Exclusionary Zoning: Unequal Opportunities

According to Whitten, a West Hartford City planning and zoning consultant in 1924, zoning is “the direction of building development along orderly and well-considered lines of city growth.” At this time, the Zoning Commission of West Hartford claimed that without regulation chaos would occur and zoning prevents waste.

“Exclusionary zoning” includes any practices that may prevent certain populations from being able to live in a specific area. Historically, this has pertained to racial mistreatment and fear of heterogeneity in social spaces like neighborhoods and schools. It is still prevalent today in terms of socioeconomic status and income inequality. This links directly with access to schools and opportunities for socioeconomic advancing.

While zoning is a necessary part of city planning, “exclusionary zoning” occurs and begins to widen gaps of socioeconomic classes by limiting opportunities. Segregation by race and income has been reported as a result of population density regulations through zoning. Researchers at The Brookings Institution analyzed statistics of Housing Costs, Zoning, and School Access to address this vary issue. The statistics are pressing. Near high-scoring public schools, housing costs average 2.4 times the prices around low-scoring public schools. Buying a more expensive house has become directly correlated to buying access to schools. Looking directly at test score gap (measuring the difference in percentile ranking between low and middle to high income), the Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford Area came in second to all national metro areas. Hartford ranked 4^th in terms of economic segregation that uses the percentage of students that would need to relocate for equal distribution of students in each school. [2] The map included  is from the Brooking Institution; it has an interactive feature to explore test score gaps based on income or race, income inequality, economic segregation, housing cost gap and school ranking. The map seen here highlights economic segregation in the Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford area, illustrated by the size of the circle. Beneath the map, charts illustrate racial composition, income composition, and school ranking by race and income, respectively. School rankings for middle/high-income are over twice as high as low-income areas. This is a very real depiction of income affecting opportunity for equal education.