The Color of Law
Widely heralded as a "masterful" (Washington Post) and "essential" (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, "virtually indispensable" study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
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36recommend
69mentions
46people
2017–2026years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein is another good source on the topic, covering how racist governmental polices played a role.
- I'd recommend looking up the existence of a book called Arbitrary Lines, and another called The Color of Law. If you read just the synopsis of each of those, I think you'll see that there are sources out there you're not aware of right now that offer perspectives that are well researched and scholarly and may have strong answers to what you believe.
- >Communities did not turn to zoning in response to infill being disallowed.
??? Zoning is the mechanism to disallow infill, it can't come in response to it. The book "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein covers how zoning as used as a new tool for racial exclusion in its third chapter. Indeed, modern socal remains a highly segregated area thanks to zoning decisions that ensure working class people, who are predominantly nonwhite, will find no suitable housing they might afford in the various lily white strongholds.
- In the US, laws were only for the affluent, male, white class anyways. Richard Rothstein wrote a great book about it called "Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Law
It's just that the middle class is no longer going to be the "In" group.
- This depends on how you define ROI. Car infrastructure and lack of density reduces tax revenue for cities and strains infrastructure.
There are other human benefits to reducing car traffic and use in favor of public transportation: * Reduces air pollution * Noise pollution * Allows a focus on human centric urban planning * Allows for higher density commercial and residential increasing tax revenue * Reduces pedestrian traffic injury
Well done video essays:
Parking minimums https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=xAxUHCA0xmxCIZWg
Noise pollution https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?si=Eov6X3Z3I1T0l_bd
Infrastructure strain https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=KrVJ3tDaODHNGBwm
More on Infrastructure and Sprawl https://youtu.be/SfsCniN7Nsc?si=0ulEtryX4K6Ysy-N
Articles:
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/public-transportation#:~:...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379358672_Vehicle_n...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/urban-sprawl/Costs-of-urban...
Climate town videos are all well researched and provide an enormous amount of follow-up content from their sources.
Generally, I care about all of the above and I perceive investments in public transportation to have a higher ROI.
Some extra historical context is helpful too: https://youtu.be/oOttvpjJvAo?si=ZGXF81qJnD_Fgw0L
The book The Color of Law by Rothstein is worth a read.
In the end there is a balance between public transportation and car dependency and right now the scales are leaning too much in favor of cars.
- These are challenges for people sharing housing, but they're not the legal reason why letting out rooms is illegal. Prohibitions on multifamily housing are all rooted in racial animus. It's the entire reason we have single-family zoning (a related legal proscription), which emerged very shortly after the Buchanan v Warley decision that outlawed outright racial zoning. There's a long and well-documented history of this, all the way down to regulations targeting multi-generational households (Black and Latino families are more likely to have a grandparent or aunt living alongside a younger family).
"The Color of Law" is a good starter read here.
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