J.D. Vance Accuses Ohio's Haitians of 'Massively Violating' Zoning Laws

Instead of focusing on the ways a rollback of zoning laws could lower housing costs for everyone, Vance wants to zealously enforce zoning codes to keep Haitians out of town.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) took another swing at the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, over the weekend. The Republican vice presidential nominee accused them of "massively violating" the city's zoning laws by living multiple families to a home.

Springfield's Haitian immigrant community has been the subject of a lot of attacks recently, including the salacious rumor that they've been stealing and eating local pets. Former President Donald Trump and other right-wing commenters endorsed this story, which appears to be an urban legend. Vance did as well, arguing that it helped to highlight the problems immigrants "flooding" communities.

In an interview posted Saturday, New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro pressed Vance on this point, asking this was a worthy trade-off given the turmoil those rumors have caused for Springfield's Haitian community. The town has received a number of bomb threats, and some Haitian parents have kept their kids out of school.

Vance responded by saying American leaders have ignored all the ways that Haitian immigrants have made life worse for American citizens in Springfield—specifically citing the rising cost of housing.

"Have we talked about the fact that many of them have been evicted from their homes, and then Haitian migrants are moved in, four families to a home, massively violating zoning laws?" he said. "They are paying way more for rent than an American citizen in Springfield can pay. So the American citizens have been evicted from their homes. They are finding housing unaffordable."

In the Times' printed interview transcript, the paper says it asked Vance for evidence of these zoning violations but hasn't been provided any.

While the cat-hunting always seemed implausible, it's more conceivable that some Haitian immigrants are violating Springfield's zoning laws.

The city's zoning code, like most zoning codes, groups much of the town's residential land into single-family zoning districts. The town's zoning code also defines what counts as a single family. In Springfield, that's either an individual or a married couple, their children, and up to two relatives, or a maximum of five unrelated individuals.

So to the degree that Haitian families are splitting homes between themselves (a not-unusual practice for low-income, newly arrived immigrants), they would be violating the town's zoning code.

An early purpose of zoning codes was to exclude immigrant populations from settled communities, as Jim Burling, the vice president of legal affairs at the Pacific Legal Foundation, recounts in his new book Nowhere to Live.

The famous/infamous 1926 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld single-family-only zoning originated out of Euclid, Ohio, where the local government reserved much of the town's land for single-family homes as a way of keeping out new industry and the "immigrant hordes" it would attract.

Zoning codes that banned apartments, rooming houses, and other types of affordable housing did a lot of work to exclude lower-income immigrants (and lower-income people generally).

The poor could still get around these restrictions by dividing single-family homes among themselves. Municipal governments cracked down on this behavior by including definitions of families in their zoning codes, so that single-family structures would be reserved for single families.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld occupancy limits with the 1974 case Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas.

A lack of data makes it difficult to evaluate Vance's claim that immigrants are causing local residents to be evicted and to see affordable housing options disappear.

We don't have good data on evictions in Springfield, Ohio. Princeton University's Eviction Lab, the most comprehensive national database on evictions, models the surrounding county's eviction rate only through 2018.

The local Springfield News-Sun reported in a recent investigation that local social service organizations had received reports of Haitian families being in overcrowded, substandard conditions. The city government is also investigating these claims. However, the paper didn't substantiate these claims.

That said, it would be expected that an influx of Haitian immigrants into Springfield would raise rents and housing prices—at least in the short term. All else being equal, higher demand means higher prices.

But that would be true of any form of population or economic growth, two things that Vance has expressed he'd like to see more of.

If Vance's dream of an all-American toaster factory opened in Springfield, Ohio, increasing wages and attracting new employees to town, that would increase housing demand and prices too. If Springfield's native residents started having more children, that would also put upward pressure on home prices over time.

That doesn't mean home prices would stay up. In free markets, high prices induce new supply.

America's perpetually rising housing costs aren't an inevitable result of rising demand from immigrants or anyone else. They're a product of zoning regulations that limit where new homes can be built, of tariffs that drive up the costs of imported building materials, and of countless other regulations.

Liberalizing zoning codes (or abolishing them completely) would make supply more elastic, cooling the upward cost pressures that come with economic and population growth.

Vance said in his Times interview that he would like to see more homes get built. But he also kept returning to his main claim that immigrants' demand for new housing is fundamentally illegitimate. For Vance, Haitians' presence in Springfield is unacceptable and so too is their demand for housing. The fact that their demand for housing need not come at the expense of American citizens is beside the point for him.

So instead of focusing on the ways a repeal of zoning laws might lower housing costs for everyone, Vance is instead focused on zealously enforcing zoning codes to keep Haitians out of town in the first place.