Replication Data for When Restrictive Economic Zoning Leads to Racial Segregation

Scholars have shown that restrictive zoning (e.g., reserving some parts of a community for single-family development and others for denser, multi-family development) is correlated with racial segregation, but we lack an understanding of why this occurs. I argue that the link between restrictive zoning and racial segregation operates through the clustering of housing costs generated by land use regulations. Using an agent-based model, I find that restrictive zoning produces racial segregation, but only when residents have homophilic preferences and unequal wealth. Then using a novel dataset of parcel level zoning codes, I show neighborhoods that are restrictively zoned have higher home values, and as the agent-based model predicts, these more restrictively zoned neighborhoods are less diverse, wealthier, and have more homeowners than neighborhoods that are zoned more permissively. Finally, using a nested measure of the degree to which zoning regulations are geographically clustered, I show that neighborhoods that are reserved for single-family homes are spatially separated within cities and between them. Collectively, these results indicate that land use regulations contribute to the maintenance of racial segregation across neighborhoods.