PIPE Workshop: Stan Oklobdzija (UC-Riverside)

Though the Supreme Court's 1955 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 corrective legal action. Zoning and land use policy may inhibit residential mobility which in turn leads to segregated schools. We investigate this drawing on data from millions of residential parcels in America's largest metro areas. Examining changes in school attendance zone boundaries, we are able to isolate the causal effect of a change in the built environment of a school's catchment area on that school's racial composition. 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.

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