How Many Cups #16: What Dr. King Might Have Thought About Greenwich, Connecticut
and their discriminatory zoning laws
A continued thank you to all who have subscribed and emailed these posts to friends and family. We’re more than halfway done with our Martin Luther King focus for this month.
Maybe The Entire Mug
Before his assassination in 1968, Martin Luther King found his influence in a precarious position. His decision to expand the Civil Rights Movement to northern cities was met with pushback, often violent from White urbanites. King’s popularity suffered and he was faced with a decision: stay true to his heart and advocate for nationwide socioeconomic reforms or maintain power, albeit relegated to the South.
Despite being advised to keep the movement centered below the Mason-Dixon line, King remained steadfast in three key decisions.
Economic reforms for Black people.
Criticizing the Vietnam War as unjust, at home and abroad.
Incorporating struggling White folks into the movement.
One of his final campaigns was to remove racial barriers for Black people as they entered the housing market. The history of redlining, predatory loans and downright physical intimidation against people of color is well-documented. It would take King’s murder for President Johnson to cement the Fair Housing Act of 1968 into law.
There Was A Flaw, However
…with a bill that was seemingly a massive victory for the underprivileged. As detailed in Brendan O’Brien’s brilliantly research Homesick, the FHA was inadequately enforced. Ensuing secretaries for the Housing of Urban Development department never received either the manpower or funding necessary to enforce its statues; laws which declared unfair rental, mortgage and, today’s focus, zoning practices illegal if they resulted in racially biased outcomes.
Take the story of Clyde Ross, which Ta-Nehisi Coates retold in his powerful Case For Reparations essay of 2014. A Black man, Ross had bought a house in Chicago’s westside during the sixties. He bought the home “on contract” however, meaning that the seller held the deed until it was fully paid off. Coates detailed the discriminatory practice:
“Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself. The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat.”
With a steady, lucrative method for amassing wealth, the only asset White entrepreneurs needed more than actual homes were Black folks. Fortunately for them, Black people were migrating in droves to escape the domestic racial terror of the South. Enter the practice of “block-busting,” which Coates also unveiled:
“Speculators in north lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to ‘block-busting’—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. With these white-fled homes in hand, speculators then turned to the masses of black people who had streamed northward as part of the Great Migration, or who were desperate to escape the ghettos: the speculators would take the houses they’d just bought cheap through block-busting and sell them to blacks on contract.
Practices like these were commonplace throughout the cities Black folks trekked to during The Great Migration. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was explicitly signed into law to eliminate these schemes. They did not. Indeed, such housing discrimination is found today - although more heavily cloaked in a veil of municipal self-governance - in uber wealthy areas of the country. Which brings us to the topic of zoning laws.
Greenwich, Connecticut
One of the richest suburbs in the world, Greenwich houses a few thousand residents who are well known for commuting to high-paying jobs in New York City. In fact, Greenwich is so aesthetically pleasing and geographically close to the city that the it was once considered to be developed as a neighborhood for those working at the United Nations. Below, some census figures clearly express this spectacular concentration of wealth:
Their median household income is $50,000 higher than the American median of $74,580, as of 2022.
The per capita income of $112,136 over the last 12 months triples the national figure.
In 2022, the median value of owner-occupied housing unit was $281,900. Greenwich’s value is $1,566,500.
The nation boasts 58.5 percent of in the workforce. Less than half of the eligible women in Greenwich work.
Living in Greenwich dispenses benefits that permanently alter a life trajectory and overall happiness. Between 2015 and 2020, their public high school sent 44 students to either Harvard, M.I.T or Princeton; a figure somehow higher than the famed Greenwich Academy prep school. Nicknamed Connecticut’s “Gold Coast,” Greenwich has four local beaches, a mansion tour, multiple public parks in pristine condition and according to their town website, “our own islands.” Yes, you want to raise your kids there.
But How?
…is what many a family is wondering.
Multifamily Zoning Laws
The hardships and obstacles one must endure to settle in Greenwich are so daunting that the Brookings think tank dedicated an entire study to it. It concluded that as of 2021 Greenwich disallowed “multifamily housing of any kind on more than 95% of its land.” To boot, this has a disproportionate impact on families of color.
Although it may be fair to ask Greenwich’s intentions behind this zoning statute, the answer is not necessary. Indeed, those searching and living in multifamily homes are predominantly Black, Hispanic or Asian. Preventing the creation of multifamily homes directly impacts them more than White families, regardless of intent.
Lot Minimums
Build your own house, one may say. Naturally, the town as embedded roadblocks to that as well. Although they once permitted lots to be subdivided specifically for those with working or middle class salaries, Greenwich did away with that allowance.
You might find the timing of this municipal change…interesting. It occurred during the racially tumultuous time between 1950 and 1960 - an era when Black folks were fleeing the South - and resulted in the codification of lot minimums that make it impossible for anyone but the most wealthy to afford living there. While this practice prices out families of all colors from building their home in Greenwich, the disparity between White and non-White wealth is so undeniable that this makes this issue one of both race and class.
What precisely are these lot requirements and how do we scale them for comprehension? Greenwich draws zones where only certain types of homes can be built. For instance, zone 4 legally demands someone build a home with no less than four acres of land. Zone 1 equates to one acre, zone 2 for two acres, so on and so forth.
For scale, an acre is roughly the size of a football field if one were to exclude the endzones. Eighteen 2,400 square-foot homes can fit inside of one acre. To date, a quick glance at their 2023 zoning map reveals that about half of Greenwich allows strictly zone 4 or zone 2 housing only.
To build a home in this town one must be able to afford silly amounts of land. But perhaps you notice that the required acreage shrinks the closer you get to the shoreline. Good luck building or buying a home on the water in Greenwich. It’ll only demand your left kidney and a handshake deal with the Devil.
Green Area Requirements
In Greenwich, a family can be forced to have up to 84 percent of their land be a Green Area. Even a multifamily dwelling requires 50 percent of its land to be green, which by definition disallows paved driveways or garages if they surpass this percentage. Please note that gravel driveways and patios are exempted, in a blindingly obvious concession that they are prettier, raise property values and therefore permissible.
Journalist Frank MacEachern once reported on the zoning’s implementation. “The concern is that more impervious surfaces lead to greater storm water runoff, leading to lower-level properties facing increased flooding and excess storm water.”
Ah, yes. A stooge might believe that local residents and town representatives are sincerely concerned with the impact of rainwater in Greenwich. But a stooge, we are not. What might constitute a “lower-level” property? A beach house near the shore, perhaps? One with a foundation close to the less-elevated sea level, perhaps?
Green Area Requirements protect the most wealthy of Greenwich residents and have an adverse impact on those trying to move there. Mandating more open space necessarily prevents Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) or multifamily homes from being developed. In plainer terms, place where the less fortunate can find affordable housing are precluded from even existing.
It is in this way Greenwich preserves their town for the rich and halts the poor, the people of color from moving in. Indeed, only one-third of public employees - school teachers, firefighters, cops - can afford to live in the town which employs them.
Let The Numbers Do The Talking
From 1950 to 1960, Fairfield County’s Black population doubled in size, from around 16,000 to over 33,000 people. When coupled with the cultural context of the contemporaneous Civil Rights Movement, this statistic is reason enough to wonder if Greenwich’s shakeup in zoning laws was intended to keep out Black folks.
Lawyer, Cornell Professor and head of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation for the Biden Administration, Sara C. Bronin has researched Greenwich’s zoning history. Her publication for the Pepperdine Law Review neatly summarized the history of race and housing in the municipality.
“Following World War II, demand for housing there boomed thanks to nationwide economic growth, the expansion of the interstate highway system, and the availability of FHA-backed mortgages. In areas south of the Merritt Parkway, the town liberally allowed property owners to subdivide property, feeding a massive expansion of Greenwich’s housing stock and a near-doubling of the town’s population between 1940 and 1970.
In response to this growth—and the arrival of more racially and socioeconomically diverse populations into a community previously dominated by luxury estates—municipal officials moved to stem the tide. Greenwich replaced its Town Plan Commission, which had speedily processed and freely allowed new development, with a stricter planning and zoning commission in 1952; doubled the residential minimum lot size in several of Greenwich’s neighborhoods in the following years; and downzoned multi-family zones in several neighborhoods to allow for only single-family homes in 1968. With the pipeline of new housing supply cut off, the town’s population has remained flat from 1970 through the present-day.”
As of 2021, the most recent survey which includes demographic numbers, Greenwich has 63,455 total residents. Only 2,532 of identify as Black or White and Black. That’s just below 4 percent of the total population.
I’m not a mind-reader, but I feel comfortable in proclaiming that Black folks, and all people of both struggle and color for that matter, want access to the top-tier education, amenities and geographic pleasantry that Greenwich has to offer. Yet the town has levied housing statues which prevent non-wealthy families from moving there.
We must ask why.
Scratch that. I actually just did. And what’s more, I gave you everything short of a smoking gun for you to come to your own conclusion. Who knows, maybe you think that the people of Greenwich are passionate supporters of the aesthetic beauty that only a mansion surrounded by 4 acres of perfectly cultivated front yards can provide them.
Or maybe you’ve lived in America for a day or two.
More Sources
“Concern remains over green space regulations” - Greenwich Time
The Case For Reparations - The Atlantic (Ta-Nehisis Coates)