New York City Has Been Zoned to Segregate

New York City is often romanticized as a mecca of multicultural urban living. But as diverse as it is, residents from very different backgrounds don’t often live in the same neighborhoods. In fact, New York is in second place after Milwaukee as far as black-white segregation goes.

Today, historical color lines are being redrawn through a concentration of wealth and the displacement of communities of color. In New York, that phenomenon may be spurred in part by the city’s well-intentioned land-use policies. Various types of rezoning—upzoning and mixed-use zoning, for example—have inadvertently but disproportionately harmed poor neighborhoods. That’s the central argument of Zoned Out!, a new book edited by Tom Angotti, an urban planning professor at the City University of New York, and housing advocate Sylvia Morse. CityLab caught up with the two for a conversation, the highlights of which are below.