A new report for Boston Indicators, “Exclusionary by Design”, shows the clear intent of many Greater Boston suburbs to resist racial and class integration in the 1970s. Housing scholar Amy Dain demonstrates how racial prejudice and class exclusion figured into suburbs’ downzoning in the 1970s; and how putatively legitimate concerns like tax revenue, aesthetic continuity, and the environment served the cause of exclusion.
Some years back, I took a bus ride to a climate rally in New York City with a bunch of other activists. My seatmate was 12 years old, a smart kid from the suburbs who had never been to New York. As we approached Manhattan on the Cross Bronx Expressway, he looked out at a block of concrete apartment buildings and said something like: This is what happens when you don’t care about the environment. Actually, I replied, this is green living: People live close together; they can walk or take public transit; they live in apartments, share walls and heat and are relatively energy efficient; their carbon footprint is far lower than a family in a “green”, leafy single-family suburban house.