The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas

Rothwell, Jonathan; Massey, Douglas S.

doi:10.1177/1078087409334163

Cited by 178 publications

(109 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Juggling potentially conflicting community goals with governmental revenue generation through property taxes is especially challenging in rural townships without the means to coordinate and adapt planning strategies (Zabik & Prytherch, 2013). Some types of zoning have been criticized for enabling social exclusion and maintaining property values for wealthy groups (Rothwell & Massey, 2009). Feiock, Tavares, and Lubell (2008) found that racial homogeneity, affluence and education, and good fiscal health were correlated with the adoption of exclusionary growth management tools in Florida counties.…”

Section: Local Land-use Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Factors influencing zoning ordinance adoption in rural and exurban townships

Locke

Rissman

2015

Landscape and Urban Planning

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Section: Local Land-use Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Factors influencing zoning ordinance adoption in rural and exurban townships

Locke

Rissman

2015

Landscape and Urban Planning

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“…Finally, we used our ordinal measure but excluded central cities. This also yielded a high correlation with the original index (0.91) and did not change the results in our models when tested in Tables 2 and 3. The survey also contains some questions about what zoning was like ten years earlier; and in prior work, we found that density zoning regulations changed little from 1990 to 2000, and that the metropolitan-wide averages of the Pendall scores validly approximate density zoning throughout the period (Rothwell and Massey 2009). In that work, variables indicating the share of jurisdictions in metropolitan areas that changed their density zoning by 10% or more were insignificant.…”

Section: Data and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…In earlier work, however, we found that these regulations had weak and inconsistent effects and that they predicted neither metropolitan housing supply (Rothwell 2009) nor racial segregation (Rothwell and Massey 2009). Preliminary models estimated here found the same thing, and we also found no systematic effects when we included more comprehensive indices of zoning developed by Malpezzi (1996) and Gyourko, Saiz, and Summers (2008).…”

Section: Data and Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Whereas racial-ethnic segregation stems from a complex interplay of group differences in buying power; white prejudices; minority preferences; discrimination in housing and lending markets; zoning, and federal housing policies (Hirsch 1983;Jackson 1985;Massey and Denton 1993;Charles 2003;Rothwell and Massey 2009), class-specific prejudices, preferences, and discrimination are not likely to play as important in determining segregation between income groups. Although, other things equal, affluent families likely prefer to live apart from poor families, the degree of class segregation is not nearly as severe as the degree of racial segregation (White 1987; Massey, Domina, and Rothwell 2009), suggesting that class bias is less powerful than racial bias.…”

Section: Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Rothwell

Massey

2008

SSRN Journal

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Objectives-Socioeconomic segregation rose substantially in U.S. cities during the final decades of the 20 th century and we argue zoning regulations are an important cause for this increase.Methods-We measure neighborhood economic segregation using the Gini Coefficient for neighborhood income inequality and the poor-affluent exposure index. These outcomes are regressed on an index of density zoning developed from the work of Pendall for 50 U.S. metropolitan areas, while controlling for other metropolitan characteristics likely to affect urban housing markets and class segregation.Results-For both 2000 and changes from 1990 to 2000, OLS estimates reveal a strong relationship between density zoning and income segregation, and replication using 2SLS suggests that the relationship is causal. We also show that zoning is associated with higher interjurisdictional inequality.Conclusions-Metropolitan areas with suburbs that restrict the density of residential construction are more segregated on the basis of income than those with more permissive density zoning regimes. This arrangement perpetuates and exacerbates racial and class inequality in the United States.Since the mid-1970s, the United States has undergone a dramatic shift in its class structure (Danziger and Gottschalk 1995;Levy 1998). By 2005, inequalities of wealth and income had risen to levels last seen in the 1920s. In broad terms, those in the top fifth of the income distribution saw their income and wealth increase dramatically in real terms; those in the middle three fifths saw their income and wealth stagnate and their indebtedness grow; while those in the bottom fifth not only saw indebtedness grow, but experienced real declines in both wealth and income. Within the top fifth of the distribution, the higher up one goes, the greater the increase in income. Whereas the average income earned by the top 20% of households grew 55% in real terms from 1973 to 2003, the real gain for those in the top 5% was 75%, compared with just 13% among households falling at the median. Over the same period, the Gini Coefficient for household income inequality rose from .397 to .464 (Massey 2007).As the human ecologist Robert Park (1926) would surely have predicted, rising inequality in the social realm was accompanied by increasing separation in the spatial realm, and after 1970 segregation on the basis of socioeconomic status increased dramatically. Whether measured in terms of income (Jargowsky 1997;Massey and Fischer 2003;Fischer et al. Direct all correspondence to: Jonathan Rothwell, The Brookings Institution, 1775 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington DC 20036, jrothwell@brookings.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptSoc Sci Q. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2013 April 22. . Increasingly well-educated and the affluent people seemed intent on segmenting themselves off from the rest of American society, a trend that Reich (1992) labeled "the secession of the successful."While social scientists have long studied the causes and consequences of racial-ethnic s...

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“…In addition to subtle forms of housing discrimination, purportedly race-neutral zoning regulations could also serve to segregate immigrants. Rothwell and Massey (2009) find that anti-density zoning leads to increased racial segregation by essentially pricing out many minority residents. These regulations are particularly prevalent in highly suburbanised metropolitan areas with fragmented local governments.…”

Section: Assimilation or Stratification?mentioning

confidence: 98%

Immigrant suburbanisation and the shifting geographic structure of metropolitan segregation in the United States

Farrell

2014

Urban Studies

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This study investigates immigrant suburbanisation trends over the past decade in the metropolitan USA, focusing on how suburbanisation affects the residential segregation of foreign-born populations. Using 2000-2012 data from the decennial census and American Community Survey, it tracks the suburban settlement patterns of 17 country-of-origin groups. It uses a methodological approach that decomposes metropolitan segregation into within and between city/suburb components. The findings indicate that most immigrant groups rapidly suburbanised during the 2000s, though there remain large differences in suburbanisation rates among country-of-origin groups. Immigrant suburbanites tend to be less segregated from US-born whites than are their coethnic counterparts in large cities. Suburbanisation continues to blur the city/suburb divide, which now accounts for a small share of the segregation experienced by most groups. At the metro level, suburbanisation is associated with lower levels of immigrant segregation even after controlling for relevant metropolitan characteristics. These findings are consistent with spatial assimilation, though trends over time suggest a more complicated picture. While immigrants are gaining access to the suburbs, most groups experienced increasing segregation at the same time they were rapidly suburbanising. This is due to increasing segregation within the suburbs, which often offset segregation declines occurring within large cities. These findings underscore the importance of understanding the underlying and often countervailing city/suburb contributions to metropolitan segregation.

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The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas

Cited by 178 publications

References 35 publications

Factors influencing zoning ordinance adoption in rural and exurban townships

Factors influencing zoning ordinance adoption in rural and exurban townships

Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Immigrant suburbanisation and the shifting geographic structure of metropolitan segregation in the United States

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