Redlined Forever: The Racist Past of Today’s Land Use Regulations

• In Event: Spatial Dynamics of the American Political Economy

Abstract

Despite a rapidly diversifying population and some progress toward integration, America remains a deeply segregated nation. Trounstine (2018, 2020) shows that municipal land use regulations play a clear role in generating and maintaining segregation. However, the political mechanisms that produce such regulations are unclear. In this paper, we trace current land use regulations to their historical roots. Using data from more than 1.5 million parcels in the Bay Area of California, we show that neighborhoods that were graded as good investments by the federal government’s mortgage guidelines in the 1930s are more likely to be zoned for single-family, low-density housing today, even after accounting for the neighborhood’s historical housing stock and home values. And today, neighborhoods zoned single-family and low density are less likely to be the site for new building permits, they are less diverse, wealthier, have higher home values, and have more homeowners than neighborhoods that are zoned more densely. We also demonstrate that highly regulated neighborhoods are overrepresented on city planning commissions and city councils, offering suggestive evidence that city governments play a role in maintaining privilege and exclusivity.

Author

• Jessica Luce Trounstine, University of California, Merced