwhelmingly black. [See Footnote - Schenley Farms Census]
Finally, homes in Schenley Farms regularly sell for more than 1 million dollars, while homes in Schenley Heights or the Hill District are frequently less than $200k.
The key takeaway here is that the currently existing zoning of Very Low and Low density subdistricts enforces the exclusionary and racist (as well as economically inequitable) policies of the past ~130 years.
Recently it was suggested to us that city council members might be looking into reducing setbacks and minimum lot sizes in Moderate, High, and Very High density subdistricts. And that's good! Minimum lot sizes and setbacks are bad and ought to be abolished or at least reduced as much as possible.
But only reducing them in Moderate, High, and Very High density subdistricts while leaving Very Low and Low density subdistricts untouched exacerbates the effects of exclusionary zoning.
It would be far better to have all 25 residential subdistricts combined into one, with no minimum lot sizes and no setbacks - I propose either RM-VH (Residential Multifamily - Very High Density) or UNC (Urban Neighborhood Commercial).
Sources
Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. "The effects of the 1930s HOLC “redlining” maps." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 13, no. 4 (2021): 355-392.
ArcGIS. (2020). 2020 Racial Dot Map [Map]. Retrieved from https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=30d2e10d4d694b3eb4dc4d2e58dbb5a5
Breen, Deborah. "Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America; Renewing Inequality: Family Displacements through Urban Renewal." (2019): 548-550. https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/
Fishback, Price V., Jessica LaVoice, Allison Shertzer, and Randall P. Walsh. "The HOLC maps: How race and poverty influenced real estate professionals’ evaluation of lending risk in the 1930s." The Journal of Economic History 83, no. 4 (2023): 1019-1056.
Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing, 2017.
[Footnote - Redlining] "The map of FHA activity in Greensboro in Figure 3 has a feature the other figures do not: a red line that roughly bisects the city of Greensboro in half. We found this red line drawn in pencil on one map of the National Archive’s FHA records collection. This red line is a surprising anomaly because the FHA appears to have systematically destroyed its records documenting whatever neighborhood ratings it used. While the National Archives contain multitudes of maps drawn by the FHA, these maps depict various bits of data, not neighborhood risk ratings. But this one map for Greensboro has a red line, with no explanation. Nevertheless, the meaning seems clear enough because nearly every FHA-insured loan was located on one side of the line." (Fishback et al 2022)
[Footnote - Schenley Farms Census] The 2020 census counts a total of 156 non-hispanic white people, 22 Asian people, 10 Hispanic people, 3 Black people and 17 people of other races or mixed race in Census Blocks 3003, 3004, and 3006 of Tract 5620000. It also notes that for privacy reasons, a small amount of noise has been added into the data.
[Endnote] I follow the AP’s style guide in choosing to leave white lowercase while capitalizing Black.
By Jack Billings
