Single Family Schoolyards

• In Event: Political Institutions, Public Preferences, and Regulation of the Housing Supply in American Cities

Abstract

Though the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1955 decision in Brown v. Board of Education explicitly outlawed the deliberate and intentional segregation of public schools across the United States, racial segregation has nonetheless remained stubbornly persistent and deeply entrenched in the intervening decades since that historic ruling. What, then, explains the continuous and troubling persistence of racial segregation in the absence of explicit de jure policy mandating such separation? One possible and underexplored driver is America's built environment — a landscape historically designed and shaped with similar segregationist impulses, but one that has not been subject to the same corrective legal action that dismantled formal Jim Crow-era educational policies. Zoning and land use policy, we argue, may substantially inhibit residential mobility, which in turn leads to and reinforces patterns of racially segregated schools.

We investigate this important and policy-relevant question drawing on a rich and comprehensive dataset encompassing millions of individual residential parcels across America's 25 largest metropolitan areas. By carefully examining changes in school attendance zone boundaries over time, we are able to isolate the causal effect of a meaningful change in the built environment of a school's catchment area on that school's subsequent racial composition. This research design allows us to move beyond simple correlational observation and make stronger causal claims about the relationship between land use regulation and educational segregation outcomes.

These findings help illuminate the important and underappreciated ways in which land use policy shapes and influences educational segregation across American metropolitan areas. This work also makes a broader contribution to the growing literature on how policies that regulate and structure the built environment affect racial sorting, neighborhood composition, and the intergenerational transmission of educational inequality. Ultimately, understanding these mechanisms is essential for crafting effective policy interventions aimed at producing more equitable educational outcomes in the U.S. and abroad.

Author

• Stan Nguyen Oklobdzija, University of California, Riverside
  Presenting Author