Race and Municipal Annexation After the Voting Rights Act

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Cities annex adjacent communities for a variety of economic and political reasons, including efforts to capture a larger tax base. Cities sometimes refuse to annex low-income minority neighborhoods or annex them less frequently than they do nearby high-income White neighborhoods, a process known as municipal underbounding. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required federal oversight over municipal annexation in 15 states and succeeded in preventing the underbounding of many African-American neighborhoods prior to its effective invalidation in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court. I examine the annexation practices of 276 cities across 37 states to answer 3 questions: Did the Supreme Court’s action lead to declines in the annexation of African-American neighborhoods? Did such declines constitute municipal underbounding? Were they attributable to efforts by cities to bolster their tax base? I find that Section 5 cities annexed neighborhoods with approximately 3- to 5-percentage-point lower shares of African Americans after 2013, leading to the underbounding of these communities. I find no evidence that this was attributable to efforts by cities to annex only higher income neighborhoods. My analysis does not control for key neighborhood-level factors that may shape annexation decisions, such as property values, infrastructure conditions, and residents’ preferences for being annexed.Takeaway for practice: Planners should be aware of and remain vigilant to the underbounding of African-American neighborhoods. I argue that planners can work to prevent underbounding by encouraging the adoption of and using state laws that require third-party oversight over annexation and by leveraging federal funding for infrastructure improvements in underserved unincorporated neighborhoods.