The Big Shift: How the Civil Rights Act Didn’t End Discrimination, It Just Moved It
- Jeff Hulett
- May 7
- 10 min read
Updated: May 9
Discrimination is not just a social ill—it is also a cognitive function rooted in how we learn, evaluate, and make decisions. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 rightly ended overt forms of exclusion, it unintentionally rerouted discrimination into institutional channels like local zoning laws. These modern-day barriers preserve privilege under the guise of protecting community character, allowing exclusion to persist through regulatory complexity. This is not a failure of the Act itself, but a failure to update the frameworks that followed, enabling “states’ rights” to once again become a cloak for discrimination—this time through land use policy. The solution is blank slating—a periodic, principled process that resets zoning assumptions and empowers communities to justify rules based on necessity, not inertia.
About the Author: Jeff Hulett leads Personal Finance Reimagined, a decision-making and financial education platform. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions.
Jeff is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM.
The Hidden Nature of Discrimination
Discrimination is often misunderstood. In public discourse, it is usually associated with negative actions, such as racial or gender discrimination—the unjust treatment of individuals based on group identity. While that interpretation is valid and deeply important, it is only a subset of a broader, more biologically rooted human capacity: the act of discriminating is also synonymous with learning. To discriminate is to differentiate—to separate signal from noise, to judge quality, to decide.
Human advancement relies on this capacity. Our ability to distinguish between medicinal and poisonous plants, to categorize disease symptoms, or to forecast financial risks all stem from this cognitive function. Even subtle sensory perceptions, like distinguishing a fine wine from a cheap one, are exercises in learned discrimination. At its core, the human brain is a causality-seeking discrimination machine—evolved to learn by attending to differences and building weighted models of the world.
Neuroscience supports this. Our brains naturally attend to some information while discarding other data to prevent cognitive overload. This evolutionary strategy enables us to make decisions quickly and protectively, but it also lays the groundwork for unconscious social biases. When our learning processes overweight in-group familiarity, they underweight out-group value. Discrimination, in this sense, is not merely a choice—it is a default neurobiological feature.
The Civil Rights Act: A Decision Architecture Reform
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a noble attempt to re-engineer the decision environments of American institutions. Rather than seeking retribution for past injustices, its goal was forward-looking: to create equal opportunity by protecting historically marginalized groups from systemic exclusion. The law identified protected classes based on characteristics such as race, gender, and religion. In essence, it introduced legal guardrails to counterbalance our cognitive defaults.
But as with all design interventions, it had second-order effects. For some Americans, the Civil Rights Act constrained a familiar domain of discrimination. What had once been socially sanctioned criteria for deciding whom to hire, rent to, or live near was now legally impermissible. This did not erase the instinct to discriminate; it simply displaced it.
The Zoning Backlash
One of the most profound, yet under-acknowledged, consequences of this displacement was in land use policy. Post-1964, the United States saw a sharp rise in local zoning restrictions—a trend that accelerated around 1972. These rules were not arbitrary. They were, in many cases, a covert reassertion of control. If one could no longer legally discriminate against people directly, then one could discriminate indirectly by shaping who could afford to live in a neighborhood.
Zoning has been around since the beginning of the 20th century. Early zoning rules often aligned with Adam Smith's concept of commutative justice—aimed at protecting people and property from harm. Prohibiting liquor stores near schools or setting safety standards were reasonable constraints designed to ensure mutual security.
But over time, zoning evolved. It expanded beyond public safety and ventured into lifestyle protectionism: minimum lot sizes, architectural conformity, bans on multi-family housing. These decisions were often made under the guise of preserving "community character" or "quality of life," but their effect was exclusionary. They served to inflate property values for incumbents while pricing out prospective homeowners—especially those from less advantaged racial or economic backgrounds. Not surprisingly, this evolution was timed with the "big shift" in discrimination related to the Civil Rights Act.
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Housing and income data: Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
MSPUS: Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States, Dollars, Quarterly, Not Seasonally Adjusted
MEPAINUSA646N: Median Personal Income in the United States, Current Dollars, Annual, Not Seasonally Adjusted
Personal (individual) income was used, not household income. Household data can be misleading. Over time, households change with less children and more people likely to work. This family-level compensation could obscure the affordability challenge.
Zoning data: Cato Institute: Zoning, Land-Use Planning, and Housing Affordability, Estimate based on data from Daniel Shoag of the Harvard Kennedy Daniel Shoag and Peter Ganong note that “[land use] rules are often controversial and any such rule, regardless of its exact institutional origin, is likely to be tested. . . . This makes court decisions an omnibus measure, which captures many different channels of restrictions on new construction.”
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Discrimination by Omission
Our personalities and behaviors are guided by deeply ingrained neurobiological reward systems. We seek dopamine-based rewards from status, security, and success. This pursuit is not inherently immoral. In fact, it often fuels innovation and resilience. But it also means we are vulnerable to self-reinforcing biases. Once we establish a habit—especially one tied to our home, family, and identity—we find it difficult to see the unseen victims of that habit.
This is the modern form of discrimination: not one of explicit hatred or overt exclusion, but of silent omission. Zoning codes, HOA rules, and land use preferences become tools of subconscious bias. They allow us to maintain the appearance of fairness while preserving exclusive benefits for our tribe. It is not a sin of commission, but of systemic inertia. And yet, the effect is no less discriminatory.
Friends Behind the Fence
Here is the difficult part: these exclusionary practices are upheld not by villains, but by neighbors and friends. Many of my peers—successful, self-made individuals who have worked diligently to improve their lives—reside in strictly zoned neighborhoods. They are not racists. They are not elitists. They are simply optimizing their environment for safety, education, and long-term wealth preservation. This is where intentions and incentives diverge. Although no one intends to be racist, our inherent neurobiological tendencies lead us to support zoning regulations that create challenges for those who do not conform to these rules. These individuals are frequently from minority social classes.
They play by the rules. But the rules themselves have evolved into tools of quiet segregation. What began as a reasonable desire for order has calcified into an insidious filter that excludes tens of millions of would-be homeowners. The price of admission to opportunity is now set by regulatory fiat, not free exchange.
When Protection Becomes Privilege
The paradox is clear: the Civil Rights Act was meant to unlock opportunity, but it indirectly catalyzed new barriers through local policymaking. This is not a failure of the Act itself. It is a failure to update the decision frameworks that followed. We did not challenge the underlying biases—we simply redirected them. "We have states' rights..." is a common phrase local patriots invoke. But the sentence is rarely completed. "We have states' rights.... to discriminate with {fill in the blank}" helps finish the sentence. Just like confederate patriots uttered before the Civil War -> "We have states' rights... to discriminate with slavery." Today's zoning advocates imply "We have states' rights... to discriminate with zoning."
Toward Inclusive Decision Environments: Start with a Blank Slate
This may surprise readers, but I am NOT advocating for more regulation or the abolishment of zoning. Properly implemented, there is a place for zoning. Our challenge is not knowing when to start zoning, quite the opposite, human nature struggles with knowing when to stop. We do not need to eliminate zoning altogether. But we must rethink how zoning is justified and maintained.
The solution is a process called blank slating. Blank slating is a revolutionary framework. It does not chase the latest "bad" way of discriminating. It recognizes that people are natural discriminators. Blank slating focuses on the challenge as a decision problem, not a legal problem. Blank slating reduces the regulatory burden and turns the power of choice over to the local citizens, but with a twist.
Blank slating means periodically clearing the zoning code and requiring that every land use restriction be re-justified from scratch. It flips the burden of proof: instead of assuming existing rules are valid, they must be re-earned. The great benefit of blank slating is that it preserves our "good" discrimination - or ability to learn - and requires an inspection of our "bad" discrimination based on social classes by resetting the default decision environment.
Land use restrictions should only exist if they are clearly tied to public safety or health - related to Smith's commutative justice. Periodic blank slating enables us to set aside all zoning rules, inviting a reappraisal of their necessity and efficacy. A smaller, essential rule corpus can then be recommended and reviewed by an impartial authority—someone without a financial stake in rising property values or bureaucratic expansion.
Zoning rules should have expiration dates or sunset clauses that enables communities to revisit and reaffirm them. This limits the accumulation of outdated or exclusionary rules. Blank slating also ensures optimal representation: individual community preferences are expressed through transparent mechanisms like zoning commissions, HOA boards, and local agencies—all of which must be accountable to the broader public interest, not just incumbent homeowners.
The economic benefits of blank slating are:
Win 1: Lower administrative costs. A simplified zoning code requires fewer staff and less oversight. As complexity decreases, bureaucracy naturally shrinks through attrition. Fewer bureaucrats mean lower government costs.
Win 2: Lower costs for builders. Simpler rules reduce permitting delays, legal fees, and compliance costs—speeding up construction. More business activity means more tax revenue.
Win 3: More affordable housing. Increased supply leads to lower prices, expanding access for working families, teachers, nurses, and first-time buyers. Builders with fewer restrictions are freer to innovate for local demand. A larger tax base means more tax revenue.
Think of it as addition by subtraction: removing the outdated to make room for the essential. Our constitutional system is built on checks and balances to ensure good governance. Zoning commissions and HOAs often operate without such guardrails. Elections may hold officials accountable, but they do not counter the default bias toward preserving the status quo.
Blank slating serves as a decision-level check, not just a political one. It resets the assumption that current zoning rules are valid and empowers communities to justify them based on public necessity. Without this review, zoning codes expand unchecked—driven by narrow interests and insulated by complexity. The result is fewer homes, higher prices, and shrinking opportunity.
In a democracy, we review, we justify, we adapt. Zoning should follow the same principle.
Conclusion: The Path to Reintegration
Discrimination is a feature, not a bug, of the human mind. But just as we have learned to harness fire without burning down forests, we can channel our discriminatory instincts toward creativity, opportunity, and inclusion.
The Civil Rights Act was not the end of discrimination. It was the beginning of a reckoning with our subconscious filters. The big shift was never about stopping discrimination. It was about redirecting it. Our task now is to make that redirection conscious—to redesign our environments so that opportunity is not gated by fear, habit, or omission.
The promise of freedom lies not in perfect equality of outcome, but in persistent equality of opportunity. Let us rise to that challenge, not with guilt, but with clarity, courage, and choice.
Resources for the Curious
Hulett, Jeff. How We Learn is How We Discriminate. The Curiosity Vine, September 5, 2023.
Explains how learning and decision-making rely on subconscious criteria-weighting, and how this biological feature underlies both creativity and social bias.
Hulett, Jeff. How Our Neurobiology Impacts Our Life’s Pursuits: Are You from ‘Dope-land’ or ‘Acetyl-ville’? The Curiosity Vine, September 18, 2023.
Explores how neurotransmitters shape habit, personality, and decision patterns, illustrating the neurobiological basis for persistence and adaptation in belief systems.
Hulett, Jeff. The Problem with Zoning Is Good Intentions. The Curiosity Vine, 2025.
Proposes “blank slating” as a policy innovation to rebalance land use regulation and restore opportunity by counteracting systemic default bias.
Hulett, Jeff. The Simple Answer to the Affordable Housing Crisis: Stop Making Home Building Illegal. The Curiosity Vine, August 22, 2024.
Argues that restrictive zoning—not market failure—is the core obstacle to affordable housing, and proposes “blank slating” as a structural reform to unlock supply and restore homeownership opportunity.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “MEPAINUSA646N: Median Personal Income in the United States, Current Dollars, Annual, Not Seasonally Adjusted.” Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), 2025.
Tracks long-term trends in U.S. personal income, useful for assessing housing affordability relative to earnings.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “MSPUS: Median Sales Price of Houses Sold for the United States, Dollars, Quarterly, Not Seasonally Adjusted.” Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), 2025.
Highlights rising housing costs and declining affordability trends since the 1970s.
Calder, Vanessa Brown. “Zoning, Land-Use Planning, and Housing Affordability.” Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 823, October 18, 2017.
Analyzes how restrictive zoning inflates housing costs and disproportionately harms low-income and minority populations.
Chetty, Raj et al. “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940.” Science, 356(6336), 2017, pp. 398–406.
Documents declining economic mobility in the U.S., partly attributed to geographic and regulatory barriers.
Glaeser, Edward and Gyourko, Joseph. “The Impact of Building Restrictions on Housing Affordability.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review, June 2003.
Shows how regulatory limits on housing supply drive price increases and reinforce inequality.
Desmond, Matthew. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Crown Publishing, 2016.
Details how housing instability disproportionately affects marginalized communities, linking eviction risk to structural inequality.
Hayek, F.A. The Use of Knowledge in Society. The American Economic Review, 35(4), 1945, pp. 519–530.
Argues for decentralized decision-making and institutional humility—core themes echoed in critiques of modern zoning.
Tetlock, Philip E. and Gardner, Dan. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown Publishing, 2015.
Encourages updating beliefs like hypotheses, reinforcing the need for periodic review mechanisms such as blank slating.
Grant, Adam. “Rethinking the Extraverted Sales Ideal: The Ambivert Advantage.” Psychological Science, 24(6), 2013, pp. 1024–1030.
Explores adaptive personality dynamics, which support the argument that communities can shift and evolve zoning preferences with the right frameworks.
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