How 1960s Racism is Contributing to Denton’s Housing Crisis
“The objective [is] the development of neighborhoods [homogenous] in racial characteristics, [and] income levels.”
Two old black leather binders both labeled “Code of Ordinances | City of Denton Texas”
This is the short version of this post. You can find the long version here.
I recently attended the “Congress For New Urbanism 31,” the 31st annual gathering of a group of city nerds. One thing a speaker said stuck with me — “in the wake of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, many municipalities began to expand their zoning codes considerably, using single family housing and economic exclusivity where they had previously used open racial discrimination.”
Backstory: A brief history of Segregation in Housing Laws
I dove into local library resources to try and find if something like that had happened in Denton. As far as I have been able to track, Denton’s zoning code went through 2 major revisions in the 1960s. In the UNT library, I found the 1959 code and the 1966 code, and in old Denton Record Chronicle articles, a friend and I located a 1961 code.
The zoning and development section of the government code expanded over 4x, from 41 pages to over 180 pages. In 1966, the “Subdivision” segment of the zoning code was longer than the entire 1959 code.
Zoning codes are obtuse pieces of city ordinance, you may not have heard of them. In the first few years, they were primarily used to regulate where polluting businesses could be. By drawing lines on a map, and then passing those lines into law, cities could tell dirty industries “you can’t build a factory here, it’s a residential zone. You need to go build it over there in the industrial zone.” (Of course, this was still used for racism — consider the way that historically Black South East Denton is surrounded by warehouse and industrial).
However, early zoning codes were fairly rudimentary. Denton had just 3 zones — “Housing (any kind),” “Businesses (non-industrial) + housing (any kind),” and “industrial only.” Cities also created “White only” and “Black only” zones — but these were struck down by the court. Cities also used a variety of other tools to segregate housing, many of which were struck down or were coming under attack by the early 1960s. You can read more about how cities attempted to segregate their cities through housing law here.
In 1960, city planners working for Denton began to design a much more comprehensive zoning ordinance. Rather than just 3 zones, this one would wind up having 18. Their goal?
Planners understood that then — as still today — there exists a racial wealth gap. By banning apartments, duplexes, and other naturally more affordable housing in some neighborhoods, and concentrating it in others, they could de facto racially segregate Denton, without ever mentioning race in their codes. Though banning more affordable housing types does not prevent every Black or Brown person from moving into a neighborhood, it nonetheless maintains segregation on the whole.
Our modern zoning code is remarkably similar to the 1960s zoning codes. UNT has expanded, so some land near it was allowed to be used for apartments, we’ve allowed some new apartments on the outskirts of town — mostly along fast, dangerous, and polluting roads like 288 and i35, but most of the area inside the loop looks remarkably similar — expensive, single family homes are the only legal thing to build, which prevents the creation of affordable housing.
As new folks move to town, many want to live near our beautiful downtown, near TWU, or near UNT. The result is that when those homes go up for sale, they can sell for more, which means only wealthy people can afford to purchase homes in those areas — in a word, gentrification. Allowing the construction of apartments in those areas would ensure more affordable housing options — even for folks who can’t afford to pay the cost that new construction runs. The net result of this continues to this day.
Areas designed in the 1960s to have “homogenous groups of people” largely do — single family only areas cost more to live in, and are significantly less diverse than Denton. Consider two neighborhoods.
Idiot’s Hill is almost exclusively single family. An average home costs $333,000, or about $2,400 a month. That’s assuming you can scrape together the $16,000 together for a 5% down payment.
As a consequence, the neighborhood is 73% White — or only 56% as diverse as the city as a whole. Directly across the street is Sequoia Park, a neighborhood with quite a few apartment complexes in it. A rental starts at $937 — about 40% the cost of the average home in Idiot’s Hill, and only a tiny fraction of the down payment. Sequoia Park is 52% White, or slightly more diverse than the city as a whole.
Inability to make a $2000/m mortgage payment and a multi-thousand dollar down payment should not exclude people from living in Denton, or push them out to an apartment where they fall asleep to the noises of semi trucks and breath in their exhaust. But that’s precisely what our zoning code was designed to do. It was designed to mandate “the development of neighborhoods [homogenous] in racial characteristics, [and] income levels.” We shouldn’t have laws designed to segregate our city. It’s time to change them.
This story is a first stab at bringing to light an important piece of Denton history, and sharing awareness on how our current zoning hurts everyone by increasing housing prices, a deliberate mechanism created to further segregation. My research methods on the impacts of zoning were fairly rudimentary — just looking at high level census data. I encourage local scholars to use more fine grain tools to further or contradict my analysis.
