Racism and classism helped cause the national housing shortage. If Reno is going to solve its housing crisis, it is going to have to unwind decades of wrong-headed policies that sought to segregate our city by race and class, and that impeded the free market from meeting our demand for housing, creating environmentally damaging sprawl in the process.
The prime culprit here is single-family residential zoning (SFR). Cities hit upon SFR as an effective way to create racial segregation in the 1910s—first in Berkeley, Calif., of all places. Since African Americans were so effectively discriminated against in education and employment, few could purchase single-family homes. SFR then was a policy that looked race-neutral on the outside, but was racist in intent and effect.
SFR distorted the housing market and gave an unearned benefit to middle-class families. It took land not far from cities’ cores and commercial zones, and artificially depressed its value by removing competition from apartment builders, allowing upper- and middle-class individuals to purchase lots for a fraction of the price they would have fetched if the land could have been developed for multifamily housing.
The urban cores of the cities of the 19th century—close to jobs, housing, shopping and restaurants—are thick with apartment buildings designed for people of all classes, and dense with services and public transit options, too. In Reno, as in so many other 20th century American cities, this is not the case thanks to exclusionary zoning ordinances that reserve about 75% of all land for SFR.
SFR, racist covenants and redlining together sorted Americans by race, encouraging whites to move into desirable, bucolic neighborhoods with well-funded schools and infrastructure, while leaving Americans of color and lower-income whites in aging inner-city and industrial areas. Since homes have historically been Americans’ greatest financial asset, these racist housing policies helped create a racial wealth gap which persists to this day, when the average wealth of whites is 6.3 times that of African Americans and 4.6 times that of non-white Latinos. Put another way, the numbers are even more damning: Today, homeowners’ median net wealth is 80 times that of renters!
Residents of the exclusive Newlands neighborhood—almost all of which is blanketed by racist covenants—banded together in 2018 to block the legalization of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), thereby protecting a class privilege that was built on the back of racial privilege. The city is studying the issue again, but without widespread advocacy, NIMBY homeowners will succeed in defeating it again.
The racist roots of SFR is one reason why the city of Minneapolis banned it several years ago, allowing duplexes and triplexes to be built wherever that market supported them. To address its own housing crisis, California has passed Senate Bill 9 to allow residential lots to support up to four dwellings, and SB10, which allows developments of as many as 10 units in any residential area served by public transit.
If Reno wanted to get serious about housing everyone who wants to live here, and not expelling its lower-income community members and young people, it could allow ADUs, ban SFR, allow builders to build apartments and condos wherever the market would support them, and get rid of the requirement for off-street parking for every unit. Street parking is not the end of the world, people. Put down your pitchforks.
We especially need tall housing towers given the fact that we’ve gobbled up most available land with SFR. Why should the only tall buildings in Reno house hotels for Californian gamblers instead of homes for Reno residents?
Reno could also return the attractive large homes currently zoned for offices in the Old Southwest to residential use and allow owners to convert them into multifamily dwellings.
New developments should be required to follow inclusionary zoning practices that set aside a certain percentage of units in every new development for people of low- and middle-incomes.
Nationally, we could give renters the same tax deduction for rent payments that homeowners receive for mortgage payments. Are you listening, Rep. Mark Amodei, Sen. Jacky Rosen and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto?
Working-class voters are the new swing voters. We ought to deliver better homes for them and lower the cost of housing for everyone. All housing is good housing, as the Yes In My Backyard YIMBY movement argues. It is high time that we renounce 20th-century racism, elitism, environmentally damaging sprawl and free market interference, and instead create desperately needed homes. This is something on which everybody should be able to agree.
Jacob S. Dorman is an associate professor of history and core humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno, and co-director of the Racist Covenants Research Project, an effort to document how Nevada’s people of color have persisted and built communities in the face of structural racism. Thus far, the project has documented 8,100 racist covenants barring occupancy of homes by people of color in Washoe County. Learn more at www.unr.edu/history/rcrp.