Building segregation: The contemporary relationship between land use policy, housing development and schools

• In Event: Studying Integrated Spaces and the Policies that Support Them

Abstract

Several years ago, school board officials in a major southern suburban school district redrew the school attendance boundaries that help determine how students are assigned to schools. The district had a stated commitment to further school diversity when redrawing the boundaries, among other priorities. As the process got underway, a local newspaper article detailed how a major housing developer sought to influence the school board. The developer threatened to pull out of building a new high-priced neighborhood when the district proposed shifting the attendance boundaries associated with the planned community to more racially and economically diverse schools. The school board ultimately caved to pressure from the developer, erecting a new affluent neighborhood assigned to affluent schools in a racially and economically diverse and well-resourced school district.

This example crystallizes how contemporary neighborhood and school segregation—and inequality—is newly constructed in diversifying parts of suburbia and sparks questions around how developers understand school quality. It also begs a broader qualitative research question: how do suburban land use, planning and development processes intersect with and influence school construction and rezoning? Though policy researchers and historians have documented how some of these complex relationships worked in the past (see, e.g. Rothstein, 2017; Lassiter, 2012; Erickson, 2018) few contemporary studies do so.

A variety of qualitative data related to land use and housing policy is publicly available due to associated public processes as well as local media coverage of them. These data will be supplemented with approximately 15-20 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders.

Findings stand to have important implications. Though we have long pointed to the close relationship between school and housing segregation, far too few policy efforts or litigation remedies consider the two together. Even when they do, it’s often after segregation has been built into the landscape.

The proposed paper also comes at a particularly crucial moment. Bipartisan policy and advocacy attention is increasingly directed at addressing the twin housing shortage and affordability crises. As efforts to address the crises mount, much more segregation and inequality will be built unless we both understand how schools are viewed across sectors and design policy to instead advance racially and economically diverse, well-resourced schools and neighborhoods.

References

Erickson, A.T. & Highsmith, A.R. (2018). The neighborhood unit: Schools, segregation, and the shaping of the modern metropolitan landscape. Teachers College Record, 120(3), 1-36.

Lassiter, M.D. (2012). Schools and housing in metropolitan history: An introduction. Journal of Urban
History, 38(2), 195-204.

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law. New York: Liveright.

Author

• Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, Virginia Commonwealth University
  Presenting Author