White Flight, Discrimination, and the Origins of Urban Segregation in the United States

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Residential segregation by race is one of the most visible and persistent characteristics of American cities. This project improves our knowledge of the emergence of segregation in the United States with a series of data and methodological advances. Whereas previous work on the causes of segregation relied largely on descriptive analyses and coarse tabulations of urban populations, this project constructs the first fine-grained, spatial demographic dataset with neighborhood comparability over time for the early twentieth century. The emergence of segregation in the United States merits more thorough empirical investigation because of its implications for understanding racial disparities in the United States as well as attempts to achieve integration and equality. Policymakers have primarily focused on dismantling discriminatory informal institutions to reduce segregation, most notably with the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed discrimination by sellers and landlords based on race. Yet segregation remains a significant issue nearly a half century later. The proposed analysis illuminates this problem by revisiting the scholarly consensus that discriminatory informal institutions were the driving force behind the rise of segregation in American cities. Because research on segregation crosses disciplinary boundaries, the data and methods developed over the course of this project will attract broad interest across the social sciences. This project digitizes and synthesizes a significant set of related historical geographic data sources, including maps of comprehensive zoning ordinances, land use, HOLC/FHA security zones, streetcar grids, and the location of restrictive covenants. With this advance in data quality, the PIs address previously unanswerable questions about what led to the emergence of segregation in American cities. In particular, they isolate and systematically investigate the role of uncoordinated market choices, informal institutions, and government policies on the emergence of racial residential segregation. The findings will shed light on how segregation arose in American cities, providing context for policymaking related to integration and the elimination of racial disparities. More generally, the capacity of scholars to rigorously investigate the early development of American cities has been hampered by the near total lack of systematic fine-scale spatial data covering urban areas in the early twentieth century. This project remedies this gap in the nation's statistical infrastructure by compiling census data for small geographic areas and creating consistent neighborhoods over time.