Residential Segregation 17 Flashcards
When and why did zoning occur?
Zoning originally developed in the 1920s in rural settlements on the outskirts of growing cities, and became more prominent as industrialization, black migration, and immigration increased the density of central cities. Residents of suburban jurisdictions had strong fiscal incentives, buttressed by racial and class prejudice, to maintain the character of their towns by blocking dense residential development. (Rothwell & Massey 2010)
What are some of the consequences of zoning?
Poverty becomes concentrated in dense areas with affordable housing, mostly in central cities, and surrounding suburbs became enclaves of low-density affluence. In sum, class segregation is as much a product of politics as of markets. Although markets allocate people to housing based on income and price, political decisions allocate housing of different prices to different neighborhoods and thereby turn the market into a mechanism for class segregation. (Rothwell & Massey 2010)
How does zoning create income segregation?
By limiting the ability of developers to produce affordable, multifamily housing projects, restrictive density zoning promotes income segregation by channeling low-income households to sys- tematically different locations in the urban geography than high-income households. (Rothwell & Massey 2010)
What is nonexclusionary discrimination?
Nonexclusionary forms of housing discrimination entail harassment and differential treatment that occurs within an already established housing arrangement, most often entailing racial harassment, differential treatment of tenants, or disparate application of contractual terms and conditions of residency (Roscigno et al. 2009).
What are some of the weaknesses of audit studies?
Some argue that audit testers are predisposed to find discrimination, that testers’ characteristics (e.g., work experience, education, etc.) and behavior impact the test itself, and that testing samples do not effectively capture the various forms of discrimination that manifest in the housing market. (Roscigno et al. 2009).
