Land-Use Regulations As Exclusion: A GIS Analysis

Zoning regulations have been identied as a source of residential segregation in the United States. A com- mon theme in the zoning literature is that municipalities adopt zoning regulations to exclude low-income and minority families. This study presents the rst nationwide test for the presence of the exclusionary motive, using an existing dataset of land-use regulations in approximately 2,600 U.S. municipalities, and U.S. Census data on the demographics of the areas surrounding those municipalities. Geographic Information System (GIS) methods identify the demographics within a set radius of each municipality. This study uses a dataset of all school district desegregation court orders as indicators of municipalities' inclination and incentive to use land-use regulations to accomplish segregation. As a robustness check to address potential endogeneity of ethnic settlement patterns, this study employs a geographic instru- mental variable. The results oer evidence of zoning to exclude low-income populations, but largely fail to provide empirical evidence of racially motivated land-use regulation.