The issue of inequality, particularly income inequality, has emerged in recent years as a focus of both national politics and academic research. The roots of that inequality, vast differences in life experience and opportunity, result in substantial part from the differences in educational and job opportunities structured by where Americans live. Sonia Hirt’s Zoning in America and Amy Widestrom’s Displacing Democracy together offer a highly relevant historical context for understanding the way in which we have built neighborhoods, cities, and suburbs over the last century, and thus the way inequality has literally been built into American society.

Zoning in America covers a breadth of topics focused on the nature of land use regulation in American cities, but centers on the notion that zoning law in the United States is “particularly American” (p. 5). The distinctive dimension of American zoning is its favoritism of single family housing, and thus neighborhoods of single family homes primarily occupied by owners. Hirt examines a variety of explanations for the evolution of this American zoning practice and concludes that the system is effectively a cultural institution, rooted in the values of its founders, and intimately tied to notions of good government and good urbanism.

This system of local government land use regulation and formal control might seem at variance with Americans’ commitment to individualism and private property rights. But Hirt effectively presents a series of arguments that American zoning serves to protect individual property owners by constraining government bureaucrats while supporting private property values in the face of potential threats. The product of our overall system of housing development and regulation is highly unusual in cross-national context, making the United States overwhelmingly a nation of detached, single-family homes. And those homes are far larger than their counterparts in other nations—on expansive (and expanding) lots.

Adding to the appeal of serving public safety and health, Hirt argues, was the Progressive era effort to limit the role of politics and the contemporary political machine, shifting zoning control to presumably expert professionals. Formal zoning regulations could act to limit discretion and deals between politicians and individual property owners. Yet most of the impetus for adopting local zoning regulation revolved around property values—the expectation that absent zoning, property values might well decline matched by stories of increased values where it was adopted and enforced.

The structures of residential development that took form in the 1920s—the zoning history well described by Hirt, including the rise of large scale residential developers such as J. C. Nichols of Kansas City and the use of restrictive covenants covering everything from race and ethnicity to construction materials—created neighborhoods and communities that were remarkably homogeneous in terms of income and outlook. These bastions, today exemplified by gated subdivisions, homeowner associations, and the promise of ever-rising home values, have sustained the array of social, economic, and racial divisions of American society.

For all of the success of Zoned in the USA. in arguing for the distinctiveness of American zoning, the political scientist interested in broader processes might well find its conclusions too limited. There is only a limited assessment of the national efforts to promote zoning that resulted in the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act of 1924, promulgated by the U.S. Department of Commerce under Secretary Herbert Hoover. The advisory committee appointed by Hoover that drafted the Standard Act included both experts—lawyers Edward Bassett and Alfred Bettman, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted—and representatives of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the National Association of Real Estate Boards. And while zoning spread dramatically across a wide array of cities, we have little serious academic research on the local dynamics by which zoning was promoted, adopted, and implemented in places as politically different as New York City and Los Angeles. Even in fractious Chicago, a zoning ordinance pressed by the Chicago Real Estate Board was passed 50 to 0 by the majority Democratic city council in April 1923, and signed into law by Republican Mayor William Hale Thompson.

Displacing Democracy begins with a striking comparison of two predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Atlanta. In the West Manor area, west of downtown Atlanta, middle and upper class African-American families had begun to move in during the 1960s. They created a vibrant community with an active civic life—a community with a high degree of population stability, where 42 percent of adults had a bachelor’s degree or higher education in 2000. The story of Thomasville Heights in southeast Atlanta was very different, with the comparable figure for education just 4 percent. Amy Widestrom uses the contrasting examples of West Manor and Thomasville Heights, and parallel companion cases in Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Rochester, New York, to explore the origins and evolution of impoverished urban neighborhoods, and their well-off counterparts. Her aim is to explicate the forces that shape neighborhoods, and to understand how in turn economic segregation affects civic life and engagement.

Most substantial and informative are the portraits of local urban policy and neighborhood change in the case cities. Widestrom links the contrasting fates of Thomasville Heights and West Manor to planning and urban renewal policies in Atlanta from the 1960s, including the decision to use the Thomasville Heights area to house low income families displaced by the city’s urban renewal program. She notes that “local officials had hoped to deconcentrate poverty, in part to minimize the effects of concentrated poverty but also as a ploy to break up political power among the least advantaged” (p. 75).

Beyond Atlanta, Widestrom examines the paired Ivanhoe and Union Hill neighborhoods in Kansas City. Once again, she argues, the nature and future of the areas were effectively shaped by local public policy. Ivanhoe, in the path of a projected freeway, suffered population displacement from land clearance. From 1970 to 2000, the population of Ivanhoe fell by 32 percent as the proportion below the poverty line grew from 11 percent to 52 percent. Union Hill, in contrast, saw a dramatic increase in average income during the same period, as the fraction of adults with a college degree in the largely white neighborhood grew from 7 percent to 57 percent. The stories of the paired neighborhoods in Milwaukee and Rochester are parallel. Freeway development, urban renewal, and public housing served to concentrate low income families into impoverished areas. With few homeowners, these neighborhoods have found it difficult to sustain local associations and civic organizations.

Perhaps the most effective analysis in the volume deals with civic engagement and political responsiveness. Widestrom describes the problems of neighborhood organization and efficacy in Thomasville Heights based on interviews with neighborhood leaders, and the reaction of the area’s city council representative, who views the local leadership as weak or inefficient. It is much the same in Kansas City’s Ivanhoe, where its council representative noted residents “don’t really care about government per se … government represents a large-scale intimidating institution” (p. 152).

The volume’s analysis of political participation and voter turnout in these case neighborhoods is more questionable. We would expect to find differences in turnout between very low and higher income areas, and that is generally the case. Yet the differences are not consistent. While the paired Atlanta neighborhoods followed the expected pattern, Kansas City’s lower income Ivanhoe neighborhood often out-polled better-off Union Hill in local mayoral races. And turnout by the paired Milwaukee neighborhoods in mayoral races fluctuated quite dramatically.

Overall, Displacing Democracy makes a powerful case for the role local land use and development decisions over decades have played in shaping neighborhoods and their future. Decisions to concentrate low income housing and families produced areas marked by economic weakness and limited civic capacity, with little ability to alter their circumstances or public policy.

And yet, important as the issue of economic segregation is to both understanding urban policymaking and civic engagement, Displacing Democracy presents a flawed, broad-brush analysis of local policy. The public decisions that shaped Atlanta’s Thomasville Heights date back to the early 1950s, when the Atlanta Metropolitan Planning Commission’s Up Ahead plan of 1952 identified specific “Negro expansion areas,” including Thomasville Heights adjacent to the Federal Prison. The city then designated Thomasville an urban renewal project, clearing portions for new housing. Atlanta’s efforts were—far more than other cities’—intended to displace the close-in African-American population around downtown, and shift it to new “expansion areas” at the fringe. More than other locales, Atlanta’s redevelopment policies were substantial, planned, and designed, with a greater focus on African-American neighborhoods. HUD’s last published figures on urban renewal relocation, through mid-1966, show Atlanta displacing almost 3,000 families, 85 percent of them African-American. Kansas City’s renewal efforts relocated about 1,900 families, half African-American. And Rochester’s urban renewal efforts moved some 640 families by 1966.

Atlanta also reinforced its focus on Thomasville with the development of an adjacent public housing project in the late 1960s. Where city governments in places like Milwaukee and Kansas City were often limited in their capacity to direct the neighborhood changes that resulted from public policies, Atlanta’s political and business leaders proved remarkably capable and consistent reshaping the city’s racial geography.

Together, Zoning in the USA and Displacing Democracy deliver a clarion call to urban political scientists to focus on issues of land use and development as a means of understanding our contemporary social and political condition. Both authors make clear that current patterns of economic and social segregation have their roots in longstanding (and highly persistent) local public policies that need to be explicated and understood in historical context. We need a better understanding of how those policies were promoted and implemented across a range of cities, and how contemporary local policies sustain and reshape neighborhood differences.