Chapter 10 uses Louisville, Kentucky (a metropolitan area with eviction rates double the national average) as a case study to critique how housing markets and eviction practices not only favor landlords’ property rights over the rights of tenants but also play important roles in maintaining racial segregation and in the day-to-day marginalized lives of the urban poor. Evictions perpetuate racial inequity and segregation in housing and are embedded within a system of white privilege that benefits historically white places. Eviction rates are compared to housing segregation patterns generally and to the historic redlining maps specifically to show the relationships of these racially unequal patterns of housing opportunity. Eviction is a means of control of disadvantaged neighborhoods and an institutionalization of racism in the urban landscape.

Chapter 4 uses assemblage theory, which is an anti-colonialist theory of social and spatial construction that has traction in the Global South, to show how urban inequalities become assembled, disassembled, and reassembled over time and yet how grassroots activism for social and environmental justice and for community resilience can change the form and functions of cities. Buchanan arose at a time when the role of urban planning in the US cities was growing but largely conceived as the top–down imposition of order and dominant values on urban space. However, we are increasingly aware of just how contested and evolving the practice of urban planning and urban development are. Case studies of green gentrification from Los Angeles, California and Accra, Ghana illustrate the competing ideological perspectives on resilience in cities and the potential for and yet tentativeness of progress towards social justice in urban planning. The chapter explores the connections of racism in American land use with colonialism in the Global South, and the commonalities in the experiences of grassroots social-justice movements across cities worldwide.

Chapter 6 explores five outlier cases, called “The Unfortunate Five,” in which the US Supreme Court rejected landowners’ challenges to land use and environmental regulations despite the Court’s strong protection of private property rights against regulations generally. These five cases have one factor in common: the developers’ plans to build affordable housing. After exploring the potential that Supreme Court justices are motivated by explicit race and class biases, the chapter delves into the potential for implicit bias to explain why these cases deviate from the norm: the justices believe that they are protecting the private property interests of neighboring landowners against unwanted affordable housing developments. Strategies are proposed, based on a number of empirical studies, for convincing courts that affordable housing does not pose a threat to the property values of nearby landowners and that, therefore, many government policies reflect an unconstitutional, irrational prejudice against low-income people of color who need affordable housing and the developers who seek to build it.

Chapter 5 deconstructs the Supreme Court’s Buchanan opinion by conceptualizing Rhetorical Neutrality as a central tenet of post-racial constitutionalism: how the Court ignores or obscures history (historical myth); defines discrimination so narrowly that it’s virtually impossible to prove (definitional myth); and rationalizes inequality as a natural outcome of a neutral system (rhetorical myth). The Court fixates on protecting private-property and contracts rights against new government regulations during the Lochner era and uses an impoverished reading of the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit only expressly race-specific classifications of property regulation. The Court crossed the color line of the early 20th century to protect both Blacks and whites from racial zoning, a superficial victory for racial justice. The chapter explores how the Supreme Court’s narrow jurisprudence has played out in landmark land-use cases of the past 100+ years, sustaining structural inequality by advancing post-racial constitutionalism through ostensibly neutral rulings that perpetuate subordination. The chapter concludes with an analysis of current housing legislation and opinions on disparate impact.

Chapter 2 situates the Buchanan v. Warley case and the conflict over Louisville’s racial zoning ordinance in the historical context of African American movements for civil rights and racial justice, often collectively called the Long Black Freedom Movement. It describes the drive to create residential segregation in Louisville as part of white supremacists’ efforts to establish a residential apartheid in the awful depths of post-Emancipation oppression of Blacks. It weaves human stories of racial justice activism into a social and legal history of the Buchanan case and its aftermath. This history gives insight into how racial justice movements emerge and grow despite the persistence of white supremacy, insight that is particularly relevant to a much-needed racial reckoning in the American land-use system.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s key themes by describing the Buchanan v. Warley case in its historical social-movement context in Louisville and nationally, the legal theory behind the Supreme Court’s invalidation of racial zoning, and the 100+ years in which many subsequent land use policies and practices have segregated American landscapes and perpetuated racial injustice. The chapter provides a multi-dimensional snapshot of racially unjust land-use conditions in the U.S. more than 100 years after the nation’s missed opportunity to embrace an anti-subordination vision of land use. Based on distributive, procedural, and social justice concepts and the insights of the nine core chapters in the book, three major themes are identified: (1) racial inequity is deeply and systemically embedded in American land use in multi-faceted ways; (2) cross-disciplinary scholarly study is essential to understanding race and land use; and (3) American land use is characterized both by the intransigence of systemic racism and by social, legal, and policy changes that advance racial justice.

Chapter 11 revisits the key themes of this book’s chapters in light of questions about what should and could be done to make land use in the United States racially just. Even though the book begins with the intransigence of deeply embedded racial inequities in American land use, this last chapter turns to themes of hope and potential for a racial-justice transformation. First, the history of grassroots anti-racism activism is instructive for how the next generations of activists can work effectively for transformative change in the land use systems. Second, a substantive anti-subordination theory of the law can make a difference if it influences not only legal doctrines adopted by the courts but also the restructuring of land-use institutions, including private-market systems. Third, public policy reforms must be multi-faceted and aimed at systemic change, supported by evidence and advocacy. The chapter concludes with hopeful thoughts about how a Third Reconstruction could change the trajectory of “the monstrous and evil story” of “racism, power, wealth, and land throughout the nation’s history.”

Chapter 3 synthesizes analyses of changes in both social justice movements and legal and policy institutions to broaden our understanding of interconnections among segregation, environmental disparities, and structural vulnerabilities in low-income communities of color. The Buchanan case highlights a relatively narrow framing of land-use injustice in the early twentieth century: zoning as a tool of racial segregation in housing. Throughout the twentieth century, the struggle for land use justice broadened to address the deep structural inequalities and systemic marginalization of all low-income communities of color, including land-use policies creating disparities in environmental conditions, community infrastructure, and vulnerabilities to disasters, shocks, and change. As both grassroots movements and institutions have evolved to grapple with the persistence and complexity of land use injustice in the United States, building the capacities, power, and resilience of low-income communities of color is critical to transformation and justice, and this growing focus on community capacities has come to characterize land-use justice movements.

Chapter 7 uses the life and career of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to contemplate how a Progressive social-justice advocate might seek to redress entrenched housing segregation today. While acknowledging that Brandeis did not expressly speak out for racial equality in strong and unequivocal words in judicial opinions, the chapter looks for present guidance in the kind of lawyer Brandeis was, including his Progressive cause advocacy and pioneering of the Brandeis brief using extensive social science data to support government policies addressing social and economic inequalities. Observing that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) successfully used the Brandeis brief technique to overturn racial segregation in the courts, the chapter highlights the importance of evidence from sociological study about the adverse impacts of housing segregation and the interconnectedness of race and poverty in housing conditions. Brandeis would be cautious about judicial imposition of reparations but would support legislative consideration of reparations to remedy past discrimination, tailored to balance benefits and costs, as well as state and local policy solutions as laboratories of democracy.

Chapter 9’s case study of a major market-driven development project in Baltimore, the Port Covington project, explores how racial segregation and economic segregation are implicitly assumed to be normal parts of zoning’s spatial ordering of American cities. Inner cities are now places where private developers in a global neoliberal economy seek to use both public and private investments to create new exclusive, elite spaces for higher wealth consumers. Port Covington, a forty-two-block multi-use redevelopment of a vacant industrial site, is one such example on a massive scale. Although Baltimore’s relatively weak inclusionary zoning ordinance forced the developers to agree to include a limited number of affordable housing units in its new development plan, there were no discussions about whether or how to remedy Baltimore’s racialized geography and its legal and policy history of segregation, exclusion, and unequal opportunity. Major land-use decisions should not only embrace mixed-income and mixed-use policy goals but also government-provided affordable housing units and robust inclusionary measures to redress the subordinating dynamics of entrenched structural racism in local zoning.

Chapter 8 urges us to focus less on the spatial distributions and concentrations of people of different races in cities and more on the effects of concentrated members of racial minorities living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. From a “neighborhoods effects” analysis, some of the worst land-use injustice is the inequality of opportunity that comes from African Americans and Latines growing up in and living in high-poverty neighborhoods with poor housing, high crime, and low-quality schools. Public policy is failing because neither our research nor our policy solutions center on the relationships between race and poverty, instead often using race-only measures of segregation, or on the characteristics of neighborhoods that cause them to succeed or fail in ensuring equal opportunities for their residents, including neighborhood-specific crime data and comprehensive understandings of the residents’ everyday lives. The chapter calls for multi-faceted policies that address a range of interconnected factors, including the rising cost of housing, barriers to housing mobility, and the conditions of high-poverty neighborhoods affecting life opportunities for their residents.