Unlocking the “Gates” and Climbing Over the “Walls”: Opening up Exclusive Communities

Abstract

Well before gated communities began growing in the United States, many suburban municipalities could, and did, restrict who could live in them by using their zoning and land use powers. For example, requiring large minimum lot sizes and not allowing any multi-family housing made it impossible for lower-income people, who are disproportionately black, to reside in their community. These and other “exclusionary zoning” techniques have continued to be used by many suburbs to create non-visible, but highly effective, gates and walls to “protect” their middle and upper-middle class white residents from having “undesirable” people living near them. They have, thus, contributed greatly to the pattern of racial and economic segregation that has been found in most metropolitan areas in the United States since the mid-1960s. Since the late-1960s, civil rights activists have challenged such zoning regulations as discriminatory in a number of court cases with mixed results. The first effort to “open up the suburbs” via enacting a state law aimed at overcoming the effects of “snob zoning” was made in Massachusetts in 1969. Since then, civil rights and affordable housing activists in several other states have used this legislation as a model and have gotten similar “anti-snob zoning” laws passed by their legislatures. The Massachusetts statute, its impact on the supply and geography of affordable housing in that state, the opposition it has encountered, and how and why its proponents have been able to prevent it from being repealed or seriously weakened are the focus of this chapter.