President Biden’s infrastructure plan has agitated limited-government types. It is outrageously expensive, exaggerates the crisis, and funds several programs that have nothing to do with infrastructure. But at least one of its proposals, enticing municipalities to relax outdated zoning rules, holds great promise for free-market proponents.
With the Supreme Court’s approval in 1926, suburbs across the country began using single-family and open-space requirements to preserve an aesthetic that by no accident kept out minorities and the working class. Prohibitions on multi-family dwellings used wealth disparities between WASPs and everyone else to keep the flight to the suburbs as well-to-do and white as possible. Deed covenants preempted selling homes to black and Jewish families, ensuring the market did not attract “unwelcome” neighbors with the economic means to move.
In 1948, the Court ruled these covenants unenforceable, and the explicit racism that motivated restrictive zoning is, fortunately, no longer in vogue. Yet those longstanding rules accomplished their original segregationist mission and zoning restrictions maintain those old residential patterns. From Seattle to Charlotte, many cities still reserve the majority of their land for single-family homes. For that matter, over 90 percent of zoned land in Connecticut is zoned single-family.
The housing part of Biden’s massive bill aims to help erode the single-family paradigm, offering local governments federal funds to improve neighborhood infrastructure in exchange for easing their archaic zoning rules. The White House’s immediate purpose is to relieve swollen demand in urban centers with more plentiful and therefore affordable housing in near-urban and suburban areas.
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