The shady history of zoning in Oak Park

Thomas Ptacek is doing some historical research on Oak Park zoning codes. I will leave the details to him, but he found that our zoning code was penned by none other than Harland Bartholomew and Associates, who entered into a contract to amend our code in the 1940s.

Harland Bartholomew is perhaps better known as the man who was almost single handedly responsible for bulldozing African American neighborhoods to build freeways, in the name of clearing 'blight'. He also used residential zoning to promote racial segregation.

See this article by Rothstein, "The Making of Ferguson", which clearly documents how Bartholomew used zoning as a tool of segregation in St. Louis. Remember, this is the same guy who wrote Oak Park's zoning code. Since then it hasn't been amended to become less exclusionary, but more.

https://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/

St. Louis appointed its first City Plan Commission in 1911 and hired Harland Bartholomew as its full-time planning engineer in 1916. His assignment was to supervise a survey of every building in the city to determine into which of the property types it fell and then to propose rules and maps to prevent future multifamily, industrial, or commercial development from impinging on single-family neighborhoods. A neighborhood filled with single-family homes whose deeds prohibited black residence or prohibited resale to blacks was almost certain to receive a “first residential” zoning designation that prohibited future construction of multifamily, commercial, or industrial buildings.

According to Bartholomew, a St. Louis zoning goal was to “preserv[e] the more desirable residential neighborhoods,” and to prevent movement into “finer residential districts … by colored people.” He noted that without a previous zoning ordinance, such neighborhoods have become run down, “where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people.” The survey Bartholomew supervised prior to drafting the new zoning rules collected, among other information, the race of occupants of each residential building in the city, and Bartholomew estimated the future direction of African American population expansion so that the zoning ordinance could attempt to direct and circumscribe it. The Bartholomew Commission’s first zoning ordinance was adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court banned explicit racial zoning, but the St. Louis ordinance, with no explicit mention of race, was apparently in compliance. The new ordinance designated zones for future industrial development if they were in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial black populations.