Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-68cz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-18T22:26:03.568Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Geography of Inequality: How Land Use Regulation Produces Segregation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2020

JESSICA TROUNSTINE Open the ORCID record for JESSICA TROUNSTINE [Opens in a new window]
JESSICA TROUNSTINE*
Affiliation:
University of California, Merced
*
*Jessica Trounstine, UC Merced Foundation Board of Trustees Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science, University of California, Merced, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Public goods in the United States are largely funded and delivered at the local level. Local public goods are valuable, but their production requires overcoming several collective action problems including coordinating supply and minimizing congestion, free-riding, and peer effects. Land use regulations, promulgated by local governments, allow communities to solve the collective action problems inherent in the provision of local public goods and maintenance of property values. A consequence of these efforts is residential segregation between cities along racial lines. I provide evidence that more stringent land use regulations are supported by whiter communities and that they preserve racial homogeneity. First, I show that cities that were whiter than their metropolitan area in 1970 are more likely to have restrictive land use patterns in 2006. Then, relying on Federal Fair Housing Act lawsuits to generate changes in land use policy, I show that restrictive land use helps to explain metropolitan area segregation patterns over time. Finally, I draw on precinct level initiative elections from several California cities to show that whiter neighborhoods are more supportive of restricting development. These results strongly suggest that even facially race-neutral land use policies have contributed to racial segregation.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 443 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2020 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5MAQC2

References

REFERENCES

Ananat, Elizabeth Oltmans. 2011. “The Wrong Side (s) of the Tracks: The Causal Effects of Racial Segregation on Urban Poverty and Inequality.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 3: 34–66.Google Scholar
Banzhaf, H. Spencer. 2014. “The Market for Local Public Goods.” Case Western Reserve Law Review 64 (4): 1441–80.Google Scholar
Banzhaf, H.Spencer, and Walsh, Randall P.. 2013. “Segregation and Tiebout Sorting: The Link between Place-Based Investments and Neighborhood Tipping.” Journal of Urban Economics 74: 83–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banzhaf, H. Spencer, and Mangum, Kyle. 2019. “Capitalization as a Two-Part Tariff: The Role of Zoning.” National Bureau of Economics. Working Paper No. 25699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banzhaf, Spencer, and Walsh, Randall P.. 2008. “Do People Vote with Their Feet? An Empirical Test of Tiebout’s Mechanism.” The American Economic Review 98 (3): 843–63. doi: 10.1257/aer.98.3.843.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Laurie, and Santerre, Rexford. 1994. “The Determinants of Restrictive Residential Zoning: Some Empirical Findings.” Journal of Regional Science 34 (2): 253–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayer, Patrick, Ferreira, Fernando, and McMillan, Robert. 2007. “A Unified Framework for Measuring Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods.” Journal of Political Economy 115 (4): 588–638. doi: 10.1086/522381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayer, Patrick, McMillan, Robert, and Rueben, Kim S.. 2004. “What Drives Racial Segregation? New Evidence Using Census Microdata.” Journal of Urban Economics 56 (3): 514–35. doi: 10.1016/j.jue.2004.06.002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Been, Vicki. 2018. “City NIMBYS.” Journal of Land Use 33 (3): 217–50.Google Scholar
Bischoff, Kendra, and Reardon, Sean F.. 2013. “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970–2009.” In Russell Sage Foundation. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004, 1–44. http://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/report10162013.pdf.Google Scholar
Bogart, William. 1993. “What Big Teeth You Have! Identifying the Motivations for Exclusionary Zoning.” Urban Studies 30 (10): 1669–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boustan, Leah P. 2010. “Was Postwar Suburbanization ‘White Flight’? Evidence from the Black Migration.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 (1): 417–43. doi: 10.1162/qjec.2010.125.1.417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boustan, Leah Platt. 2012. “Racial Residential Segregation in American Cities.” In The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning, eds. Brooks, Nancy, Donaghy, Kieran, and Knaap, Gerrit. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Box-Steffensmeier, Janet, Brady, Henry, and Collier, David, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bradford, David F., Malt, R. A., and Oates, Wallace E.. 1969. “The Rising Cost of Local Public Services: Some Evidence and Reflections.” National Tax Journal 22 (2): 185–202. https://search.proquest.com/docview/56018665?accountid=14515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briffault, Richard. 1990. “Our Localism: Part II—Localism and Legal Theory.” Columbia Law Review 90 (2): 346–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burch, Traci. 2014. “The Old Jim Crow: Racial Residential Segregation and Imprisonment.” Law and Policy 36 (3): 223–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calabrese, Stephen, Epple, Dennis, and Romano, Richard. 2012. “Inefficiencies from Metropolitan Political and Fiscal Decentralization: Failures of Tiebout Competition.” The Review of Economic Studies 79: 1081–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Card, David, Mas, Alexandre, and Rothstein, Jesse. 2008. “Tipping and the Dynamics of Segregation.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 123 (1): 177–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chetty, Raj, and Hendren, Nathaniel. 2018a. “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133 (3): 1107–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chetty, Raj, and Hendren, Nathaniel. 2018b. “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 133 (3): 1163–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charles, Camille Z. 2003. “The Dynamics of Racial Residential Segregation.” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (1): 167–207. doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100002. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.29.010202.100002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Charles, Camille Zubrinsky. 2006. Won’T You Be My Neighbor? Race, Class, and Residence in Los Angeles. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Connerly, Charles E. 2005. The Most Segregated City in America: City Planning and Civil rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Connolly, N.D.B. 2014. A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, David M., and Glaeser, Edward L.. 1997. “Are Ghettos Good or Bad?” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (3): 827–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, David M., Glaeser, Edward L., and Vigdor, Jacob L.. 1999. “The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto.” Journal of Political Economy 107 (3): 455–506. doi: 10.1086/250069.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darity, William. 2005. “Stratification Economics: The Role of Intergroup Inequality.” Journal of Economics and Finance 29 (2): 144–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darity, William, Hamilton, Darrick, and Stewart, James. 2015. “A Tour De Force in Understanding Intergroup Inequality: An Introduction to Stratification Economics.” The Review of Black Political Economy 42: 1–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denton, Nancy A. and Massey, Douglas S.. 1991. “Patterns of Neighborhood Transition in a Multiethnic World: U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1970–1980.” Demography 28 (1): 41–63. doi: 10.2307/2061335. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2061335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1935. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 Harcourt, Brace and Company. https://search.proquest.com/docview/58303420?accountid=14515.Google Scholar
Einstein, Katherine. 2012. “Divided Regions: Race, Political Segregation, and the Fragmentation of American Metropolitan Policy.” Doctoral dissertation. Harvard University.Google Scholar
Einstein, Katherine Levine, Glick, David M., and Palmer, Maxwell. 2019. Nieghborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellen, Ingrid Gould. 2000. Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellickson, Robert C. 1977. “Suburban Growth Controls: An Economic and Legal Analysis.” Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 470.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elmendorf, Christopher. 2019. “Beyond the Double Veto: Land Use Plans as Preemptive Intergovernmental Compacts.” Hastings Law Journal 71 (1): 79–150.Google Scholar
Emerson, Michael O., Chai, Karen J., and Yancey, George. 2001. “Does Race Matter in Residential Segregation? Exploring the Preferences of White Americans.” American Sociological Review 66 (6): 922–35. doi: 10.2307/3088879.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enos, Ryan. 2017. The Space Between Us . New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erbe, Brigitte Mach. 1975. “Race and Socioeconomic Segregation.” American Sociological Review 40 (6): 801–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischel, William A. 2004. “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects.” Urban Studies 41 (2): 317–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischel, William A. 1992. “Property Taxation and the Tiebout Model: Evidence for the Benefit View from Zoning and Voting.” Journal of Economic Literature 30 (1): 171–7.Google Scholar
Fischer, Claude S., Stockmayer, Gretchen, Stiles, Jon, and Hout, Michael. 2004. “Distinguishing the Geographic Levels and Social Dimensions of U.S. Metropolitan Segregation, 1960–2000.” Demography 41 (1): 37–59. doi: 10.1353/dem.2004.0002.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Fischer, Mary J. 2008. “Shifting Geographies: Examining the Role of Suburbanization in Blacks’ Declining Segregation.” Urban Affairs Review 43 (4): 475–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frasure-Yokley, Lorrie. 2015. Racial and Ethnic Politics in American Suburbs. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gelman, Andrew, Park, David K., Stephen, Ansolabehere, Price, Phillip N., and Minnite, Lorraine C.. 2001. “Models, Assumptions and Model Checking in Ecological Regressions.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A 164 (1): 101–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2680538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glickfield, Madelyn, and Levine, Ned. 1992. Regional Growth and Local Reaction: The Enactment and Effects of Local Growth Control and Management Measures in California. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.Google Scholar
Gotham, Kevin F. 2000. “Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration.” Sociological Perspectives 43 (2): 291–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gyourko, Joseph, Saiz, Albert, and Summers, Anita. 2008. “A New Measure of the Local Regulatory Environment for Housing Markets: The Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index.” Urban Studies 45 (3): 693–729.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gyourko, Joseph, and Molloy, Raven. 2015. “Regulation and Housing Supply.” In Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Vol. 5B, eds. Gilles Duranton, Vernon Henderson, and William Strange. The Netherlands: Elsevier North Holland.Google Scholar
Hall, Andrew, and Yoder, Jesse. 2019. “Does Homeownership Influence Political Behavior? Evidence from Administrative Data.” Working Paper: https://www.andrewbenjaminhall.com/homeowner.pdf.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Bruce W. 1975. “Zoning and Property Taxation in a System of Local Governments.” Urban Studies 12 (2): 205–11. https://search.proquest.com/docview/60822794?accountid=14515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hankinson, Michael. 2018. “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism.” American Political Science Review 101 (3): 393–408.Google Scholar
Harris, David R. 1999. “‘Property Values Drop when Blacks Move in, because…’ Racial and Socioeconomic Determinants of Neighborhood Desirability.” Source American Sociological Review 64 (3): 461–79. doi: 10.2307/2657496.Google Scholar
Hilber, Christian. 2011. The Economic Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Survey of an Emerging Literature. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.Google Scholar
Hilber, Christian and Robert-Nicoud, Frederic. 2013. “On the Origins of Land Use Regulations: Theory and Evidence from US Metro Areas.” Journal of Urban Economics 75: 29–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsch, Arnold. 1983. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Iceland, John, and Wilkes, Rima. 2006. “Does Socioeconomic Status Matter? Race, Class, and Residential Segregation.” Social Problems 53 (2): 248–73. doi: 10.1525/sp.2006.53.2.248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, Kenneth T. 1987. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jargowsky, Paul A. 1996. “Take the Money and Run: Economic Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas.” American Sociological Review 61 (6): 984–98. doi: 10.2307/2096304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary. 1997. A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://search.proquest.com/docview/56703405?accountid=14515.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Rosen, Ori, and Tanner, Martin, eds. 2004. Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knauss, Norman. 1929. “786 Municipalities in United States Now Protected by Zoning Ordinances.” The American City 40 (June): 167–71.Google Scholar
Kruse, Kevin Michael, and Sugrue, Thomas. 2006. The New Suburban History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Krysan, Maria, Farley, Reynolds, and Couper, Mick P.. 2008. “In the Eye of the Beholder: Racial Beliefs and Residential Segregation.” Du Bois Review 5 (1): 5–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linneman, Peter, Summers, Anita, Brooks, Nancy, and Buist, Henry. 1990. “The State of Local Growth Management.” The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Logan, John. 2011. Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks, Hispanics and Asians in Metropolitan America. US2010 Project.Google Scholar
Logan, John R., and Molotch, Harvey L.. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lutz, Byron. 2015. “Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Connection between Property Taxes and Residential Capital Investment.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 7 (1): 300–30.Google Scholar
Marble, William, and Nall, Clayton. 2018. “Where Interests Trump Ideology: The Persistent Influence of Homeownership in Local Development Politics.” Working Paper.Google Scholar
Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A.. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Massey, Douglas S., and Denton, Nancy A.. 1988. “The Dimensions of Residential Segregation.” Social Forces 67 (2): 281–315. doi: 10.2307/2579183. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2579183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMichael, Stanley, and Bingham, Robert. 1923. City Growth and Values. Cleveland, OH: The Stanley McMichael Publishing Organization.Google Scholar
Mummolo, Jonathan, and Nall, Clayton. 2017. “Why Partisans Do Not Sort: The Constraints on Political Segregation.” The Journal of Politics 79 (1): 45. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1857348615?accountid=14515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nall, Clayton. 2018. The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Created Suburbs, Undermined Cities, and Polarized America. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oates, Wallace E. 1981. “On Local Finance and the Tiebout Model.” The American Economic Review 71 (2): 93–8. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/1815699.Google Scholar
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pendall, Rolf. 2000. “Local Land Use Regulations and the Chain of Exclusion.” Journal of the American Planning Association 66 (2): 125–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pendall, Rolf, Puentes, Robert, and Martin, Jonathan. 2006. From Traditional to Reformed: A Review of the Land Use Regulations in the Nation’s 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas. Washington DC: The Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Pogodzinski, J. M., and Sass, Tim. 1994. “The Theory and Estimation of Endogenous Zoning.” Regional Science and Urban Economics 24 (5): 601–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, Roger L. 1968. “Residential Segregation by Law, 1910–1917.” The Journal of Southern History 34 (2): 179–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, Stephen L. 2008. “Understanding Racial Segregation: What Is Known about the Effect of Housing Discrimination.” Economics. Working Papers #200815, University of Connecticut.Google Scholar
Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing.Google Scholar
Rothwell, Jonathan T. 2011. “Racial Enclaves and Density Zoning: The Institutionalized Segregation of Racial Minorities in the United States.” American Law and Economics Review 13 (1): 290–358. doi: 10.1093/aler/ahq015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saiz, Albert. 2010. “The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125 (3): 1253–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Schelling, Thomas C. 1971. “Dynamic Models of Segregation.” The Journal of Mathematical Sociology the Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (2): 143–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwab, Robert, and Oates, Wallace. 1991. “Community Composition and the Provision of Local Public Goods: A Normative Analysis.” Journal of Public Economics 44 (2): 217–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shertzer, Allison, Twinam, Tate, and Walsh, Randall. 2016. “Race, Ethnicity, and Discriminatory Zoning.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 8 (3): 217–46.Google Scholar
Shertzer, Allison, Twinam, Tate, and Walsh, Randall. 2018. “Zoning and the Economic Geography of Cities.” Journal of Urban Economics 105: 20–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silver, Christopher. 1997. “The Racial Origins of Zoning in American Cities.” In Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows, eds. Thomas, June Manning and Ritzdorf, Marsha. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 23–42.Google Scholar
Stone, Clarence N. 1989. Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Studies in Government and Public Policy. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.Google Scholar
Taub, Richard P., Taylor, D. G., and Dunham, Jan D.. 1984. Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tiebout, Charles M. 1956. “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures.” Journal of Political Economy 64 (5): 416–24. doi: 10.1086/257839. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1826343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toll, Seymour I. 1969. Zoned American. New York: Grossman Publishers.Google Scholar
Troesken, Werner and Walsh, Randall. 2017. “Collective Action, White Flight, and the Origins of Formal Segregation Laws.”NBER Working Paper No. 23691.Google Scholar
Trounstine, Jessica. 2018. Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yinger, John. 1997. Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost: The Continuing Costs of Housing Discrimination. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Trounstine Dataset

Dataset https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/5MAQC2
Link
Supplementary material: File

Trounstine supplementary material

Online Appendix
Download Trounstine supplementary material(File)
File 27 KB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.