The Importance of Housing Affordability

In 70 to 90% of many North American cities, it's illegal to build anything other than a single family home. This essentially says that if you can't afford a detached single family home, and on a lot of at least a certain square footage or acreage, you are not allowed to live here. Of course, that has pretty clear socioeconomic implications. In the 19 teens, there are great migrations of African Americans out of the South. We're going up to industrial areas in the upper South and the Midwest. And what local governments do is they say, okay, we don't impose racial segregation, but we can impose socioeconomic segregation. The same result gets you almost the same housing