How cities can ‘uncrack’ zoning codes that fostered racial inequities
Source: Smart Cities Dive by Danielle McLean
City leaders from Berkeley, California, and Louisville, Kentucky, said they are trying to roll back restrictive zoning policies that have caused inequities, during an Urban Institute webinar.
When Terry Taplin was a local college student in Berkeley, California, he and his partner were forced to move out of the city to find an affordable place to live. They packed their bags and moved to South San Francisco with a friend and the friend’s mom, an experience that Taplin described during an Urban Institute webinar last week as “terrifying” since there’s a saying in Berkeley that once you leave, you never come back.
Taplin, now a member on the Berkeley City Council, eventually did move back to the city. But he said it struck him that as “a college town that is leading the world on all these justice issues — a beacon of inclusion and progress — why would it be impossible for these two young people to find an apartment?”
″It’s because most of the city is zoned for single-family homes and that was deliberate,” he said.