ONE hundred years ago, in a major advance for human dignity, the Supreme Court struck down a racial zoning law in Louisville, Ky., that prohibited nonwhites from moving into homes in majority-white areas.
Laws like these, which existed in numerous cities at the time, are part of a larger, shameful history of government-sponsored racial segregation. In Buchanan v. Warley, the court ruled that such ordinances violate the 14th Amendment and related statutes that “entitle a colored man to acquire property without state legislation discriminating against him solely because of his color.”
But this hardly ended racial discrimination in housing, as whites adopted biased policies like economic zoning that banned apartment buildings in areas designated for single-family homes, often adding minimum lot size requirements to boot. Because African-Americans were disproportionately low-income, economic zoning was in effect exclusionary, accomplishing much of the same results as explicit racial zoning.
