Report: Nearly half of land use legislative boards are 95% white; almost all require home ownership

When working toward equity in communities, making sure public officials come from similar backgrounds as the people they’re working for is important, especially when it comes to influential roles like overseeing land use, which is a powerful economic driver for wealth. Equal representation is vital to ensure no one falls through the cracks. Historically, this hasn’t been the case, and new research from the advocacy organization Urban Institute shows that American cities and counties have a long ways to go.

“Among the localities we surveyed, we find that the people who draft, adjudicate, and implement land-use laws rarely share similar demographics, occupations, or housing tenures as their jurisdiction’s residents,” reads the report, “Who Makes Planning Choices? How Women, People of Color, and Renters Are Systematically Underrepresented on Land-Use Decisionmaking Bodies.” “Instead, we find that land-use boards—including planning and zoning commissions, boards of zoning adjustment, and a subset of local legislatures—feature persistent overrepresentation by non- Hispanic white residents, men, homeowners, and real estate or planning professionals.”

A land use board is defined in the report as a zonning or planning commission, zoning board of appeals, a historic commission, and any other legislative body that makes decisions about land.

Nearly half (45%) of all such boards are 95% white, according to the research, while only 5% of jurisdictions have a similar demographic makeup. And across all communities, non-Hispanic white residents were overrepressented by an average of 15 percentage points, while Hispanic residents were underrepresented by 8 points, Asian constituents by 4 points, and Black residents by 1 percentage point. 

“In terms of gender, men are overrepresented by more than 20 percentage points on average, though this result varies by board type, local racial demographics, and region,” the report says. “Zoning commissions are the most male dominated (compared with zoning or planning commissions, local legislatures, or other land-use decision making boards); jurisdictions with lower shares of non-Hispanic white residents and jurisdictions in the West have the highest levels of female representation.”

It’s not just ethnic and gender inequality that’s an issue. Renters were dramatically underrepresented in 99% of jurisdictions surveyed.

“In other words, land-use decisionmaking is dominated by homeowners, and the share of renters in a jurisdiction has next to no bearing on how well represented they are in land-use decisionmaking,” the report says.

Given the implications of land use on inequality, researchers stressed the importance of changing structural norms in some local governments around how boards are operated. For example, the report found it’s common for many jurisdictions “to impose significant requirements for board membership, including the extreme requirement in some localities of property ownership to serve on a board,” the report says. “At the same time, most jurisdictions provide no support for board members, whether through compensation, child care, or other services. These findings point to a strong relationship between residents’ incomes and their ability to hold positions on land use boards. And it suggests that there are structural explanations for why some demographic groups are overrepresented.”

To that end, local and state governments should analyze and rethink representation on existing boards by comparing sitting members with the communities they’re service. If there’s a gap, the report continues, administrators should embark on a focused effort to appoint people who reflect the population. And for all communities, whether their boards are representative of the population or not, administrators should specifically reach out to people who are currently underrepresented in land use boards at large. Accommodations should be made so that everyone has a voice.

“This could include requirements or standards for offering compensation, child care, and flexible meeting time options, as well as eliminating classist mandates such as property ownership rules,” the report says. “The nonrepresentativeness of land-use boards raises major concerns. If people who are Hispanic, women, or renters—or who hold occupations outside of the development sector—are systematically excluded from decisionmaking roles, one key element of local government polity is in the hands of a group of people who do not adequately reflect the residents of these communities. It is possible, even likely, that the decisions being made about land-use policy do not serve the interests of underrepresented groups. This, in turn, may be one explanation for the inequitable outcomes we have historically seen in planning policy in the United States.”