Open Letter to the City Council on Definition of Family Policies

[Illustration from 1917 Aronovici housing report about St. Paul.]

The St. Paul City Council is soon voting on whether or not to cut "definition of family" rules from the City Code. 

Here is my letter to the Council on that topic:

I've been studying the history of planning in St. Paul and US cities for many years. I wanted to share my thoughts with you about the use of the "definition of family" in City Code as a policy and zoning tool. 

The definition of family policy comes from the intersection of two problematic historical social realities. The first is a set of patriarchal assumptions about gender norms and how people should live. Victorian-era thinkers created powerful ideological constraints around gender and families. Through a set of religious, class-based, and moralistic social codes, influential people created expectations about how and where families should live, including that women should remain in the home, and that good “Christian” people required these kinds of heteronormative environments in order to avoid immorality.

The flip side of this ideology was that people who lived in diverse, complex urban spaces were morally inferior. Meanwhile, many forms of social castigation applied to women who resisted the confines of this value system. Many early assumptions about city life, in particular the supposed superiority of single-family neighborhoods, stemmed from this oppressive cultural tradition, which was baked into the zoning code in numerous ways. The definition of family — which for decades excluded domestic servants — was the most explicit expression of this moralistic zoning .

The other historical origin of this rule is even worse: anti-immigrant racism. Typically, people who arrived in  cities like St. Paul brought with them cultures and traditions that relied on complex family and community ties for many different forms of mutual support. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and acquaintances often formed larger communities of solidarity, or these ties were forged in diverse communities in their new country. Together, as a “family,” people would pitch in to purchase property, take care of chores or improvement projects, help with child care, provide cultural connections, and many other things besides.

You can trace family definition policies directly to the racist worldview that saw immigrant communities and traditions as problematic and inferior. Anti-immigrant racism, which was quite prevalent throughout the 20th century, led to the widespread adoption of the definition of family as a way to limit the options of immigrants, people of color, and other groups. In fact, in St. Paul, keeping immigrants out of the certain neighborhoods, and away from the city as a whole, was an explicit goal stated openly in city planning documents as recently as the late 1950s. While that language has thankfully been exorcised from city documents, the definition of family, which comes from many of the same motives, is still on the books.

Moralistic assumptions about what constitutes a “family” have no place in our City Code. There is no excuse for a city like St. Paul, that purports to be working toward building an anti-racist society, to keep these kinds of rules on the books. Please get rid of it. 

I hope the City Council votes unanimously to excise this language from the Code.

[Invocation of "family" in an early 20th c. St. Paul housing study.]

I've written about this before, as one of many policies the city would be better without. In addition, some people in St. Paul are invoking the poor behavior and lifestyles of college students as a reason  to keep this language on the books. I wrote a while ago about why I find that kind of generalization problematic.

Here's the punchline:

Again, I ask myself the question: how does that statement feel if you replace one group of people with another? What happens if you put in a racial or religious category there, instead of “non-homestead” or “student rentals”?

This isn’t to say that these claims or comments are incorrect, misguided, racist, or anything like that. In fact, these claims might be factually accurate and may be sound in many ways.

But I still think it’s important to put things in an historical perspective. I try hard to remember that the history of United States housing policy is extremely racist. For example, it used to be commonplace to put into one’s mortgage racially restrictive covenants about who could purchase homes. Similarly, historical claims about impacts of groups of people on property values, or troubling assumptions about behavior, led to huge problems around race and housing.

I hope we can get rid of this and other antiquated and discriminatory policies.