PPI - Radically Pragmatic
  • Donate
Skip to content
  • Home
  • About
    • About Us
    • Locations
    • Careers
  • People
  • Projects
  • Our Work
  • Events
  • Donate

Our Work

Kahlenberg for The Atlantic: Liberal Suburbs Have Their Own Border Wall

  • July 23, 2023
  • Richard D. Kahlenberg

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.

Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.

Read more in The Atlantic

 

Related Work

Op-Ed  |  December 19, 2024

Kahlenberg for The Hill: Will ‘Good Trump’ or ‘Bad Trump’ prevail on housing?

  • Richard D. Kahlenberg
Op-Ed  |  November 20, 2024

Weinstein Jr. for Forbes: Why Home Prices Remain Too High.

  • Paul Weinstein Jr.
Op-Ed  |  September 19, 2024

Kahlenberg for the Abundance Podcast: Economic Segregation

  • Richard D. Kahlenberg
Press Release  |  September 10, 2024

PPI Launches New Report on Improving Housing for Working Americans

  • Richard D. Kahlenberg
Publication  |  September 10, 2024

Improving Housing for Working Americans

  • Richard D. Kahlenberg
Op-Ed  |  August 16, 2024

Kahlenberg for National Affairs: A Way Forward on Housing

  • Richard D. Kahlenberg
  • Never miss an update:

  • Subscribe to our newsletter
PPI Logo
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Donate
  • Careers
  • © 2025 Progressive Policy Institute. All Rights Reserved.
  • |
  • Privacy Policy
  • |
  • Privacy Settings