Removing the Housing Tariffs Protecting Racial and Economic Segregation

Indiana House Bill 1001

Last month US Bureau of Labor statistics determined the prices for some household grocery staples are really soaring in what analysts say are due in part to President Trump’s tariffs. Over the past year the economists agree that the costs of tariffs are being passed on to American consumers. But in 2024 Kroger executives admitted to the Federal Trade Commission that they raised the price of milk and egg prices above the cost of inflation. A federal report found nine major retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Tyson Foods, and Kraft Heinz used pandemic-era supply chain disruptions as an excuse to raise prices even more and increase their profits. So which one is the real reason grocery prices have been soaring in the U.S.? The answer is both. Tariffs and trade wars always lead to higher prices for consumers but so does allowing greedy corporations to run amok. There is a similar situation driving our housing crisis in America. Yes, city, state, and federal governments have allowed greedy developers to drive up the cost of housing but we’ve historically allowed local governments to impose their own tariffs to drive up the cost of housing. So while Indiana House Bill 1001 doesn’t create affordable housing on its own, I hope it passes anyway. Because makes it harder for NIMBYs, weak politicians, and zoning boards to continue using their own tariffs to drive housing scarcity during a housing crisis

Never heard of housing tariffs?

Don’t worry because exclusionary zoning is rarely called a housing tariff but it does exactly that by driving up the cost of housing in neighborhoods across America under the guise of protecting property values. In the early 1900s zoning was originally meant to protect residential areas from industrial nuisances but quickly morphed into protecting neighborhoods from undesirable racial groups like Blacks, Jews, Italians and other immigrant groups. In 1911 the city of Baltimore enacted the first racial zoning ordinance to keep Blacks out of White neighborhoods and it quickly spread around the country until the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1917. Racial covenants still could be created in private contracts but were harder to enforce and by 1948 they were ruled unenforceable at all and made illegal by The Fair Housing Act of 1968. But by then they were hardly needed. Exclusionary zoning allowed towns and cities to segregate minority ethnic groups by exploiting the existing economic inequality without ever using the terms White, Black, Caucasian, or Negro.

Single-Family zoning became the weapon of choice in America for protecting neighborhood character, property values and keeping undesirable lower socio-economic groups out of your community.

Don’t want Blacks in your neighborhood?

Use zoning to demand all new housing in your neighborhood be built to house only one family at a time, no matter how many the lot can accommodate. This creates scarcity because there is a desire for more housing there but the zoning artificially holds down the number of homes available, keeping demand high and supply low. Manipulation of The Market. Even if your pre-WWII neighborhood already has duplexes and apartment buildings, use zoning to stop anyone from replacing them. Ensuring when a multi-family unit is demolished for any reason, it can only be replaced with a single-family home making housing even more scarce. In fact, make homeownership a requirement for any new build in the neighborhood. With the economic disparities between most ethnic groups and Whites that should do the trick by itself of keeping out Blacks and other minorities. And if that doesn’t work, you still have the historic financial discrimination that persist in the home mortgage market to keep out many middle class minorities that could afford to buy there. The proliferation of this weapon has been so widespread in America that 75% of land zoned for residential in most cities is zoned only for single-family homes. But like many of the weapons man uses to wage war on man, single-family zoning has proliferated to the point of causing injury to many people that were never meant to be in harm’s way. Even middle-class White families are having a hard time finding housing in many cities. After 100 years of exclusionary single-family zoning, America, including Indiana specifically, is in a housing crisis. A housing crisis affecting low-income and middle class people of all ethnicities that we couldn’t even build our way out of if we tried with the current laws. The current zoning in most cities would only encourage more unsustainable sprawl as housing units come online one single family home at a time. For the past decade I’ve been frustrated as Indianapolis’ affordable housing shortage escalated to crisis level watching city government and the nonprofit industrial complex mostly push fantastical initiatives designed to make owning single-family homes more attainable to lower income families. Completely ignoring the reality these homes are often, still too expensive and rare to house the volume of people desperately needing housing now. It’s a pipe dream that we could solve a housing crisis while continuing to ban the types of housing civilizations have been using for thousands of years in cities all over the planet. Is racial and economic segregation under the guise of protecting property values and neighborhood character that important to us? I would have to say yes it was. For all the talk from liberals in Democratic cities their zoning boards did little more than conservatives in Republican towns to increase the volume and density of new housing coming online, to say nothing about actual affordability. Until the data center fight exposed most of these planning boards don’t actually work in the best interest of communities, only homeowners were listened to by zoning boards, not individuals needing housing options. For all the talk about local control and local zoning boards they sure haven’t gotten it done to encourage housing volume and density at any affordability level. Even the occasional liberal success story of neighbors stopping a developer from building an ostentatious million dollar home in a gentrifying neighborhood comes only after the lots sat vacant for decades due in part because exclusionary zoning stopped anyone from building anything but a single family home there.

The truth is, Indiana municipalities were never going to get it done. The political will simply doesn’t exist in most Indiana towns and cities to look past NIMBYs and their battle cry to protect property values and neighborhood character and do what’s needed to house more people anytime soon. I support House Bill 1001 not because it builds affordable housing but because it reduces some of the “tariffs” designed to keep neighborhoods exclusive and expensive to artificially inflate property values. It even addresses ridiculous requirements and costs needed for elevators in multi-story apartment buildings bringing us inline with the rest of the world while maintaining safety and accessibility. After a century of disastrous single-family zoning and excessive red tape, Hoosier cities and towns need a reset to begin addressing this housing crisis. Exclusionary zoning “tariffs” do affect the price of all housing whether it’s affordable or market rate because tariffs like unregulated corporate greed are always passed down to the consumer. I wish this bill went even further and directly addressed transit oriented development zoning to encourage even more housing and slew of other issues. Systemically we have to go beyond allowing developers to game the system of subsidies and tax credits to maximize their profits but minimizing housing quality and volume. And we absolutely do have to intentionally fund affordable housing and actually fund community-led, community owned cooperative housing development on a philanthropic, city, state, and federal level. Indiana House Bill 1001 could make building dense housing more possible in this housing crisis but we still have to put in the work to create truly affordable housing.