When Terry Taplin was a local college student in Berkeley, California, he and his partner were forced to move out of the city to find an affordable place to live. They packed their bags and moved to South San Francisco with a friend and the friend’s mom, an experience that Taplin described during an Urban Institute webinar last week as “terrifying” since there’s a saying in Berkeley that once you leave, you never come back.

Taplin, now a member on the Berkeley City Council, eventually did move back to the city. But he said it struck him that as “a college town that is leading the world on all these justice issues ⁠— a beacon of inclusion and progress ⁠— why would it be impossible for these two young people to find an apartment?”

″It’s because most of the city is zoned for single-family homes and that was deliberate,” he said.

Taplin said the district he represents has a historically Black and brown working-class population and experienced disinvestment and has been downzoned — allowing reduced housing density — and is experiencing gentrification. His office is pushing for land-use reform to readdress what he described as a “legacy” of “segregation” in Berkeley.

Living in cities across the U.S. has increasingly become unaffordable. Home prices have surged, contributing to many renters falling behind on their payments or being evicted. Experts say the nationwide housing crisis is largely due to housing inventory not keeping pace with growing populations.

Redlining maps of the 1930s — in which the Federal Housing Administration and other entities refused to insure mortgages in or near Black neighborhoods — are comparable to zoning maps today, said Yonah Freemark, senior research associate of metropolitan housing and communities policy at the Urban Institute. The “historically Whitest, wealthiest communities throughout the country,” he said, often have the fewest provisions allowing affordable housing and ban everything but single-family homes.

Freemark was part of an Urban Institute team that recently launched a website that provides basic information for local policymakers and community leaders about the basics of zoning and how it affects racial equity.

When reforming zoning to promote racial equity, local, state and federal leaders need to think beyond the basic zoning maps, said Freemark.

For instance, rules such as variances, conditional uses, or zoning changes that allow developers to get around baseline regulations are often applied inequitably, he said. And parking requirements or impact fees can make affordable housing projects very difficult. Review and approval systems that local governments use can also, in many cases, make building multifamily housing projects challenging, according to Freemark.

Lastly, he advised local leaders to think about who the people actually making choices in their communities are. “Who’s on the planning board and are they representative of the community at large?” Freemark asked.

Read the full article about fixing zoning problems by Danielle McLean at Smart Cities Dive.