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In the past few years the planning profession has begun to actively confront the inherent racism (intentional or not) of past planning practices in this country. Community planning and its zoning mechanism took hold in the early part of the 20th century as a way to address the serious health impacts of urban development. Cities had been growing haphazardly for centuries with little thought given to the impacts that factories and other polluting entities had on residents.

When the first plans and zoning codes were developed it seemed appropriate to separate the noxious uses from residential areas, but that soon grew to include full city plans that separated all distinctive uses from one another. What came to be known as 鈥淓uclidean zoning鈥� created distinct areas for industrial space, commercial space and residential space, but it went further and carved out distinct areas for different types of residential uses.

Over time what this produced were large areas of single-family housing separated from areas of apartments. In addition to the fact that houses are much more expensive than apartments, this was not a benign, color-blind process.

Accompanying the planning process were two very pernicious actions adopted by the real estate industry: neighborhood covenants and redlining. The worst of the covenants specifically excluded certain groups from living in a neighborhood, and home mortgage redlining steered nonwhites to other areas of town. Both have been ruled illegal, but the long-term consequences persist to this day, with significant housing segregation. The redevelopment of poor urban neighborhoods that started in the 1950s made situations worse by evicting people from their communities to make way for new and more expensive housing, which was once again mostly accessible only to white people.

Next time I鈥檒l discuss efforts under way to directly address this historical situation.