Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love It

Abstract

Everybody, in the academic/activist world at least, seems to hate exclusionary zoning (EZ). In this intervention, I question this prevalent sentiment, especially as held by urban/housing scholars dedicated to the pursuit of social (or housing) justice. I find that the effort to curtail EZ—the Anti-Exclusionary Zoning (Anti-EZ) Project—embraces a set of pernicious normative values giving rise to sociopolitical outcomes far more detrimental to social justice than EZ’s actual adverse effects. Most saliently, while the practice of EZ is often a manifestation of the ubiquitous and enduring presence of racism in America, the Anti-EZ Project inflicts an even greater degree of racialized harm upon the disadvantaged. I thus find that, strategically, the Anti-EZ Project stands in polar opposition to what the pursuit of social/racial justice demands, and I briefly sketch the basic contours of this alternative strategy, pointing to, inter alia, some affinities with the Movement for Black Lives platform.