Why Seattle homeowners may unintentionally promote segregation

People who argue against rezoning in order to protect the character of their neighborhood may unknowingly be promoting segregation.

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Starting with the earliest land use implementation, Jessica Trounstine, associate professor of political science at UC Merced, found cities attempted to create neighborhoods exclusively for white people. Though that’s changed over time, there are still mechanisms in place that haven’t allowed total de-segregation.

That’s true in Seattle, Trounstine says, citing the data she used to write “Segregation by Design.”

“Seattle fits this pattern very well,” she told Seattle’s Morning News.

Segregation in Seattle “peaked” around 1950, she says. It began to decline, but not as dramatically as other cities.

The city’s land use regulations remain fairly restrictive, with many areas prohibiting anything more than single-family homes or low-density buildings. Just take a look at the city’s own zoning map, which is covered in single-family and lowrise zones. That’s a concern for a city suffering from an affordability problem that is pushing people either out of the area or onto the streets.

A self-described advocate for zoning changes in urban environments recently pointed out that people living in older neighborhoods often consider themselves to be guardians. They want future generations to have the same experience they did, so they fight change.

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“They want the same exact amount of parking on the street, the same amount of traffic to the grocery store, the same amount of people in the public schools. They want to preserve this very specific lifestyle that they’ve had and they feel like they’re the self-appointed protector of that lifestyle,” Laura Loe Bernstein explained.

That battle, however, may be misguided in a growing city like Seattle.

Density isn’t completely being ignored by city government. For example, Mayor Jenny Durkan recently announced a streamlined process for building backyard cottages. The hope is to incentivize homeowners to build more units and create more affordable housing.

The city has also studied upzoning many neighborhoods, allowing for more density. The problem with that, as The Seattle Times wrote in June, is that it may not do as much for the affordability problem as people think.

So what’s the solution?

Trounstine says the way to move past strict zoning laws — and unintentional segregation — is to take away the power to regulate land use from local governments.

Listen to the entire interview on the Aug. 2 edition of Seattle’s Morning News.

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