Single Family Schoolyards: Residential Zoning and School Segregation

Though the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed explicit segregation of public schools, segregation has remained stubbornly persistent in the intervening decades. What explains continuous racial segregation in the absence of explicit policy? One possible driver is America's built environment designed with similar segregationist impulses but not subject to the same corrective legal action. Zoning and land use policy influence where households of different means can live, thereby sorting their children across schools. We investigate this link drawing on housing unit counts from the American Community Survey, apportioned to 923 school district boundaries and 13,002 school attendance zones with 27 million residential parcels. We find that districts where single-family and multifamily housing is spread unevenly across attendance zones are more segregated by race and income. Schools with attendance zones that contain a higher proportion of single-family detached residences enroll a disproportionately high share of Asian and White students, as compared with their districts. When an attendance zone boundary is redrawn to encompass a higher share of single-family housing, its Asian and White share increases further. These findings help illuminate how land use policy influences educational segregation and contributes to literature on how policies that regulate the built environment affect racial sorting.