Abstract
An instrument of wealth accumulation and racial segregation in housing markets, the intersections between zoning and labor are often overlooked. Extending theories of space, race, and class, and drawing on historical and archival evidence, I elaborate three ways that American land-use zoning emerged to shape labor markets in the early 20th century: (1) zoning constrained households from engaging in subsistence and direct market activity, acting as a regulatory source of labor commodification; (2) zoning first emerged as a xenophobic tool for regulating labor competition; and (3) zoning introduced racialized boundaries distinguishing formal work from a sphere of economic informality. I illustrate these theoretical-historical propositions with a study of the frontier origins of American land-use zoning laws in late-19th -century Los Angeles. This first and influential approach to residential zoning emerged amid racial dynamics of western settlement and the class politics of a national “free” labor market. I demonstrate how efforts to regulate the settlement and labor practices of poor urban households and Chinese immigrants on in Los Angeles became the direct legal basis for the dichotomous categories of “residential” and “industrial” districts that the city first defended before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915. By theorizing the intersections of land-use zoning and labor markets, this paper provides a theoretical framework and historical genealogy for future work to consider entanglements of housing and labor politics amid the concurrent flexibilization of work and land use in the present.
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Notes
Consider that a 2004 review in the Annual Review of Sociology on residential segregation only mentions zoning once in a footnote (Charles 2003, p. 170). For sociological studies that directly study land-use regulations and their politics, see: Jerolmack and Walker (2018); LaBriola, 2022a, b; Logan and Molotch, (1987); McCabe (2016); Owens (2019); Rothwell and Massey (2009); Rothwell (2012); Shlay and Rossi (1981).
Lens identifies a third important foci in social research on zoning on the political factions and interests that drive land-use decision making. He reviews the opposing perspectives of William Fischel’s (2001) “homevoter” hypothesis which argues that homeowners drive local land-use policy, and Logan and Molotch’s (1987) “urban growth machine” account that highlight the role of real estate speculators and city boosters in driving land speculation and zoning policy.
One notable exception here are economists who point to the effect of zoning in constraining labor market mobility into high-growth cities. These scholars argue that by constraining the housing supply and increasing the housing cost of cities with high demand for labor, zoning inhibits efficient flows of labor between cities (Lindsey & Telles, 2017, p. 116; Moretti, 2013, p. 154; Posner & Weyl, 2018, p. 38–51). For critical perspective on what they term the “housing as opportunity” view, see Rodríguez-Pose and Storper (2019).
Research on the origins of zoning has examined real estate disputes in eastern cities (Boyer, 1986; Hirt, 2014; Wolf, 2008) and overt racial zoning ordinances in southern states and San Francisco that courts struck down and guided municipalities to use proxies for race in density rules (Delaney, 1998; Godsil, 2006; Power, 1988; Rothstein, 2017; Silver, 1991). Here I turn to theorize the case of the creation of the first “residential districts,” in the United States, and the emerging spatial legal separation of land uses, as “industrial” and “residential” districts emerged as dichotomous categories of use. This legal invention occurred not in New York but in Los Angeles, in a process of municipal experimentation over the legal limits of nuisance laws beginning in the 1890s and 1910 (Kolnick, 2008). Not only was Los Angeles the first city to distinguish “residential” and “industrial” districts, but its zoning experiments were the first to be upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915, one year before New York City passed its much-studied Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance.
Joining longstanding critics of density zoning as a driver of segregation are urban economists and planning scholars arguing that restrictive zoning constrains housing supplies, inflating home prices and exacerbating wealth inequality (Glaser & Gyourko, 2003; Glaser et al., 2005; Lindsey & Teles, 2017, p. 109–126; cf., Rodríguez-Pose and Storper 2019). By restricting the supply of new construction, in contexts of rising demand, zoned homeowners benefit from rising equity at the cost of expanded access to ownership (LaBriola, 2022b; Oliver & Shapiro, 2006, p. 253; Reeves, 2017).
Sociologist Gieryn (2000, p. 574) emphasized the gendered consequences of zoning: “the spatial division of labor between home and work has profound consequences for women’s identities and opportunities… What it is to be female is constructed in part through idealized qualities (domestic security, family stability) ascribed to the home.”
Not until 1850 did the number of wage earners surpass the population of enslaved workers, exploited for productive and reproductive labor in plantation households (Foner, 1995, p. xvi). Self-employment and bondage, not waged work, were the primary forms of productive labor for much of the 19th century (Foner, 1995, p. xv-xvi).
Liévanos (2019) from his study of Home Owners Loan Corporation investment risk maps of Stockton, concludes that historic overlays of industrial districts continue to map onto racialized settlement patterns: “the percentage of neighborhoods zoned as industrial in 2004 was highest in the predominately Black, Mexican, Filipinx [historically] red-graded neighborhoods… [meanwhile] [t]he exclusive, white elite… neighborhood had no industrial land uses” (246).
Notably, in her case for revising zoning bans on home-based businesses published in the years after welfare reform, Garnett (2001) noted welfare recipients as prime candidates for “bootstrap entrepreneurialism” in the home: “[t]he low-skilled individuals who face welfare time limits and work requirements are among the most vulnerable in the modern economy… Home businesses might offer a partial buffer against these economic realities…” (1216-7).
Take for example Tera Hunter’s (1998) study of emancipated Black women working in postbellum Atlanta. In 1880, many Black women laundry workers conducted their work from home. Falling on immigrant and Black domestic workers, laundry work was the most onerous and underpaid of 19th -century domestic tasks (Strasser, 2000, p. 104). Yet for Black mothers, “flexibility marked the main advantage of laundry work… Black women controlled the labor process in their own homes and neighborhoods” (Hunter 1998, p. 57, 207).
This legislation was overturned by courts in 1884 but subsequent efforts would reinstate elements of the ban on homework.
In the urban regulation of vice districts, notes the legal historian Novak (1996, p. 161), “if liquor, gaming and lewd theatrics prefigured a judicial finding of ‘disorderliness,’ the addition of race often helped assure conviction.”
Box B-1306, Ordinance No. 9774. Ordinances, Los Angeles City Archives, Erwin Piper Tech Annex Building, (LACA hereafter; emphasis added).
While initially arrested in development compared to gold-rush San Francisco, the completion of three major railways in 1869, 1876, and 1886 spurred a rate war between railways, speculative housing booms, and a population explosion in Los Angeles.
These expectations of abundant opportunities for a agrarian paradise lost—blending self-sufficient production and moral domestic reproduction (independent of government) was explicit in the 1900 Southern California booster publication Our Italy: “In my mind I see the time when this region … will be one of small farms, of neat cottages, of industrious homes. The owner is pretty certain to prosper–that is, to get a good living (which is independence), and lay aside a little yearly–if the work is done by himself and his family… And the particularity of the situation is that the farm or garden, whichever it is called, will give agreeable the most healthful occupation to all the boys and girls in the family all the days of the year that they can be spared from the school” (Warner, 1900, p. 108; parenthesis in original).
“Railroads to Encourage Settlers in Southwest.” New York Times. February 2, 1902, p. 2; Hernandez, 2011, p. 45.
A rate war between the two railroads decrased the fare to Los Angeles by two-thirds for Eastern migrants, and more for midwestern migrants (Fogelson, 1993, p. 66).
“Eden of the Saxon Homeseeker.” Land of Sunshine. January 1895. 2(2):34; “Un-American type…” quoted in Phelps (1996, p. 77).
On the history and dynamics of sex work and exploitation of Chinese women in late-19th -century California, see Cheng Hirata (1979).
For Chinese men, labor market exclusion was at once racialized and gendered, as many came to specialize by the 1870s in “feminized work” as domestic servants and laundry workers (Wang, 2002).
“Board of Health Orders Many to Clean Up.” LA Herald, June 27, 1901, p. 9.
Early building codes and “fire limits” in Chicago, designed to minimize the risk of fires after the Great Fire of 1871, functioned as a form of proto-zoning, argues urban historian Einhorn (1991) as the higher costs of building with brick constrained who could engage in the storage and use of combustible materials, for example to run a small engine.
As Lasch (1977, p. 167) noted, bourgeois domesticity observed a “religion of health.” The Los Angeles social reformer Dana Bartlett explicitly connected gendered domestic projects to the development of urban regulation: “Whatever touches the health or morals of the community is of interest to [the Los Angeles “house-mother”] because she is a woman. As she knows how to make the home a place of beauty, so she is naturally interested in abating nuisances and promoting everything that tends to the development of purity of life in the city at large” (Bartlett, 1907, p. 96).
“Bar Bakery Addition from Home District.” LA Herald, September 27, 1910, p.8.
“Dye Works Must Leave Residence District.” LA Herald, October 7, 1910, p.8.
“Restrict the Morgues.” LA Herald. May 12, 1904, p. 6.
Box B-110, Health Officer Report, 1898. Unsorted Archives, 1879–1900. LACA.
Box A-25. Petition 669, August 10, 1908. Petitions. LACA.
Box B-110, Health Officer Report, 1898. Unsorted Archives, 1879–1900. LACA; Box B-110. Health Officer Annual Report, 1899. Unsorted Archives, 1879–1900. LACA.
“Pasadena Cow Owners’ Wrath.’ LA Herald April 29, 1904, p. 9.
“Mayor Vetoes Cow and Brickyard Ordinances.” LA Herald, April 3, 1910, p. 7.
Box A-2. Petition 272, April 1, 1901. Petitions. LACA, emphasis added.
“The Tramp Nuisance.” LA Times, October 7, 1894, p. 11.
“The Tramp Nuisance and the Remedy.” LA Times, November 15, 1894, p. 4.
In 1904, the year the residence district ordinance is passed, 94% of Los Angeles inmates were white men and 70% had been arrested on “public order” charges, while Mexican and indigenous inmates were a higher proportion of incarcerated persons in the 1850 and 1860 s (Hernandez, 2017, p. 39, 56).
One article noted, “but it will, perhaps, cause the celestials [Chinese migrants] in the city to … sit up nights devising ways… to even things up with this, the latest effort to [force American men] to compete with Chinese slave labor” (“The Unemployed.” LA Times, January 12, 1895, p. 8).
The Unemployed.” LA Times, January 12, 1895, p. 8.
Driven by a boom of low-cost subdivision construction and installment-plan mortgages, the city boasted a relatively high homeownership rate of 40% in 1890 (Phelps, 1996, p. 107–109). Notably, homeownership was high even among the city’s Black population. By 1910, 36% of Black residents were homeowners, in stark contrast to Black homeownership rates in New York (2.4%), New Orleans (11%) and Birmingham (16.5%) (Hernandez, 2011, p. 128).
Facts about Contended Los Angeles, quoted in Davis (2002, p. 115).
As the labor historian Paul Ong summarized: “At the heart of the anti-laundry movement was a conflict between White residents and Chinese laundrymen over the use of urban space. This conflict did not materialize until the trade was in its latter stage of development. But once the conflict was underway, it led to an anti-laundry campaign that culminated into the unique set of laws enacted against the Chinese” (Ong, 1981, p. 104).
“Chinese Chased from Compton.” LA Herald. August 23, 1893, p. 6.
See, for example: Workingmen’s Party of California. 1880. “Chinatown Declared a Nuisance!” Rare Books Collection, Huntington Library. Call #6216.
Consider the 1878, 400-page report by the California State Senate’s Special Committee on Chinese Immigration. The report fixated on the unconventional family structures of male-majority Chinese enclaves (an effect of restrictive migration policies), and their corruption of Christian families—“[i]t is safe to say that where one soul has been saved…by reason of the presence of the heathen hordes on this coast, a hundred white have been lost by contamination,” testified one pastor (California State Senate, 1878, p. 38).
Importantly, as numerous scholars have established, Chinese workers and white workers rarely competed for employment in the same sectors. Chinese American workers in 1880 were concentrated in four industries, agriculture, laundry, domestic housework, and day labor, which together accounted for 87% of jobs held by Chinese workers (Lou, 1990, p. 49). Few of these sectors competed with white men, though some did meant competition for working white women.
Labor organizers accused business leaders of deliberately promoting Chinese immigration to undercut white wages. Frances Noel, chairwoman of the local National Women’s Trade Union League pointed to an issue of Pacific Coast Magazine where a prominent banker stated that “California can do nothing better than to import a hundred thousand Chinese annually… because they are willing to perform duties which the white people do not care to perform…[adding that] the question of immigration should not be decided by a few beer-befuddled labor leaders” (U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, 1916, p. 5722).
“Chinese Immigration.” LA Herald. October 3, 1873, p. 2.
“Leads All in Wash Bills: Los Angeles the Paradise of the Laundryman.” LA Times, March 18, 1906, p. I18.
Ordinance 162. Laundries Hours Regulation. March 7, 1885. Unsorted Archives, 1879–1900. LACA; “Increase in License Fee for Laundries.” LA Times. June 28, 1902, p. 2.
“Will Districts Hand Laundries.” LA Herald. December 4, 1903, p. 8.
“City Council.” LA Herald. April 7, 1886, p. 6; “Criminalities.” LA Herald. May 5, 1887, p. 12; “Celestial Lawbreakers.” LA Herald. May 18, 1899, p. 6.
It was perhaps because of the difficulty of disproving accusations of spitting inside laundries that the ordinance was successfully deployed to arrest laundry workers for purported violations: “Sprinkling by Mouth.” LA Herald. July 4, 1899, p. 5; “In the Police Court.” LA Herald. August 5, 1899, p.8.
“Ordinance Valid: Important Decisions in the Flower-Street Laundry Case.” LA Times September 26, 1899, p. 7; “Laundry Ordinance Illegal: Chinamen Discharged.” LA Times. November 7, 1899, p. 10; “The Ordinance Invalid.” LA Herald. November 7, 1899, p. 8.
“New Building Laws: Provisions of Restrictions Regarding Laundries.” LA Times December 17, 1899, p. D1.
“City Building Commission: A Report of Work.” LA Times December 17, 1899, p. D1.
B-96, Health Officer Annual Report 1879, Unsorted Archives, 1879–1900. LACA.
In 1902, newspaper articles began to speculate about discussion of a new ordinance “sweeping in character” that would make it “unlawful to erect any laundry or washhouse within 100 feet of any school, church, or residence” (Liquor Licenses on Tap Once More.” LA Times. November 4, 1902, p. A2).
January 11, 1904, page 580. City Council Minutes. LACA.
Box B-1304, Ordinance No. 9080, January 11, 1904. Ordinances. LACA.
“Oppose Chinese Laundries.” LA Herald. December 12, 1903, p. 7; “Will Fight Ordinance.” LA Herald. February 16, 1904, p. 7; “Ordinance Illegal.” LA Herald. March 13, 1904, p. 1.
“Oscar E. Farish dies, ill but a few weeks.” Los Angeles Express, December 12, 1917. Dr. Walter Lindley Scrapbooks, California Hospital, Volume V, box 7, p. 179. Claremont Colleges Libraries.
“’Residence District’: Plan Haven or Refuge.” LA Times, May 28, 1904, p. 4.
Box B-1306, Ordinance No. 9774. Ordinances, LACA; “’Residence District’: Plan haven or Refuge.” LA Times. May 28, 1904, p. 4; “Residence District.” LA Times. July 16, 1904, p. 2.
Consider the 1899 case of a Los Angeles policeman wearing a Star 47 who was accused of extorting Chinese laundries for alleged violation of the hour ordinance. The officer “rode a horse, and would come up suddenly just before 10 o’clock. At that hour the men would be bathing [in the laundry shop], ready for going to bed, and the officer would insist that they were washing clothes” (“Chinamen Held Up.” LA Times, June 1, 1899, p. 8).
“Factory Ordinance Attacked in Court.” LA Herald, February 16, 1908, p. 5; “Firm Says Fire Board Unjustly Discriminated.” LA Herald, February 25, 1908, p. 3; “Factories May Be Built Here.” LA Herald, February 29, 1908, p. 5.
Language of ordinance quoted in August 1, 1908, page 299. City Council Minutes. LACA.
August 1, 1908, page 299. City Council Minutes. LACA.
Box B-1323. Ordinance 16,948 New Series, August 1, 1908. Ordinances. LACA; emphasis added.
Ordinance N.S. 18,526, adopted 19 July 1909.
“Poverty Price of Others’ Ease.” LA Herald, May 14, 1908, p. 9.
Box S451, Folder 35. Illegal Garage Conversions. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke Papers: Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Staff Files, 1975–1976, 1981–2008, Retina Bowlin, 1999–2008. University of Southern California Archives.
Though not commonly recognized, New York City looked to Los Angeles when drafting its own landmark comprehensive zoning ordinance. New York City’s 1913 Commission on the Heights of Building—which drafted the 1916 ordinance—carefully studied the frontier urbanism in Los Angeles’ land-use laws and its 1915 U.S. Supreme Court victory, noting that “no city in this country has gone as far in the way of creating industrial and residential districts.” (Board of Estimate and Apportionment of the City of New York, 1913, p. 151).
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Acknowledgements
For comments on previous drafts, I wish to thank Fabien Accominotti, Jeffrey Bilik, Jonah Stuart Brundage, Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Jared Eno, David Freund, Marco Garrido, Robert Jansen, Greta Krippner, Roi Livne, Luciana de Sauza Leão, Peggy Somers, George Steinmetz, Anna Wood, and Jun Zhou. Editors and three reviewers at Theory & Society provided me with generous and insightful guidance for significantly improving this article. Participants at the Michigan Social Theory workshop and Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies helped guide this paper in its present direction.
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Flores, L. Zoning as a labor market regulation. Theor Soc 53, 357–394 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09539-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-023-09539-y