To end housing racism, more cities should be like Berkeley

The Berkeley City Council is having an honest conversation about race and housing policy. It’s especially fitting because Berkeley is the literal birthplace of exclusionary zoning, and now council members are leading in bringing an end to a policy rooted in racism.

Berkeley is putting the rest of the country on notice: It’s time to reckon with the racist origins of so many of today’s housing policies, which is a history that has long been papered over.

In 1968, Congress theoretically made racist housing policies illegal. From that moment on, American cities began reworking their explicitly racist laws into implicitly racist ones, weaving a net of exclusionary policies that hold back housing production. Piece by piece, communities built an invisible system of structural racism that has made all of us poorer.

When cities began the process of banning new apartments, they used terms like “preserving neighborhood character” — language that is still used today to justify policies that keep our neighborhoods segregated. Across the country, whiter neighborhoods successfully maintained their character of exclusion.

This net of restrictive housing policies did more than just keep us segregated. These policies became so intractable that they created a chronic housing shortage. While more and more communities were preserved in amber, megaprojects negotiated their way forward in the neighborhoods with the least political power.

Formerly redlined neighborhoods saw the development of shiny glass towers, while the housing shortage drove low-income people out of their communities altogether. A chronic housing shortage has driven people into ever-longer commutes and ever-deeper poverty. It’s a human rights catastrophe, a climate catastrophe and an economic catastrophe — and it’s something we can actually fix.

Vice Mayor Lori Droste, Mayor Jesse Arreguín, Councilmember Terry Taplin, Councilmember Ben Bartlett, and Councilmember Rigel Robinson, have initiated a process that will force Berkeley to examine how its housing policies perpetuate segregation and climate change, and outline what they are going to do to change that.

All of this has been instigated by what is known as California’s Housing Element process. For the first time in a generation, the state of California is asking its cities to get serious about building housing. Through a complex process, the state hands out minimum housing production goals and cities must change their policies to meet those goals.

The Housing Element process has been seen as the “local control” way to get more housing built. But now that “local control” means cities get to choose where they build housing not if they build housing. Some city councils are freaking out.

In Palo Alto, the City Council is strategizing about its objections and potential lawsuits. In Southern California, city councils are pooling their money to file frivolous lawsuits that basically amount to “um, but we really don’t want to.” They are doing what cities have done for decades: Try to come up with elaborate ways to avoid building housing. And some city councils are putting their heads in the sand and ignoring it for as long as possible.

But in Berkeley, they are not hiding. State law requires cities to “affirmatively further fair housing” through their Housing Element updates. Unlike other cities, Berkeley is taking that directive seriously. By examining both their history of racist housing policies and their current policies that perpetuate segregation, they are following both the spirit and the letter of the law.

Berkeley is the first to take these actions, but it cannot be the only one. After decades of notorious NIMBYism in Berkeley, it’s exciting to say: I hope more cities in California decide to be like Berkeley.