Brief Resources Developed by Rezoning for a Better Evanston
- The Racist History of Zoning in Evanston and Across the U.S., Roger Williams & Frank Hill, 2025
- “… exclusionary zoning was developed, in part, to evade the prohibition on explicitly racial zoning codes. It attempted to keep Black citizens out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, a large number of whom were Black, to live in expensive white neighborhoods.”
Evanston Community Comments and City Council Meetings
Recent Zoning Research
- Pew.org: New Housing Slows Rent Growth Most for Older, More Affordable Units, 2025
- “The findings suggest that not allowing more homes to be built—even for high-income residents—pushes up all rents, making it harder for low-income tenants to remain in their neighborhoods.”
- Journal of Housing and Community Development: Rethinking Zoning to Increase Affordable Housing, 2023
- “Restrictive land use regulations and zoning laws have been linked to higher housing prices, reduced construction activity, and a decrease in the elasticity of housing supply. Historically, zoning practices have been employed by affluent communities to boost property values, decrease tax burdens, and often impede the influx of non-white residents. Consequently, housing stock fails to meet demand, exacerbating housing affordability challenges, even in previously affordable cities.”
- Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University (JCHS): Eliminating Exclusionary Land Use Regulations Should be the Civil Rights Issue of our Time, 2019
- “…exclusionary land use practices, by constraining housing supply and raising prices, not only make housing less affordable but also contribute to growing inequality, and may reduce the rate of economic growth… [E]liminating exclusionary zoning and related local laws and regulations is a challenge worthy of mobilizing the extended civil rights community.”
- Institute for Youth in Policy: Exclusionary Zoning and Affordable Housing, 2024
- “This brief examines the history of exclusionary zoning policies and how these policies have disproportionately harmed low-income buyers of color. One of the significant outcomes is the lack of affordable housing for these marginalized groups, which keeps these groups out of well-funded neighborhoods, exacerbating socioeconomic and racial inequity.”
- CATO Institute: The Constitutional Case against Exclusionary Zoning, 2024
- “Exclusionary zoning slows economic growth, severely limits economic mobility, and imposes burdens that disproportionately fall on racial minorities… One of us [authors} is a libertarian sympathetic to originalism. The other is a progressive living constitutionalist. We differ on many things, but agree here.”
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