zoning, legislative regulations by which a municipal government seeks to control the use of buildings and land within the municipality. It has become, in the United States, a widespread method of controlling urban and suburban construction and removing congestion and other defects of existing plans. Great Britain, Germany, and Sweden preceded the United States in zoning for the purpose of controlling building in new areas adjoining cities, but now use comprehensive plans. The zoning resolution adopted by New York City in 1916 was the first in the United States and has profoundly affected New York architecture, while the standard it set has been followed by other cities. By this law (often amended since 1916) New York City is divided into use districts, area districts, and height districts. Use districts are of four classes: residential, business, retail, and unrestricted. The height and area limitations serve to insure light and air for the occupants of city buildings. In the United States the state legislatures hold the power to authorize zoning, within which the separate cities enact their own zoning ordinance and it is typically closely integrated with a city planning program. Zoning has been used to maintain the suburban, and class character of a municipality, however, and as such has been called exclusionary zoning; it has produced racial and economic segregation. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled against such zoning in directing that public housing in Chicago be spread beyond the city limits. The New Jersey courts have gone further, declaring that developing communities have an obligation to accommodate their fair share of a region's needs for modest homes and apartments. Bibliography
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I think the Chinese laundry case you are think of is Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356 (1886), where the Court held that facially neutral laws nevertheless violated the Equal Protection Clause if they were administered in a racially discriminatory manner. In that case, the Court struck down a law regulating laundries because it was applied and administered so as to disadvantage only Chinese laundry owners. The SF city ordinance prohibited laundries from being operated in wooden buildings, the overwhelmingly majority of which were run by Chinese. That's more a building code rule than a comprehensive zoning ordinance.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 14, 2007, at 6:44 PM, bhandari at berkeley.edu
> wrote:
>
> > And why is
> > Congress (across party lines) pressuring Paulson
> to put pressure on
> > Chinese authorities? I can't see how the job gain
> from yuan
> > appreciation
> > would not be overwhelmed by the losses to the US
> economy.
>
> You think politics is rational?
>
> In any case, surely you've noticed that there's a
> lot of steam being
> produced about how the Chinese are stealing our jobs
> and poisoning us
> with their toxic products. Manufacturing unions have
> sway with some
> Dems, and Lou Dobbs and the populist right have sway
> with Reps.
> There's a lot of anti-trade sentiment around, not
> all of it based on
> rigorous empirical analysis. It's especially
> virulent when it's
> joined with ancient American tropes about the Yellow
> Peril. Chinese
> immigrants were widely hated even though they built
> half the
> transcontinental railroad. Wasn't the first American
> zoning law
> directed against Chinese laundries in SF?
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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