The Political Origins of Slum Growth and Segregation in Cities

• In Event: The Historical Political Economy of Inequality and Clientelism

Abstract

A growing literature in distributive politics finds that racial and socioeconomic segregation in cities has major implications for the provision of public goods and other distributive outcomes. Why are some cities much more segregated than others in the first place? In this paper, I explore the political origins of slum growth and segregation across major cities in Brazil. I argue that the interaction of the timing of certain critical federal government policies (i.e., critical junctures) with local political dynamics largely determined the spatial layout specific to each city. Using a close-elections regression discontinuity design and geocoded data on the location of over 900,000 social housing units, I first find that federal social housing programs, such as Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida (MCMV), increased the segregation of country's cities. I then show that the effects of the MCMV program on segregation are magnified in cities that happened to be governed by mayors from the Left. In contrast, while housing market liberalization in the 1990s dramatically increased the segregation of Brazilian cities overall, the effect is attenuated in cities that happened to governed by mayors from the Left. The findings highlight the unintended consequences of popular policies, such as social housing programs, and how the motivations of the local Left have contradictory effects at different points in urban history.

Author

• Alice Z Xu, Harvard University