Zoning and other local, state, and federal housing policies are decidedly anti-family. Local planning accommodates, subsidizes, and encourages the production of single-family homes in the suburbs served by personal automobile transport. Zoning segregates the community, excluding the poor and members of minority groups. “The worst thing one can say about local planning officials is that they did their job well and followed the law.” The results are often poorly planned communities, dysfunctional public transport, and inadequate housing and neighborhoods for the poor and working classes.
Because the quality of public services and facilities is a function of a community’s tax base, suburban planners often choose to exclude multi-family and subsidized housing that requires the expense of schools and other services in favor of subsidizing commercial and industrial development that will generate jobs, as well as payroll, property, and sales taxes. The result is that central cities lose their jobs and stores to the suburbs but still house the bulk of the region’s poor.