Berkeley may eliminate historically racist single family zoning

For those historically inclined, this is analogous to eliminating planned parenthood because it was started as an eugenics program for Blacks:

“We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” -Founder of PP

Is something necessarily racist if it happens to negatively impact non-white races more? Seems like a 'causation != correlation' kind of thing.

Some folks might be surprised by the qualification of single family zoning as 'historically racist' (the concepts don't even seem superficially related, so the suggestion seems absurd -- zoning, to many, is a mundane topic). Some education into how and why single family zoning developed would be quite beneficial.

A larger number of folks are aware of redlining (addressed shortly after Civil Rights legislation was passed), so when viewed through the lens of other racist housing policy that we all acknowledge occurred, it shouldn't be surprising to understand that zoning was unfortunately another tool in the toolbox to segregate people.

Another angle to this is property rights. Nobody is saying it's bad to live in a single family home. Nobody will force these property owners to tear down their dwellings to build higher density. It's about providing choice for a wider income band.

In the Bay Area, roughly 85 percent of residential neighborhoods (49 percent in Berkeley) are zoned single-family-only, according to UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. “That’s ridiculous,” said Stephen Menendian, the institute’s assistant director and director of research. “The fact that only 15 percent of residential areas permit by zoning ordinance denser housing options, in a region that is the economic vanguard of the country, is totally inadequate to the needs of the region and frankly the country.”