Word of the week: Warning out

Not in our backyard.

Warning out is a centuries-old term that I learned only recently, in the course of reading the historian Yoni Appelbaum’s insightful new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.

The short version: In Colonial New England, a board of selectmen could order an “undesirable” person, or a whole family, to get out of town.

Warning Out in New England 1656-1872, by Josiah Henry Benton.

The first “warning out of town” was recorded on June 6, 1654, in Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony. Via Wikipedia: “Robert Titus was called into town court and told to take his family out of Plymouth Colony for allowing ‘persons of evil fame’ to live in his home.” You could also be warned out if you became, or threatened to become, a “public charge.” According to a summary of Josiah Henry Benton’s Warning Out in New England (1911):

Some towns only warned out persons they thought likely to become a charge, others automatically warned out any and all newcomers. Many who were warned out never left, with the result that “a large number of persons became actual inhabitants of towns, owned property, paid taxes, held town offices, without ever acquiring the rights of inhabitancy.” Many also were warned out years after their arrival.

The complete text of Benton’s book is available as a PDF here.

The municipal practice of warning out died out in the early 19th century, but it was preserved in principle during the westward migration, when, Appelbaum writes, “towns focused on their exclusion of the indigent” rather than “incompatibility or theological purity or competition for jobs.” Its shadow lingers to this day wherever there’s restrictive zoning, parking requirements, a homeowners’ association, an aggressive historic-preservation committee, a NIMBY bloc, or an anti-immigrant crowd.

America, writes Appelbaum, was founded on the novel idea that people — “white”¹ European people, anyway — “should be able to choose their own communities, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.” But in the last half-century Americans have become less nomadic, in part because they no longer can select their communities. Instead, communities are reasserting their right to select their people.

This conflict transcends the left-right political divide. Jane Jacobs, the U.S.-born urbanist and author who moved to Canada because she opposed the Vietnam War, pioneered the anti–urban renewal movement and is considered, in Appelbaum’s words, an “apostle of urbanism.” But, he continues:

To stave off change, Jacobs and her allies asserted a proprietary right to control their neighborhood. It belonged, they argued, to those who were already there, and it should be up to them to decide who would get to join them.

On the right, we’re currently seeing mounting hostility to immigration — even legal immigration — and a willingness to deny or retract citizenship, even though everyone on the North American continent except Natives is descended from someone who moved here from somewhere else, often less than legally.²

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Last week my state, California, took a long-overdue step toward reforming modern-day warning-out, when Governor Gavin Newsom signed two bills that will scale back the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which has long been wielded by so-called environmentalists to prevent new housing from being built. (And often in communities that think of themselves as “progressive,” like Berkeley.) As of last week, writes Henry Grabar in Slate, “Just about all housing that’s more urban than sprawl is no longer subject to environmental review, no matter who builds it.”³ That’s good news.

That California should need to be rescued from NIMBYism is kind of paradoxical, given our origins as a come-one-come-all YIMBY haven. During the 1849 Gold Rush, no questions were asked of the fortune-seekers who flooded into California, which until the previous year had been part of Mexico: If you could pan for gold, or sell stuff to miners, you were welcome. Personal histories and identities were freely rejiggered, and a popular song of the era mocked and celebrated the characters who changed their names to obscure their rap sheets.

I learned the first stanza to “What Was Your Name in the States?” as a California fifth-grader studying the Gold Rush. (Yes, hard to believe, but it’s true.) Years later I included it in Art of the State: California, one in a series of books celebrating the culture of each of the states. (Read my story about the Art of the State project here.) Along the way I learned that the song had additional stanzas, including this one:

Oh, what was your name in the States?
Though you’ve suffered the cruelest of fates,
’Way out here in the West ev’ry body's a guest,
So line up and fill up your plates, my friend,
Who ever you are in the States!

That open-door attitude didn’t survive long past statehood. In fact, the first zoning law of any kind was passed in Modesto, California, in 1885, to ghettoize the businesses of Chinese immigrants. And the first single-family-housing ordinance was enacted in the Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley, California, in 1916. To learn more about those fateful and highly problematic policies, you’ll have to read Stuck. One of the many interesting things I learned in its pages: The term “stranger” — “in other lands synonymous with ‘enemy’” — became in America “a common form of friendly salutation”: Howdy, stranger.

1. The definition of “white” has fluctuated over the decades in the U.S. See, for example, this list of court cases.

2. Take my family, for example. My paternal grandfather was born in the Russian Empire and would have been turned away at Ellis Island if he’d disclosed that inconvenient fact in an era of severe immigration quotas. Instead, he declared that his birthplace lay several hundred miles to the east, in what since 1920 had been British Mandate Palestine. He had in fact been brought there as a toddler, when Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Russians: bad! Turks: bad! Brits: good! Lying on your immigration papers: eh, who’s going to check? As for my maternal ancestors, they arrived on these shores in the late 1800s and thus avoided altogether the harsh immigration laws of the 1920s that were aimed at warning out Jews and other undesirables.

3.

Henry Grabar

also writes a Substack newsletter about cities, Ground Floor, and is the author of my favorite book about parking, Paved Paradise (2023).