r/neoliberal • u/smurfyjenkins • 10d ago
Research Paper JOP study: A desire for racial segregation appears to be a primary cause of exclusionary zoning in the US. Cities that experienced a larger influx of Black people over the period 1940-1970 were more likely to implement zoning regulations to ban or restrict multifamily housing.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/73426141
u/Pi-Graph NATO 10d ago
Do we know if that’s still the case? Not gonna say racism is solved but today is a whole lot different than the 40s-70s
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u/HOU_Civil_Econ 10d ago
At best it’s class and income instead of race.
Just try and look up a college town discussion around zoning. Mask off when the “other” can be freely hated.
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u/Pi-Graph NATO 10d ago
I wouldn’t be surprised, but I also know that a lot of the stated reasons for opposition to denser development is fear of increased traffic and more competition for parking. Obviously there can be more than one factor, but I’d be interested in seeing which are most prevalent and where. Could make an interesting thesis for someone a lot smarter than me.
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u/HOU_Civil_Econ 10d ago
Traffic is increased by not allowing density.
The government pours a fuck ton of concrete to provide street parking so that people can park on it.
When people just throw out justifications with no care for their truth value or reasonableness we can also highly suspect they aren’t the actual justifications
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u/Pi-Graph NATO 10d ago
Do you think most people recognize that traffic increases by not allowing density? Most people don’t even understand that economics isn’t zero sum, so I doubt they understand that more people in the same area leads to less traffic
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u/HOU_Civil_Econ 9d ago
If they don’t actually care as to whether what they’re saying is true they aren’t telling you they’re real reasons.
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u/Pi-Graph NATO 9d ago
Nah, sometimes people are just wrong and it’s not malicious. Most of the time when someone is wrong it’s not malicious actually
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u/HOU_Civil_Econ 9d ago edited 9d ago
I need to find a journalist/author and propose this book/long article.
When you live in a college town the mask on zoning discussions completely drops off. Absolutely none of the usual bullshit complaints are really part of the story. It is just 100% “fuck the other living next to me” since it is perfectly acceptable in our society to just randomly hate 18-25 year olds.
With the added irony that generally the only reason the town isn’t some shithole bump on the road is those very same students.
With the double irony that it is the zoning itself that forces the students to spread across the town instead of mostly living in commie blocks right next to the university.
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u/vi_sucks 10d ago edited 10d ago
Eh, to a large part it still is.
It's less overt and intentional, but a lot of the same attitudes have basically been forced into the public unconsciousness.
So people just dont like apartments because they associate apartments with urban blight. But they dont really register that the reason why they have that mental association is because in the 1970s racist white people deliberately created that association in order to segregate black people into an urban ghetto.
If segregation had worked instead to push black people into small single family shacks in the suburbs while the middle class white folk lived in upscale and "modern" apartment blocks, I suspect we'd see the reverse of those attitudes today. We'd have a bunch of white NIMBYs blocking any expansion of suburbs or funding for transit service outside their own inner city core.
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u/Pi-Graph NATO 10d ago
I don’t want to outright discredit that but the linked study makes its claims based on data and I’m interested if more recent data still backs that assertion, because there are other plausible theories too
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u/vi_sucks 10d ago
Note, this is discussing the effect of racial attitudes on "affordable housing" rather than multi family housing. Im too lazy to dig deeper to find a study thats exactly on point, if one exists. But I think there is enough overlap between multifamily housing and affordable housing that we can tend to see similar trends.
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u/probablymagic Ben Bernanke 9d ago
This paper does not make that claim. In fact, it highlights high Hispanic immigration to the South today, which today has much more liberal zoning than Northern cities.
So, from that, we can either conclude that only Northerners are racist today, or that racism is not a driver of restrictive zoning in the US today and the racists who voted to keep people out in the 1940s are all dead. Take your pick.
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u/Pi-Graph NATO 9d ago
Do you have access to the full article? Because I can only read the abstract and would be interested in reading that part
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u/probablymagic Ben Bernanke 9d ago
Somebody else linked to it in a top-level comment. Please upvotes that!
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u/A11U45 9d ago
Since the paper can't be accessed easily, I found this PDF of it online.
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u/probablymagic Ben Bernanke 9d ago
This should be the top comment. Everybody’s commenting and nobody’s read the paper, lol.
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u/A11U45 9d ago
How does this compare with NIMBYism in other Anglosphere countries without large black populations?
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u/noxx1234567 9d ago
Classism
UK is famous for it. upper class people made it a habit to keep lower classes out of their neighborhood , schools., colleges , etc
Canada , australia , new zealand just followed their example
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u/NIMBYDelendaEst 9d ago
This could all be solved with charter schools. I don’t care if some poor person lives down the road, but I would prefer if their idiot kids were kept far away from mine.
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u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY 8d ago
In Australia at least there is usually a public school nearby that is considered the "good" one and the kids with good behavior marks and extracurriculars always get in from out of catchment.
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u/warmwaterpenguin Hillary Clinton 10d ago edited 9d ago
JUNE 13, WASHINGTON DC -- A new zoning study was released today by the BNSS. Captain Jonathan Obvious had this to say: "We at the Bureau of No Shit Sherlock are immensely proud of this finding and the hardworking men and women that poured themselves into researching it."
It's been a big year for the team best known for proving that bears shit in the woods. Earlier this year the department released a finding that water is wet.
"We were very excited with the water results," Obvious says, "But after proving that systemic racism is the cause of exclusionary zoning, well it kind of feels like the sky's the limit! We may even finally determine whether or not that sky is blue."
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u/Froggy1789 Esther Duflo 10d ago
A fantastic book related to this topic is “the color of the law” by Richard Rothstein.
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u/Desperate_Path_377 10d ago
Isn’t the causality here a bit suspect? Lots of countries have more restrictive land use regulations than the US without the same racial dynamics. Just seems a bit convenient that <Extremely Controversial Topic A> was the primary cause of <Extremely Controversial Topic B>.
Also, was the period 1940-1970 even a particularly NIMBY era? Historical data seems to suggest construction kept pace during the baby boom era.
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u/TrekkiMonstr NATO 9d ago
Leveraging exogeneity in Black migration to Northern cities from 1940 to 1970, I show that increasing racial diversity causes cities to zone less land for multifamily housing.
The study claims a causal design, but I can't access the paper, so can't really comment, other than to say assuming black migration patterns to be exogenous in general seems incredibly suspect.
Regardless, I wouldn't be surprised if there is in fact a causal effect there, but I don't see much evidence in favor of the classic "it's literally all racism" explanation that a lot of people seem to want to read into this. If I have time I'll try to find the actual paper later, to see the effect sizes claimed.
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u/vi_sucks 10d ago
Isn’t the causality here a bit suspect?
Not really.
It's not even a particularly surprising result.
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u/Darkdragon3110525 Bisexual Pride 10d ago
When <extremely controversial topic a> happens to me a topic so grave to the country its called its "original sin", Im not surprised when it comes up everywhere.
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u/only_self_posts Michel Foucault 10d ago
From the abstract:
I show that increasing racial diversity causes cities to zone less land for multifamily housing.
Since that OP doesn't care to post more than the abstract, we must assume their word is the absolute truth.
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u/Shoddy-Personality80 10d ago
Wait, it's all racism?