Yes, remnants of discriminatory urban planning remain

The way we build cities reflects how we view ourselves— and how we view others. For decades, zoning bylaws and restrictive covenants have worked to keep parts of North America’s cities white, relegating racialized people to specific, segregated areas and baking inequality into our housing systems.

It has been well-established that American cities used zoning laws to enforce racial segregation. According to a January 2021 working paper from the U.S. National Bureau for Economic Research, “real estate developers had used restrictive covenants as early as the first decades of the nineteenth century on tracts of houses built on the urban periphery or in suburbs. These deed restrictions, passed from developer to homeowner, explicitly forbade commercial uses and beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the selling of the house to racial and religious minorities… [Then,] as the twentieth century wore on, white homeowners increasingly turned to more formal tools of exclusion and neighborhood control, particularly zoning.”

But Canada has a very similar history. In a 2012 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on municipal exclusion, author Ian Skelton noted that, “the practice by municipalities of using controls on land use to constrain their social composition is a long standing one in Canada…In Canada several authors have pointed to experiences, in a number of cities, of municipal controls such as zoning regulations which are operationalized to preserve high land and dwelling values, and to ensure that areas are developed and maintained for affluent groups.”

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