By Jessica Trounstine, Housing Matters, May 20, 2020
Although segregation has decreased from its peak in 1970, the United States remains highly segregated. City governments regulate land use, and thus, control the distribution of housing. A recent study tested the hypothesis that whiter communities create restrictive land-use policies that allow them to exert control over their neighborhood’s demographics and maintain the status quo.
To test the hypothesis, the author analyzed the relationships between (1) restrictive land use and the relative whiteness of a jurisdiction compared with its region, (2) changes in white population shares in cities that were or were not sued under the Fair Housing Act, and (3) precinct-level election returns related to development restrictions and the area’s whiteness. All analyses had controls for wealth and homeownership, in addition to controls specific to the relationship, such as preexisting zoning laws, average home value, and voter turnout. Additional details on the three analyses follow:
- For the relationship between the restrictiveness of cities’ current land-use policies and the proportion of white residents in a city (compared with the proportion of white residents in the metropolitan region), the author used survey data on local land-use regulations from the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index.
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