Racial Justice in American Land Use

Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, Cedric Merlin Powell, Catherine Fosl, Laura Rothstein

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781108802765
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

Over a century after racial zoning was invalidated, American land use remains racially unjust. When racist tools were abolished, other facially neutral tools were created or adapted to maintain white power and wealth. Policies, practices, and laws evolved to embed racial inequality and white supremacy deeply into institutional structures and landscapes. Despite modest improvements since the early twentieth century, land use and neighborhood conditions for Black people and other people of color remain dramatically worse than for whites. Discrimination and segregation persist. This enduring and multi-faceted nature of racial injustice in the American land use system means that there is no one cause and no one solution. Instead, this book advocates for nuanced systemic change. Using cross-disciplinary analysis in social-movement history, legal theory, and public policy, the authors call for a racial-justice transformation that integrates grassroots racial-justice activism, newly revitalized anti-subordination legal theories, and many different public policy reforms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The Intransigence of Racial Injustice in American Land Use 100+ Years After Buchanan v. Warley
• 2 The Paradox of Buchanan v. Warley: The Early Twentieth-Century Black Freedom Movement and the Battle against Residential Apartheid
• 3 Structural Inequality and the Evolving Movements for Land-Use Justice: From Housing Injustice to Environmental Injustice to Resilience Injustice
• 4 Assemblages of Inequalities and Resilience Ideologies in Urban Planning
• 5 Race Displaced: Buchanan v. Warley and the Neutral Rhetoric of Due Process
• 6 There's Something Happening Here: Affordable Housing as a Non-Starter in the US Supreme Court
• 7 What Would Louis Do?: The ''Brandeis Brief'' on Land Use and Its Present Impact on Racial Segregation
• 8 Why Segregation Matters: The Inequality of Opportunity
• 9 Zoning's Racial Innocence and the Imperatives of Segregation
• 10 Understanding Evictions as Racialized Land-Use Practices in Louisville, Kentucky
• 11 Hope and Transformation: The Next 100 Years of Racial Justice in American Land Use
• Index