Scott > Scott's Quotes

“To prevent lower-income African Americans from living in neighborhoods where middle-class whites resided, local and federal officials began in the 1910s to promote zoning ordinances to reserve middle-class neighborhoods for single-family homes that lower-income families of all races could not afford. Certainly, an important and perhaps primary motivation of zoning rules that kept apartment buildings out of single-family neighborhoods was a social class elitism that was not itself racially biased. But there was also enough open racial intent behind exclusionary zoning that it is integral to the story of de jure segregation.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court’s Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“President Warren G. Harding’s secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover, organized an Advisory Committee on Zoning to develop a manual explaining why every municipality should develop a zoning ordinance. The advisory committee distributed thousands of copies to officials nationwide. A few months later the committee published a model zoning law. The manual did not give the creation of racially homogenous neighborhoods as the reason why zoning should become such an important priority for cities, but the advisory committee was composed of outspoken segregationists whose speeches and writings demonstrated that race was one basis of their zoning advocacy.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“Because the Buchanan decision had made it “impossible to find an appropriate legal formula” for segregation, Freund said that zoning masquerading as an economic measure was the most reasonable means of accomplishing the same end.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“Terrified by the 1917 Russian revolution, government officials came to believe that communism could be defeated in the United States by getting as many white Americans as possible to become homeowners—the idea being that those who owned property would be invested in the capitalist system.”
― Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

“The neighbors protected a historic church building, kept the scale of the new construction relatively modest, and preserved open space and a grand old beech tree. Meanwhile, five hundred people submitted their names to get on the list for twenty new affordable apartments”
― Katherine Levine Einstein, Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis