35' Height Restrictions as Ethnic Cleansing (Ep 3)
In which we use magic strings to track intellectual threads across time
Previously, part 1: Parking Minimums as Ethnic Cleansing, part 2: Setbacks as Ethnic Cleansing
I have a prediction:
If you examine your local municipal code, you will find many references to a certain height. That height is 35 feet. Not 30, not 40, not 2.5 stories, but 35 feet.
If you look back through your zoning code across time, this reference will have cropped up somewhere between the mid 1920s to 1950s, depending on when ‘your municipality’ adopted zoning codes.
Here’s how to validate this prediction. Look through your municipal zoning code, and use your `ctrl-f` browser/PDF search tool to look for `35`. The formatting can be tricky, as it’s often numbers present in a table, so you won’t see `35 ft`, but the column will be something like `building height, ft`.
Here’s what one might look like:
It’s utterly banal1, often buried deep in a table in a PDF in some forgotten server somewhere:
OK, so where did this number come from? And what does it mean?
“it” is a “height limit”. I suggest reading the original documents to understand more about what a height limit is. I’ll explain a bit more below. It’s more complicated than it might seem on first blush.
Here’s the raw text from the document that (I contend) originates all of this:
The entire city is divided into four classes of height districts. The maximum limits are 35 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet and 150 feet, and the height districts are termed respectively class H1, H2, H3 and H4.
In the class Hı height district the height limit is 2 1/2 stories but not in excess of 35 feet. The one and two family dwelling and the two story apartment sections will generally be placed in the class H1 district. This class will therefore include most of the residence sections.
emphasis mine
Where does this come from? It’s pretty 🌶️ :
Here’s what the text looks like in the original document. When do you think it was written?
The entire page is relatively banal. It’s not easily distinguishable from zoning-related documents you might read in municipal documents across the country today.
This document is from 1922, and it’s ‘upstream’ and ‘originating’ for most of the zoning codes throughout America.
In Euclid vs. Ambler in 1926, this document was “ratified”. (the TL;DR is that the city of Euclid made the first challengeable ‘objection’ to a land-use law-related decision a developer named Ambler wanted to have. Ambler sued the city, it went to the supreme court.)
At no point did anyone discuss the rightness, overall, of the institution of zoning, as painted in this 1922 document.
You can read the court case documentation directly, here. It’s 33 short pages, via PDF. Feel free to read a summary - that’s where I started. Here’s a quote from the summary:
The entire area of the village is divided by the ordinance into six classes of use districts, denominated U-1 to U-6, inclusive; three classes of height districts, denominated H-1 to H-3, inclusive; and four classes of area districts, denominated A-1 to A-4, inclusive. The use districts are classified in respect of the buildings which may be erected within their respective limits, as follows: U-1 is restricted to single family dwellings, public parks, water towers and reservoirs, suburban and interurban…
It’s clear that in Euclid v. Ambler, (which was argued a few years after the Atlanta Zone plan was proposed), the court is discussing the height districts as laid out in the 1922 Atlanta Zone Plan. If you read a page or two forward and back, you’ll see other similarities between Euclid vs. Ambler (1926), and the paradigm outlined in zone plan.
So, it’s a problem when elsewhere in that document, there’s a robust expression of power enforcing ethnic cleansing:
Hilariously, the court shows it agrees with the racist underpinnings of the zone plan. Here’s a winning quote:
… that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others…
In this context, the ‘kinds of people’ who live in apartment buildings were widely understood to be ‘undesirable ethnic groups’. Obviously black people, but also Italian, Polish, Catholic, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Jewish, and much, much more. White people then (and now) were really concerned about who might live near them and their children.
So, I maintain that any zoning code document in America that contains a reference to a 35 foot height limit should be assumed infected by the supremacist thinking that causes one to advocate for something like `race zoning`.
Let us not accidentally mindlessly support such a regime by not knowing the conditions that gave rise to such a powerful institution (modern American ‘municipal planning’) or miss an opportunity to ask good questions, like:
Do you know the relationship between ‘race-based zoning’ and that distinctive regime known as “American Zoning Laws”?
Many people are as horrified as you and I am, to learn exactly where some of these details come from.
Related Reading
The Atlanta zone plan: report outlining a tentative zone plan for Atlanta by Robert H. Whitten.
VILLAGE OF EUCLID, OHIO, et al. v. AMBLER REALTY CO. (Oct 1926)
As a side-note, can you detect not-so-vague whiff of pseudo-science draping these pages? It’s pseudo-science and authoritarian language mixed together. Smells delicious.