Liberal Suburbs Have Their Own Border Wall
Residents of rich blue towns talk about inclusion, but their laws do the opposite.
The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.
Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.
In a new report for The Century Foundation, I contrast Scarsdale with another Westchester County suburb, Port Chester, which is just eight miles away but has remarkably different demographics. Scarsdale’s median household income, in excess of $250,000, is nearly three times that of Port Chester, as is the portion of residents with a college degree. And whereas three-quarters of Port Chester’s elementary students qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school, zero percent of Scarsdale’s students do. In Scarsdale, 87 percent of residents are non-Hispanic white or Asian American, whereas 69 percent of Port Chester residents are Black or Hispanic.
On the overwhelming majority of Scarsdale’s land, building anything but a single-family home is illegal. According to data collected for the report by New York University’s Furman Center, just 0.2 percent of Scarsdale’s lots have structures classified as two- or three-family homes or apartments. Port Chester, by contrast, allows multifamily housing on about half its land. From 2014 to 2021, 41 percent of the new housing units authorized in Port Chester were for multifamily housing. In Scarsdale, none of the 218 units permitted were for a multifamily home. When multifamily housing is proposed in Scarsdale, residents raise numerous objections, many of them spurious. Some oppose apartments, for example, on the grounds that multifamily housing will result in overcrowded schools, even though data show that school enrollment in the Village of Scarsdale has been declining in recent years.
Many people seeking a better life for their children would, in fact, relish an opportunity to move to Scarsdale. In interviews I conducted for my new book, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, low-wage single mothers from across the country repeatedly expressed their desire for better schools for their children.
And as I note in the Century Foundation report, Scarsdale spent nearly $5,500 more per student than Port Chester did in 2020, and had lower student-to-teacher ratios. In 2019, 32 percent of Port Chester students were performing at grade level in English, compared with 87 percent of students in Scarsdale—a staggering 55-percentage-point gap. In math, 35 percent of Port Chester students performed at grade level, compared with 90 percent of Scarsdale students, also a 55-point gap. When low-income students are given a chance to attend lower-poverty schools, research shows they can cut the achievement gap with their middle-class peers in math by half and in reading by one-third over a five- to seven-year period. They just seldom get the option.
Television cameras help depict the plight of immigrant families who are turned away at the border, but they don’t capture the way working-class families in places like Port Chester are shut out of higher-opportunity public schools in places like Scarsdale that prohibit the construction of the types of homes that less advantaged families could afford. Although Scarsdale parents may try to reconcile the exclusion with their political liberalism by supporting greater state education spending in places like Port Chester, economic integration of schools has been found to be far more effective than a “separate but equal” compensatory-spending approach to equity.
By limiting housing supply, Scarsdale’s zoning laws—and similar rules in other New York City suburbs—also artificially drive up home prices in the metropolitan region. Earlier this year, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul proposed the New York Housing Compact, which would have given downstate municipalities, such as those in Westchester County, a goal of increasing their housing supply by 3 percent every three years. If communities failed to reach those goals, the state would require municipalities to provide applicants for housing permits with a fast-track approval process. In addition, downstate areas would need to rezone for greater housing within a half mile of commuter-railway and subway stations. Currently, in Scarsdale, nearly all of the land near the train station is zoned for large lots containing single-family homes.
But though yes-in-my-backyard reforms have gained traction in states such as California and Oregon and in cities such as Minneapolis and Charlotte, the liberal New York State legislature deep-sixed a moderate Democratic governor’s housing agenda—with the help of elected officials and civic leaders from affluent liberal suburbs. Amy Paulin, a Scarsdale Democrat, told The New York Times that Hochul’s “proposal would change the complexity of our county in a way that doesn’t make sense.” Westchester County’s Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, meanwhile, rejected Hochul’s plan and called instead for financial incentives to encourage communities to voluntarily permit more housing.
Wealthy conservative areas also erect barriers to new housing, but liberal areas are typically worse. Writing in 2022, the Brookings Institution researcher Jenny Schuetz observed that “decades of painstaking research of zoning by economists and urban planners have produced a high degree of consensus on which places in the United States have tight land use regulations, regardless of the method used to measure zoning.” She argues that “overly restrictive zoning is most prevalent and problematic along the West Coast and the Northeast corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston.” These areas “lean heavily Democratic in national, state and local elections.” And studies that examine the stringency of zoning within states—for example, California—find that the most restrictive zoning is found in the more politically liberal communities.
In Lexington, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb where the median household income is $203,000 and voters supported Biden over Trump by 81 percent to 17 percent, the walls of exclusion are steep. A developer who wants to build a triplex would need a lot of at least 15,500 feet—more than twice the minimum lot size in neighboring Waltham (median income of $103,000). By three Boston University researchers’ count, a builder in Waltham must comply with 17 regulations, whereas in Lexington, a builder faces 34 regulations.
Of Princeton, New Jersey—whose voters favored Biden over Trump by a six-to-one margin—the political scientist Omar Wasow has acerbically observed, “There are people in the town of Princeton who will have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn and a sign saying ‘We love our Muslim neighbors,’ but oppose changing zoning policies that say you have to have an acre and a half per house.” He continued: “That means, ‘We love our Muslim neighbors, as long as they’re millionaires.’” (Having a modest number of wealthy neighbors of color may convince privileged white homeowners that the system is just.)
Wealthy suburbs can be defeated in their efforts to remain exclusive. In June 2019, Oregon became the first state to enact a virtual statewide ban on local single-family zoning ordinances. The reform happened only because rural Republicans, who tend to be skeptical of government land-use regulations (and of liberal elites), joined urban Democrats to defeat affluent suburban interests. In September 2021, a similar coalition in California repeated the feat, legalizing duplexes statewide and allowing people to subdivide lots, which could mean as many as four homes on what had previously been a single-family lot. Such laws have “opened up entire communities that had been largely walled off,” one housing expert told the Times.
The passage of such laws is a stunning development in a country where, for decades, NIMBY forces reliably won political fights. It shows that the zoning walls that have endured for so long—and imposed so much damage—are becoming more and more difficult to defend. Posting welcoming slogans on a manicured lawn isn’t enough. If affluent liberal suburbanites believe that other people deserve a shot at improving their lives, the most important thing they can do is allow families of modest means into their towns.