Sinners: How Zoning Criminalized Migration

Zoning is a controversial and complicated mess. This piece discusses the origin story of zoning and how public health innocuously disguised its premise.

Jul 28, 2025

Last month, local urbanists scored a rare neighborhood association win. The South Lakeview Neighbors association, bolstered with new pro-housing members, voted 23-19 to approve a 40-unit apartment building in South Lakeview. For a group notoriously averse to even the most incremental changes (such as approving one Zipcar parking space), this win stunned the Belmont NIMBYs and may signal the arrival of a new era in local housing politics.

Opponents of the project used their usual tactics—bashing the height and unit count of the building and claiming it’s “out of character” for the neighborhood. In an impressive display of cognitive dissonance, the group claimed that the new building simultaneously features both too much and too little parking. All developers, they insisted, are greedy—except, naturally, the ones who built their own homes decades before. Heading the barrage of fear-mongering were neighbors concerned that a mid-rise building next to their quaint single-family homes would draw in the wrong crowd—renters who are criminals, anti-social, and perhaps even pedophiles. These absurd claims ignore reality: over half of Chicago households rent, and if renters are such a menace to society, then the city has much bigger fish to fry.1

None of this is new. In fact, this sentiment helped fuel the very zoning policies that constrain many of our cities today.

To explain how we got here, we must look back to the Progressive Era. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, cities in the northern U.S. drew in millions of new residents; European and Asian migrants sought industrial jobs, and Black Americans, as part of the Great Migration, fled the burgeoning Jim Crow South in search of a better life.2 This influx of new residents caused rapid urbanization—such as in Chicago, where the population grew from 300k to 1.7 million in a few decades, and new communities like Little Italy, Ukrainian Village, and Bronzeville sprung up. However, a lack of available housing forced these impoverished migrants to crowd into unhygienic and dilapidating buildings. Many lived in tenement houses, buildings constructed to maximize occupancy through shared living, cooking, and bathing spaces that often offered little ventilation and no privacy. The densest tenement houses might have crammed six people into one bedroom. Tenement housing’s dire living conditions frequently facilitated outbreaks and shorter lifespans.

This photo displays common tenement housing conditions in Chicago.

19th century life in greater Chicago was no paradise, either. Rotting horse carcasses littered the streets, raw sewage clogged the Chicago River, and 10,000 children under the age of 5 died every year in the early 1890s.3 When influenza ripped through the population in 1890, the city declared a public health crisis. Following several major infrastructure projects, such as the remarkable feat of reversing the Chicago River, the city set its sights on eliminating airborne diseases.

However, after a flawed investigation from the Chicago Department of Health identified the “tenement problem” as part of the cause behind outbreaks like influenza, city officials began to transform this public health disaster into a political tool. Health commissioner Oscar Coleman De Wolf, operating under racist claims that some nationalities were “culturally predisposed” to poor living conditions, concluded that foreign-born populations living in tenements were the source of all disease outbreaks as a direct result of their low incomes and untidy housing. His framing of disease as a “foreign” problem was not new—it accorded with broader progressive era worries about immigration and preservation of civil order—but De Wolf elevated it to new heights through the practice of tenement inspections. Inspectors regularly evaluated tenements and removed sick residents, ostensibly to prevent the spread of disease. His plan sometimes even required tenants to pay for renovations when buildings were found to be in violation of his new regulations; common examples included no on-site bathrooms or clean drinking water.45

To no one’s surprise, the city did not require similar inspections on single-family homes. Consequently, University of Washington historian Margaret Garb claimed that such differences in building standards—which grouped tenements with factories and workshops—affirmed the exclusivity of property rights for single-family homeowners. Eventually, city zoning laws effectively outlawed tenement housing altogether by setting lot size minimums and banning roommates.6 Andrew Young, Chief Inspector of the Chicago Bureau of Sanitation at the time, justified all of the above via the following: crime is begotten by sin, and sin begotten by disease, disease begotten by filth and filth begotten by ignorance and neglect of the individual or the inefficiency of the agencies employed by the municipality to correct such conditions.” By associating disease with sin, and sin with crime, city officials stigmatized renters—a pattern that still echoes in modern-day community meetings where "undesirables" are arbitrarily shunned.

Chicago’s tenement inspections stigmatized higher-density housing in such a way that would later reinforce modern zoning laws. In 1926, an Ohio suburb known as Euclid passed an ordinance defining land districts and restricting zones to a certain use, height, and width. Ambler Realty, then the owners of 68 acres of land in the village, argued that the newly passed ordinance reduced the value of the land. The company planned to develop the space for industrial use, but with the new zones intersecting multiple portions of the company’s land, plans had to be scrapped.

History of Housing Segregation: Discriminatory Zoning — The Village of Euclid published and popularized these zoning maps once the Supreme Court decision was decided.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Euclid, arguing that the township had the authority to dictate land-use policies in the interest of public health and safety. Even though Ambler Realty was not planning to build apartments, other municipalities used this decision to justify their own similar zoning laws. In the majority decision, Supreme Court Justice Sutherland said, “The blighting of property values and the congesting of population, whenever the colored or certain foreign races invade a residential section, are so well known as to be within the judicial cognizance.” Thus, zoning was legalized as an explicit way to protect the property values and lifestyles of wealthy, white homeowners. Such xenophobic and racist rhetoric influencing modern day zoning law cannot be ignored

Zoning is also weaponized to target minority communities. Shown in this map of NYC, many of the major manufacturing zones border or are contained entirely within minority neighborhoods. Source: *American Journal of Public Health*, 91(7). (2001). American Public Health Association.

Isn’t requiring clean water, adequate living space, air flow and sunlight objectively a win for tenants? Absolutely. However, many American laws, such as dictating minimum square footages and roommate bans, predated modern medicine like vaccines and now unnecessarily obstruct affordable housing. Chicago will likely never see levels of crowding and immigration on par with the late 19th century influx, but housing demand certainly remains. There are fewer families and more single-person households today, creating a housing shortage despite a slowly growing population. Single-family zoning and lot minimums dictate a neighborhood’s affordability level. Since proximity to low-income housing decreases the value of single-family homes, the stability of property values requires economic homogeny. Many of the same laws that once protected tenants from greedy, uncaring landlords are now used to exclude the very people they’re meant to protect.

Biden's Ill-Advised Plan to Eliminate Exclusionary Zoning — Shelterforce Shelterforce — Soon, cities used local zoning laws to segregate class.

Cities grabbed the newly legalized zoning laws and ran with them. Emboldened by the newfound power to restrict the types of housing most inhabited by non-White or low-income residents, cities could still legally exclude "undesirable" populations due to arbitrary definitions of public health. In the 1920s, Memphis, Seattle, and Indianapolis designated minimum lot sizes in their municipalities, citing close quarters contributing to disease.7

This isn’t inherently wrong. Crowded housing does spread more airborne disease. Yet these minimum lot sizes—justified in the name of "public health"—have no basis in science. Dallas mandates 7500 sq ft plots, Los Angeles requires 5,000 sq ft, and Bethlehem, Connecticut, demands a staggering 76,000 sq ft. Do the people of Bethlehem truly require 175% larger lots than LA to live healthy lives? This author thinks not. While these laws may have started as tools to prevent the spread of disease, cities have expanded zoning far from the original scope. A one-size-fits-all approach to housing is wrong—one just has to live in college dorms for a year to understand why smaller, denser housing can be an appropriate place to call home, even temporarily.

So why do we continue to uphold restrictive housing requirements? Well, because of century-old racism and classism. Zoning can be used to help or to hurt. Unfortunately, due to precedents set by Supreme Court judges and public health officials long since gone, we continue to live under the same damaging pattern of exclusion. Until we confront this legacy head-on, we will remain trapped in a cycle: misconstruing public health for property values, and weaponizing exclusion for prosperity.

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