What Goes Where: A Snapshot of Durham's Land Use
Discover the essential tools and knowledge to navigate zoning regulations and participate in shaping the development of your community.
Every community is made up of several different parts — homes, schools and universities, places of worship, and places of business. Zoning is the process of deciding which part of a city, town, or neighborhood can be used for certain purposes. This helps prevent incompatible uses in the same area.
Zoning serves several important purposes:
- Land Use Management: Organizes land into zones designated for different types of uses, such as residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, and mixed-use.
- Promoting Compatibility: Ensures that land uses and developments are compatible with their surroundings, reducing conflicts and enhancing quality of life.
- Public Health and Safety: Includes provisions related to setbacks, building heights, and emergency access to ensure public safety.
- Environmental Protection: Can include measures to preserve open spaces, protect natural resources, and promote sustainable development.
But zoning can also be used to reinforce policies that harm communities - from segregation to concentrating industrial pollution to environmental injustices.
Zoning can be complicated to read about, but it helps to visualize it.
Here’s a map of how Durham, N.C. is zoned.
There's a lot of variations, but most zoning can be broken down into three main groups.
Green is Residential – apartments, condos, and homes.
Blue is Commercial – stores, offices, and businesses.
Yellow is Industrial – factories, landfills, and power plants.
Zoning is meant to help keep a community organized and contain compatible land uses in the same area. For example, noisy manufacturing plants would typically be zoned far away from residential areas.
So, why are some industrial sites so close to residential areas?
The answer lies in the historical practices of redlining and racially biased zoning. From the 1930s to 1960s, cities across the country participated in redlining, where neighborhoods were graded from A to D based on their 'residential security'—or the perceived riskiness for lenders making mortgages. Affluent, predominantly white neighborhoods were given an 'A' grade and marked in green, while predominantly Black or immigrant neighborhoods were given a 'D' grade and outlined in red (hence, redlining), signaling to banks that these areas were hazardous for investment.
This practice, known as redlining, systematically denied loans and financial services to communities of color, entrenching racial and economic disparities. Zoning often reinforced these divisions, allowing industrial sites, highways, waste facilities, and other undesirable land uses to be placed near or within redlined areas.
Let’s look at how this played out in Durham.
This is the 1937 redlining map of Durham, where you can see neighborhoods graded and color-coded as described above. The 'D' graded areas—predominantly Black and immigrant communities—were marked in red, shaping the city's development and zoning decisions for decades.
Part of the grading process was an official report on each neighborhood. These often showed the explicit racism in the process. Compare the reports for Durham’s D1 neighborhood to the A4 neighborhood:
- Favorable influences: In this category, we see that the A4 area is zoned specifically for single-family.
- Detrimental influences: In this category, we see that the D1 area is the home of a trash dump. This is an issue we see in many minority and low-income areas today.
- Inhabitants: These two areas have different descriptors of inhabitants. The A4 area has "professional men" and 0% of the population is Black. The D1 area has "laborers" and "domestics" and 100% of the population is Black.
- Income: The estimated annual family income in the D1 area is approximately 4% of the annual family income in the A4 area.
Although redlining is no longer practiced today, it still influences how zoning decisions are made.
Residential zoning can often be divided into two categories— single-family and multi-family.
Multi-Family Zoning allows for housing that many owners or families can live in, such as apartments, duplexes, and triplexes. These types of housing developments tend to be more affordable and home to more people of color.
Single-Family Zoning is when neighborhoods are zoned for houses used by a single owner or family. This zoning format helped create the stereotypical image of suburban America. However, this zoning use limits housing supply, artificially raises prices, and prevents families from moving into neighborhoods with better schools and job opportunities.
This is a form of exclusionary zoning and drives up housing costs and limits the availability of affordable housing. The practice is sometimes referred to as "new redlining.”
Source: The Urbanist (Trumm, 2017)
Compare the redlined map of Durham with its current residential zones.
Multi-family housing is still mostly in the areas that were graded C and D, while single-family homes dominate wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. These redlined areas often lack easy access to healthcare, grocery stores, and good schools.
Note: The legend for this map is not visible by default. Click to toggle on the legend in the bottom left of map.
Single-Family Zoning continues the legacy of segregation.
This 'new redlining,' fueled by single-family zoning, keeps the legacy of segregation alive. Today, the redlined areas still have mostly Black residents, showing how deeply these historical policies affect our communities.
The legacy of racial segregation through zoning, both past and present, demonstrates how policy decisions from nearly a century ago still shape the city’s landscape, maintaining racial and economic disparities in housing and opportunity.
Note: The legend for this map is not visible by default. Click to toggle on the legend in the bottom left of map.
So, what can we do?
Communities across the country are coming up with new ideas to address the consequences of redlining and stop single-family zoning.
Here in North Carolina, many municipalities and nonprofits have positively impacted their communities through land use decisions, from inclusionary zoning to community land trusts to transit-oriented development.
Explore some of the policies and programs implemented across the state. Click on any green pin to see what progressive zoning policies and programs exist in different North Carolina cities.
- If any of the mapped cities have multiple programs or policies, use the arrows on the bottom-left of the pop-up windows to navigate.
- Each pop-up window has more details about each policy and a link for more information.
Interactive Map on Progressive Zoning Policies
By embracing these forward-thinking zoning practices, we can foster inclusive, resilient communities that provide equitable opportunities for all.
If your local decision-making body has implemented a progressive zoning reform that you would like added to the map, contact Southern Coalition for Social Justice at lucyk@scsj.org.
For any general zoning inquiries, contact Southern Coalition for Social Justice's Environmental Justice team at EJ@scsj.org.
