Jessica Trounstine’s chapter in the recently published book The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power examines the ongoing impact of restrictive land use policies on inequality in metropolitan areas across the U.S.

How did white homeowners in the U.S. manage to lock in their economic and political power at the local level, and what does that mean for contemporary inequality? A book chapter by Jessica Trounstine, professor and chair of the political science department of the University of California, Merced, discusses how factors tied to race, class, land use policies, and other local regulations intersected in the 20th century to create entrenched segregation and vast disparities in local spending and resources that persist to this day and in some respects have grown worse over time according to her new analyses.

White homeowners have a long history of attempting to segregate their neighborhoods within cities, a history Trounstine reviews in her chapter, “The Production of Local Inequality: Race, Class, and Land Use in American Cities,” part of the recently published The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (Cambridge University Press), coedited by Stone Center Affiliated Scholar Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen. Even after racial zoning practices were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917, white homeowners employed tactics such as restricting housing deeds by race (ruled unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 1948), pressuring real estate agencies and banks, and lobbying for land use polices that limited or forbade multifamily and publicly subsidized housing. In the decades following World War II, increasing numbers of Black and Latino Americans moved to cities from rural areas — a period that also gave rise to white homeowners’ flight from the central part of cities and the founding of hundreds of homeowners’ associations, established with the intention of keeping out people of color and low-income residents.

As the political landscape changed in the 1960s, however, attempts by white homeowners to maintain residential segregation within the boundaries of cities were increasingly met with frustration. “These efforts required sustained political attention and sometimes even failed in the face of the rising Civil Rights Movement,” Trounstine writes. “In the end, many of these pro-segregation residents [left] the city altogether — moving to the suburbs where they had much greater political control over community boundaries.”

The outflow was staggering: by 1970, more than half of all residents of metropolitan areas lived in a city’s suburbs, rather than within its limits. Over the next three decades, that percentage rose to two-thirds. “In general, the people who moved to these new places had higher incomes and more wealth than those who stayed behind. And they were overwhelming white,” Trounstine writes. Suburbs had all the powers of independent municipalities, and they increasingly adopted land use restrictions, such as minimum sizes for lot acreage and restrictions against multifamily housing, throughout the 1970s. These restrictions were facially neutral, yet in effect reinforced racial and class segregation.

Decades after this initial wave of regulations, white neighborhoods, particularly those with high rates of homeownership, remain significantly more likely than neighborhoods of color to support restricting development. The political power of white homeowners is amplified by the racial gap in homeownership, which remains persistent: in 2019, 73 percent of white households owned their homes, compared with 47 percent of Latino and 41 percent of Black households. “What this means is that a largely white homeowner community is the driving force behind the institutionalization of land use regulations that generate segregation; and their goal has been to maintain the race and class exclusivity of their communities,” Trounstine writes. (For more on the racial gap in wealth and housing, see the GC Wealth Project’s Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality.)

Once segregation between cities and suburbs was achieved, she writes, “maintaining segregation simply meant preventing people of color and those with lower socioeconomic status from moving in; a task that was accomplished through land use regulations.” One effect — which is also indirect evidence of the increasing use of restrictive land use policies — is that the supply of housing has not kept pace with housing prices. Studies have shown that prices are also no longer in line with the cost of construction. “The conclusion that researchers have drawn is that this market distortion reflects a constraint on housing supply,” she writes. “After ruling out other alternative explanations like topographical restriction, scholars have largely concluded that land use regulations, along with more active opposition to development from residents in desirable areas, are the most likely culprits.”

Studying the impact of land use policies is difficult, Trounstine notes, because every incorporated city in the United States has its own policies. To do so, she drew on data from the Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index (WRLURI), a survey that collects data from more than 2,700 municipalities, and combined that with multiple measures of racial and class segregation across the suburbs and cities that comprise the broader metropolitan area. For each metropolitan area, she calculated the difference between a center city’s adoption of land use regulations and that of its suburbs. Her findings show that “suburban land use controls are significantly related to the extent of intercity segregation in metropolitan areas along both race and class lines. The effect is most powerful with regard to racial segregation. When suburbs have more stringent land use policies, metro areas are more segregated.”

Her additional calculations show the economic and political impacts of increased segregation: residents of suburbs on average receive two and a half times the resources that their population share justifies, while residents of central cities receive less than half the amount justified by their population share. “As race and class segregation across city lines has increased, low socioeconomic status residents have less ability to use politics to address inequality,” she writes. This is because redistribution occurs within segregated city lines and not between resource-rich and resource-poor cities and municipalities within the same metropolitan area.

There are exceptions to this pattern that have come about more recently, Trounstine notes: metropolitan areas — such as San Francisco — in which residents of the central city are of high economic status. Could such cities, with their ample tax revenues, spend money on redistributive measures like public housing that would help offset inequality? Possibly, Trounstine says, “but this presumes that the process of gentrification has not displaced the residents who need redistributive programs” beyond the city limits.

The cumulative effect of these trends, Trounstine writes in her conclusion, is that despite progressive change in racial attitudes and increasing attention to inequality, the U.S. remains highly segregated at the local level. White homeowners were so successful in their efforts to maintain racial and socioeconomic homogeneity in the suburbs through land use policies that segregation has become a (tacitly or not) accepted norm. “Today, the politics of suburban America is quiet and consensual — largely because conflict has been zoned out,” she concludes. “Residents of central cities and poorer suburbs cannot affect the politics of exclusive suburbs as a result of fragmentation. The result is dramatic inequalities across places.” To reverse these dynamics, either local political and land use autonomy will need to be challenged or public goods will have to be fairly distributed at the state level.

Read More:

The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power, coedited by Jacob S. Hacker, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, Paul Pierson, and Kathleen Thelen

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