How 1960s Racism is Contributing to Denton’s Housing Crisis — Long Version

“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 long version of this post. You can find the short 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.

Left — The 1959 Land Use Code, including both the Subdivision Code and the Zoning Code. Middle — the 1966 Subdivision Code. Right — The 1966 Zoning Code

To dive into what exactly happened, let’s detour through a brief explanation of what zoning is. Zoning is a method for cities to make it illegal to build certain types of buildings in certain places — plots of land (usually whole areas of town) are “zoned” in different categories. These categories have “allowed uses” and “banned uses.” For example, building a heavy manufacturing plant in Downtown Denton is illegal. This is one of the original uses for zoning — cities got sick of having heavy industry near residential areas.

Preventing loud, polluting industry from existing near housing is a perfectly rational use of zoning, but cities rapidly expanded zoning to all sorts of other purposes like racial zoning and using heavy industry zones as a barrier to segregate Black and White neighborhoods.

And this is precisely what we see in Denton.

In 1959, the city outlined just 3 zoning districts. Unfortunately neither code contained a copy of the zoning map, but even the categories are illuminating.

• “Dwelling Districts” which could contain only housing and home businesses, like private practice doctors
• “Business Districts” which could contain housing, retail, pharmacies, gas stations, and so forth
• “Manufacturing Districts” which could contain Heavy Industry

By looking at a 1960 “Proposed Zoning Map” taken from the 1960 Denton Comprehensive Plan, we can guess that the “Manufacturing Districts” essentially wrapped around South East Denton, segregating them from Downtown. (Purple = Heavy industry)

By picking through old newspaper articles accessed via a Denton Library portal, I was able to track down a zoning code between 1959 and 1966. In 1961, the code underwent its first major overhaul since 1937.

Although documentation of discussion around the 1961 zoning code is limited (city minutes report only the votes, the newspapers had little discussion of the revision), there are clearly racialized elements to the narratives present.

In 1955, the Denton Record Chronicle reprinted a national piece entitled “IS YOUR TOWN BREEDING A SLUM” which warned that “substandard housing breeds crime and poverty. It also reprinted a Dallas piece simply entitled “House Sale for Negroes” warning that a seller in Highland Park was considering selling their home to Black buyers. In 1957, the DRC reprinted a piece about Black students trekking miles to an integrated school — “there has been no official segregation here in the past, but the effect was generally the same due to a zoning system which caused Negroes and other racial groups to attend schools in the sections where they lived” (emphasis mine).

During the period of consideration for the 1961 zoning plan, the Denton Record Chronicle printed several favorable pieces about it, usually noting that the zoning code would protect wealthier homeowners from having to live near poorer folks.
In May, 1961, it published this piece under the heading “PROTECTS VALUES.”

In a June 1961 piece, letting folks know that “Tuesday’s the day to have your say about zoning,” the DRC reported that the old code “has resulted in apartments being built next to single family homes and other undesirable situations.” Later on, I’ll look deeper at the 1960 Comprehensive Plan to tie together these loose threads connecting zoning to race.

The 1961 zoning revision passed 7–0, and was hailed as an excellent and incredibly consequential step for the town.

By 1966, the zoning code included 18 different zones, as well as allowing for special use permits and “Planned Development” zoning, which still exist in today’s code and essentially allows developers to make their own neighborhood zoning.

the first page of the list of zoning districts

The new code included no fewer than 9 residential districts. Below you can see the first of 16 tables that outlined what uses were permitted in each zone. Five of the 9 new residential zones banned duplexes and apartments, unlike the old code, where they were allowed anywhere housing was allowed. 6 of the 7 commercial/light industrial districts banned housing in them, unlike the 1959, where all types of housing were allowed in the business district — the only exception was Downtown, which got its own mixed use zoning district. (Boarding houses, the most affordable kind of housing that served the poorest residents, were allowed in 6 of the 7 business districts).

The net effect was the de-facto exclusion of Black and Brown people from certain neighborhoods, as these groups were and are less wealthy than White people on average due to the effects of centuries of racism. 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 (including economic segregation of poorer White people from wealthier White people).

Dallas’s Highland Park, a suburb designed, as described by its creators, to be “a refuge from an increasingly diverse [Dallas],” utilized first racial zoning, and now single family only zoning to maintain de-facto segregation. Below, highlighted in pink, are the only parts of Highland park zoned for duplexes or apartments.

Today, while Dallas is 57% White, Highland Park is 86.5% White — roughly twice as white as the Dallas metropolitan region. Per the “Zoned Out in Texas” report, Highland Park’s first black homeowner moved in in 2003.

Denton’s story is more difficult to suss out from census data for a number of reasons. Much of Denton developed before the zoning regulations. Areas zoned for low density often contain many “non-conformities” — duplexes or small apartments in single family only neighborhoods. We also have many single family homes rented to large groups of college students, which allows them to pool their incomes to afford comparatively expensive housing (4–6 poorer students can outbid 2 middle class parents with children). There is also an abundance of student apartments that share census tracts with single family neighborhoods, although they are not integrated into them.

This makes it more difficult — especially in the triangle area comprised of UNT, TWU, and Downtown — to draw out stories of de-facto racial segregation. However, the data still tells a compelling story.

Take the area north of 380. First, our current zoning map.

• Yellow, Mustard, and Green* (R2, R3, & PD) mean single-family only
• Light brown (R4) allows Single Family and duplexes/townhomes (after obtaining a costly Special Use Permit)
• Medium Brown (R6) allows townhomes and 2–4 plexes
• Dark Brown (R7) allows small apartments
• Pink and Purple (Mixed Use) allow apartment and businesses
• Blue (Public Facilities) includes schools, colleges, parks, and other public uses

(Green is a Planned Development. Some do not include housing. The ones that do, on this map, are single family only, as far as I’m aware.)

We can compare this to the census’s racial demographics data — the darker the green, the whiter the census tract. The area between 380, 288, and Sherman (“Idiot’s Hill”) is zoned nearly exclusively for single family housing, parks, and schools . Its census tract is 73% White, or 53% whiter than Denton as a whole (54% White). The cheapest rental home in this area (at time of writing) is 4 bedroom, available for $2,650.

By contrast, the area between Hercules Lane and Windsor, which allows duplexes and apartments, is 68% White. The cheapest apartment currently available to rent starts at $1000, or 37% the cost of the cheapest house in Idiot’s Hill.

Just across 380 from Idiot’s Hill is Sequoia Park, a small neighborhood with a generous amount of apartments. It’s about 50% denser than Idiot’s Hill, and an apartment can be had for $937, or 35% the cost of renting the cheapest Idiot’s Hill offering. It is 52% White, roughly matching Denton’s 54% white.

Looking to South Denton, which has many newer homes and very few apartments, we see similar, and more pronounced, effects.

The census tract for Single-family-only Forrestridge is exclusively single family zoned except one apartment complex off Teasley. It is 72% White,

Just down Teasley is a census tract that includes a compact single family neighborhood, as well as a mobile home park–a much scorned type of affordable housing. The planned development is in the darker green, and the mobile home park is in the lighter green at the South end of the tract.

This denser tract is just 51% White — or slightly less White than the city as a whole, nearly twice as diverse as Forrestridge.

Why did 1960s Denton do this?

The 1966 and 1959 codes are both dry legal documents. They contain very legal language when explaining their reasoning for the codes, if they explain the reasoning at all. For slightly more vivid language, we can return to the 1960 Comprehensive Plan.

In their Land Use report, they describe “retarded areas” as one of the most serious issues facing urban areas, and specifically point to small lots as one of the markers of “retarded areas.”

The report notes that the areas are typically commercial or industrial, with few new houses going in (the authors leave out city investment practices and racist federal investment decisions driving these things), and says “the entire colored population of Denton is housed within the south-east section of Denton, which is classed as substandard,” and attributes this to Black people being poorer. They clearly understood the connection between zoning, poverty, and racial demographics.

They also say that a sign of “retarded” neighborhoods is a lack of streets and drainage ; after evicting the Black residents of Denton from Quaker where they had built their own utilities — nearly 40 years prior to this report, — the city still had not built the community streets or drainage.

The city suggested “more thorough zoning and subdivision controls” as a means of preventing “blight,” or, if I had to put it in other words, “we can zone out the poor, mostly Black residents of this city, and turn their former homes into industrial area”

The smoking gun though, is this line where the planners held it as a priority that neighborhoods be homogenous in “racial characteristics, income levels” and socio-economic status.

Reading through the 1966 and 1961 code, and comparing them to the 1959 code, it was clear to me just how influential the 1960 Comprehensive Plan was for the 1961 code and future, and the impacts of this racial and economic segregation has clearly continued into the present day — the zoning code is iterative, and our modern zones and neighborhood categories look much like they did back then.

In conclusion, I feel confident that the changes from the permissive 1959 zoning code to the restrictive 1966 zoning code were made specifically to further racial and economic segregation in the city of Denton, and that these zoning patterns continue today. The housing affordability crisis today is a result of many complex factors, but a dominant one for Denton — as well as most cities — was the city’s decision to racially segregate the City by zoning controls meant to economically isolate White and Black residents from each other. These zoning decisions and their impact on the racial demographics of Denton remain largely unchanged since the 1966 code.

As the city grows, it needs more housing to meet demand. Folks, especially poorer folks, often want to live near the heart of town. If you cannot afford a car, it’s very important you live within biking or busing range of work, the grocery store, and your doctor. Younger folks want to be able to near the music venues and bars. But when demand outpaces supply, prices rise. In a normal market, prices rising is a sign to add more supply — in this case, build more housing. Building more housing reduces prices. But when the historically White neighborhoods downtown continue to hold zoning designations designed to maintain segregation through high prices, that’s impossible, and you get high prices, and the displacement that comes with that.

To close, I once attended a city council meeting where a hearing was being conducted to rezone a parcel, behind the Sonic on 380, to allow a three-story apartment building to be built there. Refrains echoed through the comments issued by those opposed to it that could have been copied from old FHA or zoning documents — “apartments bring a certain element with them.” “Apartments are not neighbors.” “Crime comes with apartments.” “I moved to this neighborhood to get away from the kind of crowded living this development will bring.”

The rezoning request was not approved in that hearing.

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.