Black Housing Opportunities in Birmingham, Alabama

BLACK HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA Bobby M. Wilson Zoning to exclude minorities from certain housing markets includes such devices as requirements for minimum lot size and frontage, floor space, and living density. Multifamily housing units are usually least able to meet such requirements. Because land acquisition costs for single-family units have proven too high for low and moderate income blacks outside the South, prohibition of multiple housing units has often resulted in limiting housing opportunities for blacks. (1) Since the 1920s zoning has provided a device for protecting the homogenous single-family suburb from influxes of minority and low income groups. (2) The courts have often looked with disfavor upon the encroachment of multifamily units into single-family neighborhoods . The influx of European immigrants and black rural migrants from the South to the tenement houses of the North created undesirable conditions that became associated with multifamily housing. (3) As a result of their perception of the relationships between multifamily housing and social problems such as crime and low moral standards the courts as early as the 1920s upheld the prohibition of buildings designed or intended for the housing of two or more families in suburban locations. Some courts in the 1920s ruled that the prohibition of multifamily housing was discriminatory, but exclusionary zoning of multifamily units was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1926 in a decision which stated: (4) . . . the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surrounding created by the residential character of the district . . . detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-------until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Dr. Wilson is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Geography at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294. 50Southeastern Geographer Five decades later, protecting the character of their single-family residential areas continues to be the primary purpose of some jurisdictions . About 10,000 state court zoning decisions have supported exclusionary zoning since the 1926 Supreme Court ruling. During the late 1960s, however, exclusionary zoning was a major focus in a series of court decisions against discriminatory zoning laws, especially those which prohibited multifamily housing. Most controversies surrounding the exclusion of multifamily units have taken place in suburban communities outside the South that are in proximity to cities with large black populations. One of the best known of these zoning controversies is the case involving Black Jack, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. (5) Prohibition of multifamily housing had decisively limited the housing opportunities of low and moderate income blacks within the St. Louis SMSA, where the proportion of black households living in multifamily housing was twice that of the white population. (6) The United States Supreme Court recently upheld a New Jersey Supreme Court decision which ordered the town of Mt. Laurel to revise its zoning ordinance to include low and moderate income housing, permitting low and moderate income groups the opportunity to suburbanize . (7) This paper compares single and multifamily housing opportunities of black and white households within the Birmingham SMSA. The term "housing opportunity" as used here refers to access to particular types of housing. If blacks and whites had equal access to singlefamily and multifamily housing, the impact of zoning restrictions against multifamily units would be the same upon the two groups. BIRMINGHAM HOUSING PATTERNS. Economic and population growth rates are major factors influencing regional differences in land use patterns. The large population and economic growth rates of cities outside the South have created a demand for low and moderate income housing that could only be satisfied by increasing the number of multifamily units. Such units represent an intensive use of residential land and they can be made available at a rapid rate. Most southern cities developed later than those to the north, and their lower residential densities reflect the effect of the automobile in liberating workers from selecting residences near places of work as well as the lower land Vol. XVII, No. 1 51 Areas Zoned for...