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135 CHAPTER FIVE Exclusion and Park-Neighborhood Building, 1922 to 1929 In the s, subdivision building drove Atlanta’s largest housing boom to date. Established housing developers and new speculative builders alike platted, subdivided , graded, planted, and hawked new neighborhoods ranging from four square blocks to five hundred acres. Sales values peaked in Atlanta from  to ; sales volume, in . From  to , builders completed at least fourteen thousand units, and from  to , $ million worth of housing. As a result, the city filled in and spread out. Some s-era projects were entirely new, as when Sylvan Hills launched in , or when J. P. King auctioned Roxboro Park’s first forty lots in . In other cases, developers announced expansions to already existing neighborhoods, as when Ansley Park advertised its “Annex Lots” in . Like the prewar exclusive park-neighborhoods, those sweeping across Atlanta’s suburbs in the s promised natural settings, restrictions , and prestige. And they diffused racial and class exclusion across the landscape. As park-neighborhood building accelerated in the s, restrictive covenants dictated the racial and class composition of more and more of the Atlanta landscape. Typically spelled out in a deed or subdivision plat, as in the covenants for Inman Park or Ansley Park in the s and s, such restrictions established minimum building costs or lot sizes, or specified use (e.g., residential, commercial) for a specific period of time (e.g., forty or sixty years). A subdivision developer could, for example, require that properties be used only for residential purposes or that buildings measure no less than, for instance , , square feet, or cost no less than two thousand dollars. Covenants could also, as discussed in chapter , regulate race. A developer could require that a property not be sold or leased to “Semites” or “people of African descent .” However, restrictive covenants were less successful in controlling race, class, and housing practices in older, established areas of the city. Consequently, white elites cast about for ways to manage race and class across the whole city, in established neighborhoods as well as new suburban enclaves.  Chapter Five Comprehensive land-use zoning, unlike restrictive covenants, held the potential to order the entire city by class and race, and Atlanta’s elites pushed for zoning’s adoption in the early s. To be sure, zoning could not ensure architectural harmony or designed landscapes, as protective covenants might, but it could establish lot sizes and building setbacks, regulate building heights, and control density. Black-occupied and multifamily housing could be assigned to less-desirable areas of the city, away from white-occupied park-neighborhoods or from older districts that whites had come to view as white. That is, protective covenants could prevent nonwhites (or people unable to afford minimum building costs) from living in park-neighborhoods, but they did not establish where, exactly, nonwhites or the poor or middle class could live within the city. Comprehensive land-use zoning had the power to assign people to particular places, across the whole city and even in the unincorporated areas. Moreover, unlike restrictive covenants, zoning did not expire, and it applied to neighborhoods that did not adopt covenants when property was originally subdivided. Thus, Atlanta’s white elites decided not simply to institute zoning practices that were becoming increasingly accepted throughout the country, but opted to continue their racial segregation campaign by introducing racial classifications into the city’s  Comprehensive Land-Use Plan. Equally important, the public debates over comprehensive land-use zoning acted to further disseminate pro-segregationist rhetoric and normalize white park-neighborhood expectations in Atlanta. Texts generated as part of Atlanta ’s  zoning proposal (including the plan itself, its promotional materials, media coverage, and public hearings) affirmed and publicly circulated parkneighborhood thinking and practices. Protests against requests for zoning variances that arose after  suggest that many Atlantans had accepted the idea that apartments and single-family homes, businesses and residents should not be mixed. The  zone plan continued the ongoing quest of whites for racial housing segregation by classifying land use by race. Rapid park-neighborhood building inside and outside Atlanta’s city limits augmented zoning’s influence on residential geographies by developing more land into white-occupied parkneighborhoods ; disseminating deed covenants that mandated class and racially exclusionary practices across the landscape; and producing and circulating advertisements selling and media stories detailing these housing landscapes and their attendant racial and class assumptions. That is, park-neighborhood practices and sensibilities—particularly race and class exclusion—spread via the rapid development of the material landscape...

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