[apoverton]

Something that is not touched on in the post but the book The Color of Law touches on in depth is how single family zoning has strong racist motivations. There are many Suburban areas that had the exclusion of black people as a requirement for Federal financial support. These include areas such as Stanford/Palo Alto and Long Island in NY but the list is numerous.

[rayiner]

That is a great book. There are so many things people don’t know, such has how FDR’s WPA tore down integrated neighborhoods and replaces them with segregated ones: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen...

> In Langston Hughes’ autobiography, he describes how he lived in an integrated neighborhood in Cleveland. His best friend in high school was Polish. He dated a Jewish girl. That neighborhood in Cleveland was razed by the WPA, which built two segregated [ones], one for African-Americans, one for whites. The Depression gave the stimulus for the first civilian public housing to be built. Were it not for that policy, many of these cities might have developed with a different residential pattern.

[andrewtbham]

FTA: "The progressive left has discovered that single-family zoning has racist underpinnings. That’s great, because we should now have no problem finding common cause for repealing this most distorting of regulations, one that the federal government never should have forced cities to adopt to begin with."

[salawat]

Since when has zoning ever had anything to do with the Feds short of Department of the Interior/Bureau of Land Management?

I'll accept at one time public works implementation of utility infrastructure may have skewed things, but I was pretty sure issues of zoning were predominantly local affairs.

[wolrah]

> Since when has zoning ever had anything to do with the Feds short of Department of the Interior/Bureau of Land Management?

What is it with this thread and not reading the article?

"The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance.

These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

[pzone]

It is briefly mentioned at the end of the article as a way to find common cause with the left on this issue.

[cheez]

Wow

[godelzilla]

[flagged]

[dang]

Would you please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? It's against the rules because it destroys what this site exists for, and we ban accounts that do it regardless of which ideology they favor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[godelzilla]

This website is extremely ideological. It's just primarily tech bro ideology. This post is from The American Conservative, a proudly ideological right-wing publication. By eliminating dissent you're only making the echo chamber louder.

[dang]

Nobody is eliminating dissent. Threads on divisive topics are filled with disagreement. It's flamewar comments that are the problem, because flamewars are so stupid, so predictable, and so nasty. They're the worst thing that group dynamics lead to on internet forums. On HN, we want thoughtful, curious conversation. If you don't want to post in that spirit, please don't post. If you're interested in using the site as intended, please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit to heart.

I have no idea what "tech bro ideology" is but whatever politics you favor, I can give you a long list of comments bitterly complaining that HN is dominated by it and the mods are secretly conspiring to suppress everybody else. Edit: actually here you go—see the list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23807579

All such comments are the same—the righties say it and the lefties say it, everyone says it. It is pure cognitive bias.