The Case for Ending Apartment Bans

Laura Loe Bernstein (@sharethecities) and Henry Kraemer (@HenryKraemer)

There’s a stubborn disagreement right now over the roots of America’s housing crisis, and whether runaway rents can be eased by ending apartment bans. We can all see that rising rents have far outpaced wages, just one of the many ways crony capitalism squeezes the working class, poor folks, communities of color, and the shrinking middle class. Millions of Americans need the housing crisis to end, and for the United States to establish housing as a human right. This crisis was born of a willful, elite effort to exclude the masses from decent neighborhoods by banning the apartments we can afford. The crisis cannot end without undoing that sin.

We need a Housing Guarantee in this country, to ensure that everybody has a home they can afford, and can rest easy knowing they will never be priced out of it. That means:

Robust social housing options accessible to all people. The ability for people to choose to opt-out of our broken for-profit housing systems and into a federally supported system that favors limited equity co-ops, community land trusts, and a massive investment in public social housing yet unseen in the United States (but common in Europe). Year-to-year rent stabilization and presumption of indefinite tenure to give renters peace of mind that their landlords won’t spike their rents or no-cause evict them. Cash assistance or solidarity funds to help people who need it to pay their rent. Ending apartment bans to stop perpetuating the race and class separation that resulted from past land use wrongs.

Successfully enacting these first four priorities is nearly or entirely impossible if we do not end apartment bans. Also known as exclusionary zoning, apartment bans restrict new home-building to the sort of single-family houses most commonly associated with suburbs and affluent neighborhoods. Apartment bans are extraordinarily widespread, and render it illegal to build duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and other spaces where multiple families can live nestled together (and often more cheaply) on the same plot of land. These bans have been central to the widespread disparities in access to the best parks, transit, scenic views and amenities, while consigning the lower classes to underfunded schools, environmental racism and generational wealth gaps.

Without a housing guarantee that opens the door to every neighborhood, we cannot build geographically equitable social housing, therefore new development will continue to segregate our communities by class and race.

Legalizing apartments in every community in the United States will not be enough. We need strong rental regulations to protect residents of these new apartments from exploitation and harm from their landlords. We need universally accessible public housing options to give renters the freedom to ditch their landlords if they want. But that starts with making space for apartments, especially in the neighborhoods wealthy property owners have long hoarded for themselves.

Without abolishing apartment bans we are left with very little space in growing cities to place social housing. Let’s say we raise taxes on the rich as much as we dream, and set about to build social housing apartments. Right now, apartments – market rate or not – are illegal in much of the useable land in American cities (only 17% of Seattle’s buildable land allows apartments, for instance). Where will we put the new social housing if apartment bans remain? (And it will take years to build the social housing we need; in the meantime let’s at least build some places for middle class and working class people to live.)

Too few policymakers who care about working people, too few homes built for working people.

Numerous studies, as well as lived experience, point to a massive housing shortage in America. Experts estimate we are roughly 7 million rental homes short of what is needed to house everybody affordably from coast to coast (though clearly regional economic disparities have led some cities to have rows of vacant houses while many others are home to ever-growing homeless camps). In that context, with millions of Americans fighting over scraps, landlords can charge tenants whatever they want. This power imbalance leads to desperate economic and mental health outcomes. Nearly half of renters are paying over 30% of their incomes for shelter - including well over half of Black and Latinx renters.

As with every economic ill afflicting US residents, this did not just happen. It is the fault of intentional government disinvestment and segregation at all levels, targeted to pad the comforts of a privileged few at the expense of the basic needs of the many.

It begins, like most problems in America, with white supremacy. Even if you set aside that all of the land in question was stolen from Native Americans, throughout our national history, land use has focused on excluding people of color.

In 1917, the Supreme Court struck down city ordinances that explicitly banned Black people from certain neighborhoods. In response, then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover convened a committee (largely comprised of segregationists) who invented modern exclusionary zoning, allowing neighborhoods to ban apartments and plexes. By keeping their neighborhoods off-limits to anyone who could not afford a full plot of land on their own, white wealthier folks were able to legally exclude the vast majority of Black families (as well as working class whites) from their neighborhoods. Just as the federal government explicitly pushed single-family zoning to prevent a socialist revolution, they pushed apartment bans to keep the classes separate. This birthed the invisibly gated communities that are still with us today.

Not only did Herbert Hoover foster the runaway capitalism that brought us the Great Depression, but he brought us the apartment bans that continue to keep working people out of livable neighborhoods around the country.

In the context of de facto segregation, apartments were consigned to poor inner cities. But at least housing was still being built. After World War II, white veterans got cheap loans to move to the suburbs, and new, segregated housing projects went up for black veterans and their families to rent. It was not until the mid 1970s when construction began to dip, as Nixon declared a moratorium on new public housing projects, and governments at all levels turned against all homes that did not fit the white suburban ideal. Since then, even as the US population has grown, we have fallen further and further behind the need for new homes, and the share of cost-burdened renters doubled.

This happens to roughly coincide with when widespread prosperity in America ended and rampant income inequality began. Broad-based income growth ended in the mid 1970s, just as investment in building apartments did.