The Institutional Racism Of Land Use Regulation

Is there anything more boring than land-use regulation? Not quite. As our guest today argues, these seemingly banal policies could be causing modern-day segregation.

In a new paper, Jessica Trounstine, chair of the political science department a the University of California Merced, makes a strong case for why land-use policies aren’t as race-neutral as they seem, and why we need to pay more attention to them.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.

Transcript

Wioletta Dziuda:

I'm Wioletta Dziuda.

Anthony Fowler:

I'm Anthony Fowler.

William Howell:

And I'm Will Howell, and this is not another politics podcast. There has been around our country a whole lot of attention to issues involving race and racism.

Tape:

As protest for Black Lives Matter continue across the country, many state and local leaders have declared racism a public health crisis.

Tape:

Someone to suggest that there aren't racial challenges and patterns is for someone to be blind.

Tape:

The fact of the matter is there is institutional racism in America.

William Howell:

Look, this notion of institutional racism, we often talk about it in terms of national institutions, but it probably plays out a lot at the local level as well. And it's primarily at the local level where we then see huge levels of segregation.

Wioletta Dziuda:

One thing that might come to mind is land use restrictions. And there's some evidence that actually those kinds of policies might generate intended or unintended consequences for racial segregation. Yeah. Recently, for example, we probably have heard about Minneapolis, Minneapolis city council voted to do so-called upzoning, which means that throughout the entire city of Minneapolis, it is no longer possible to restrict the land use to only single family homes, so you can build now duplexes, triplexes, and other family homes throughout the entire city of Minneapolis. One interesting question would be if this kind of changes are going to have any impact on something that seems to be completely unrelated, which is racial segregation and racial equity within the city of Minneapolis.

William Howell:

And this was done. I mean, there's been a lot of movement on this front in the aftermath of George Floyd. So, the question is, what do we know about this relationship? Like systematically, what do we know about the relationship between land use regulation and segregation? Anthony, you talked to a scholar who's written a really interesting paper that speaks directly to these issues.

Anthony Fowler:

I did, I spoke with Jessica Trounstine from UC Merced. Jessica is an expert on local politics and on political geography, she's written a really interesting book called segregation by design, which is about a lot of these topics, about how the ways that we pass our laws can have all of these unintended racial consequences. And we talked specifically about a paper she recently published in the American political science review, on this question of land use regulation and racial segregation.

Anthony Fowler:

So the specific paper that we're talking about today is about land use regulations and their effect on geographic segregation, what kinds of land regulations are we talking about here?

Jessica Trounstine:

I should start by saying land use regulations sounds really boring, why would anybody want to pay attention to land use regulation? It turns out that land use regulation is important and fascinating for a couple of different reasons, first, it is the single most important power that local governments have in the United States, and it's unusual, so the United States sort of has the system which allows local governments to completely control what is built, when it is built, how it is built within their boundaries. Look around in your own neighborhood, and you sort of think about what the houses look like next door to you or across the street from you.

The background of all of that is land use regulation, so explicitly racial zoning was banned by the Supreme court very early on, but when cities first began making these land use maps, they did segment particular parts of the city or reserved certain parts of the city for white residents only, you can't put that on paper. That said it is completely and totally legal, a hundred percent, to say, this is where the expensive housing is going to get put. And this is where the less expensive housing is going to get put.

And the way in which that occurs is you say in one particular area of the city, or maybe even the city as a whole, all of the houses that get built here have to be on at least a third of an acre lot, or we can only build a density of say eight units per acre, right? That prohibits multifamily housing, denser kinds of housing, and it's sort of obvious to say that denser housing and more units per acre lot, and makes less expensive housing for the most part, right? And so cities can dictate sort of who is able to access the housing in their community by dictating what type of housing gets built.

And on top of that, there are many informal mechanisms of development approval that can generate outcomes that dictate what type of people live in a particular neighborhood, right? So when a development is going to get built, the city has maybe a land use commission or a planning commission that is going to approve or deny that variance that needs to be in place in order for that development to get built. And land use and planning commissions can and do act in discriminatory fashion in the approval of these kinds of regulatory variances.

We find that places that are whiter, wealthier have more homeowner homeowners and have a history of early regulatory frameworks are all more likely to have more stringent regulations today.

Anthony Fowler:

So let's talk a little bit more about the specifics of the paper, so if you want to really understand what would have impacted land use regulation have on geographic segregation? How do we go about answering that question? Tell us about some of the analysis in the paper.

Jessica Trounstine:

There's a lot of endogeneity that happens here, right? So you have stringent land use regulations, and my argument is that you adopt stringent land use regulations in order to produce a particular kind of demographic in your community. But then that demographic also produces additional land use regulation, right? And so it's a chicken and egg problem if they both happen at the same time, they both cause each other, then we have to sort of figure out how we disentangle these processes? What I do is I use an external actor, when cities do this, when they actually engage in racially discriminatory regulatory behavior, they can get sued under the federal law.

And if they get sued, the court gets involved and can actually issue injunctions to force cities to change their land use regulations, when the federal government gets involved, the city is not by choice making a change to their land use regulation, and so I use this fact that there is this forcing mechanism from the federal government to measure changes in land use regulation.

And then I can say, okay, so if the city was forced to change their land use regulations, how does that affect their demographics going forward? And what I find is that a city that is forced to change their land use regulation becomes less white over time. And the caveat here is that the whole United States is becoming less white over time. So what I'm measuring is sort of how rapidly are you becoming more or less quite over time. And the cities that have forced land use changes become less white more quickly than cities without forced land use change.

Anthony Fowler:

Okay. Yeah, I think this is really an interesting analysis, and I find it mostly convincing, but I would if I was going to play devil's advocate here, let me raise some concerns, and I want to hear your responses to the potential concerns that I'm going to raise. So one potential concern I could imagine is that, I don't know a lot about the details of these lawsuits, but one potential concern would be that these lawsuits also involve other things other than just land use regulations.

And at the same time the court orders them to change the land use regulations, they also are doing other things that reduce discrimination in housing in those cities, and so we're getting this kind of complicated treatment that's about land use regulation, but also about other legal practices, other norms, is that something we should be worried about?

Jessica Trounstine:

I think that's an important worry. So I've read a lot of these cases and they're quite specific, right? And so many of the cases will be about a specific land use regulation on a specific parcel at a specific moment in time. So I'll give you an example, I did some in-depth analysis and interviewing in this little town up in Northern California, St. Helena. In St. Helena, there was a particular property where a low-income developer wanted to build affordable housing for the Latino workforce, and the city refused to rezone it in order to allow it to have denser multifamily housing to be built on this specific parcel. So they brought this lawsuit and what they won was a requirement that the city rezoned that parcel.

So it's actually in some ways, the worry should be the other way around, right? So if you're only rezoning a particular parcel, how is that going to change the demographics of the city? And actually in St. Helena, it did change the demographics of the city. So St. Helena went from 97% white in one census period down to 70% white in the next census period. It was a massive, hugely dramatic transformation of this town.

And what I understood to have happened was the city got nervous, right? So they rezoned that one particular parcel, but then when a developer came and said, there's another parcel that seems suitable for low income and affordable development, then the city sort of was more willing to play ball in the future with the developers. So these cities are not, they're not doing this by choice and they're not sort of saying, oh, well, now we're going to go and see if there's racial discrimination in the real estate market, or if there's racial steering among our rental agents or whatever else, they don't want to do that, in my experience that's not the reaction that these cities are having.

Anthony Fowler:

Your answer to the question, I thought it was really interesting, but also was somewhat consistent with my concern, which is that maybe it's not so much the particular land use regulation changes that happen as a result of these injunctions, but it's some broader sense in the community that if we're not careful we're going to get sued again, it's not so much the removal of land use regulations that's doing the work, it's the fact that there was this high profile lawsuit and everyone knows they now need to get their act together and.

Jessica Trounstine:

Except that in the future other parcels get rezoned, so that the worry changes the land use... the regulatory framework, the worry doesn't just allow development to happen, and in fact, land use regulation is so powerful that they literally cannot build anything unless the zoning changes occur.

Anthony Fowler:

So here's another concern, another potential concern, one potential concern might be something like while your estimates are perfectly valid and unbiased and whatnot, it could be that by focusing on these lawsuits, you're focusing on essentially the most extreme cases, and that maybe there's kind of an external validity concern that just because you're finding these cases, that as a result of these fair housing lawsuits, they had a big effect, that doesn't mean if I just went to Lake Forest, Illinois, or some pretty white neighborhood that wasn't subject to one of these lawsuits, and I took away their land use regulations that all of a sudden it would become more—

Jessica Trounstine:

I think that's right, and I think there's a lot of experiments right now going on that we're going to see whether or not this is correct. And so Minneapolis is a great example of this sort of, I don't know, someday we'll get to have a bunch of dissertations written about this, or maybe one dissertation written about this, right? Where land use regulation gets liberalized citywide. So Minneapolis decided to ups own their entire city, so that now duplexes and triplexes can be built anywhere in the city.

And it's remains to be seen whether or not duplexes and triplexes are going to get built anywhere in the city, right? So there's lots of ways to stall development, to stop development, even if the land use regulation is in place to allow it to happen. So what I like to say is at the very least, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for this kind of development, right?

So maybe once you have the necessary land use regulations, you also have to have planning commissions that are willing to approve these developments. And maybe what I'm measuring here with the fair housing legislation is bundling that, right? You get planning commissions who are then more willing to accept the kind of development that we're talking about. Whereas a neighboring city that doesn't face a lawsuit and the planning commission is sitting there rubbing their hands saying, "Ha ha, he got away with it, and we can continue being very rigid."

I've been working with this city here in the central valley where they're telling me that they are perfectly, their land use regulations are perfectly liberal. They've upped zoned the entire city and it's not their fault that the developers just don't want to build there. And when I have talked to the developers, what the developers tell me is, heck yeah, I'm not going to build there because every time we bring this before the city council, the planning commission, we get shouted down by the residents and then our costs get driven up, because we have to do more studies and we have to put in more stop signs and we have to change the color and the shape and all this.

And it's a pain in the neck, and so they're going to go to the next door community, so I absolutely think this concern is valid and that there are probably pieces of the puzzle that we just haven't figured out yet here, and unfortunately, maybe fortunately for me and my grad students and all the people studying local politics right now, there's just so much to learn, there's so much to learn about these processes that we don't know yet.

Anthony Fowler:

So there's another analysis in the paper that I think is really interesting where you're looking at these precinct level returns from California initiatives. Do you want to talk about that?

Jessica Trounstine:

Sure. Yeah. So for a long time I've tried to understand sort of who wants this, right? Who wants development to look a certain way and who doesn't. And so this was my first attempt at trying to analyze at least in the aggregate, what do neighborhoods feel about any kind of regulation that they have the opportunity to vote on. And in California we have this ridiculous initiative process which allows us to vote on just about anything you can think of. And so, I got to—

Anthony Fowler:

We've had a lot of Illinois here as well, we have—

Jessica Trounstine:

Okay. Good, good. Well, I mean, that's not good.

Anthony Fowler:

Well lots of judges and yeah, yeah, it's not great actually, but.

Jessica Trounstine:

Normatively bad, good for political science. So I gathered these data from across California in 2016, and actually it turns out that in 2016 that was the year that pot got legalized in a lot of... So there was a ton of local initiatives that were about. where dispensary's can be located, and I took out all of that stuff. Because although that's land use associate, it's associated with land use, I was just looking at sort of the density of residential development essentially.

So I take a look at all California counties that have land use regulations on the initiative ballot, and then I do a very specific look in San Francisco where I get even finer grained detail. And I do a basic aggregate analysis looking at how the neighborhoods voted on these different initiatives, and it turns out that the wider the neighborhood, the wealthier the neighborhood, the more homeowners in the neighborhood, the more likely they are to prefer to restrict development in across these various mechanisms.

Anthony Fowler:

So if you had to guess, I'm going to push you a little bit outside your paper. Why is it the case that white neighborhoods like these land use regulations, even conditional on wealth, whiter neighborhoods relative to equally wealthy mixed neighborhoods and black neighborhoods, et cetera. Is there actually some racist intent here or is it something else or it's hard to say?

Jessica Trounstine:

Okay, it's an excellent question, but a complicated question. I think I wouldn't use the term racist intent. It's basically an investment in structural inequality, right? These neighborhoods see that they have an advantage in the distribution of public goods. The police officers are much more likely to respond to their neighborhood. The good teachers want to work in their neighborhood schools. They have an investment in their property values and in those public goods that they perceive to be related to the demographic makeup of that neighborhood. And it's not just race that people see in terms of higher density housing, so white residents do have a preference for whiter neighborhoods, but they also have a preference simply on the face of it for lower density neighborhoods.

And I believe that there is a series of ideas or images that people have about what exists in a higher density neighborhood, crime, bad schools, lower property values, sort of cracked sidewalks and neglect from the city government that are all bundled with race. But I don't think that if you questioned them, they would talk about racism, I don't think they would sort of admit it or even think of it in those terms.

Anthony Fowler:

How should we feel from a normative moral standpoint, maybe from a legal standpoint too, but first just kind of from a normative moral standpoint, how should we feel about small towns deciding for themselves how land should be used in their town? I could imagine one, maybe a Chicago econ free market person would say, we shouldn't have any of these things that we should let the market decide and we should maybe I don't have a right to determine what my neighbor does with their land.

On the other hand somebody might say, well, there's extra analogies, and if somebody builds a big smoke tower next to my house, that's going to hurt the whole community, and so we all have an interest in... So I don't know, how do we trade off some of these things?

Jessica Trounstine:

Yeah, I think it's really hard, I mean, so these are collective action problems first and foremost, right? It's sort of classic prisoner's dilemma right here, we have neighborhoods that want the best for themselves, but when they want the best for themselves, that might be collectively negative, we have to put smokestack somewhere, we have to put recycling plants somewhere, we also need higher density housing because we cannot house the United States right now in our big cities.

Our big cities are... the state rocketing prices in our big metropolitan areas is genuinely harming the health, wellbeing and safety of Americans. And that is a collective bad, it's a societal negative. And allowing neighborhoods to be the dictators of their boundaries has produced this collectively negative outcome. And so I actually feel normatively pretty strongly about this, that we need more centralized planning. If we have regulation without planning, all we will do is advantage the most advantaged members of our society and the disadvantaged members of our society will suffer. What we need is centralized planning in combination with regulation and land use in order to produce collective benefits.

Anthony Fowler:

Great, this is really interesting. Thank you so much, Jessica, for doing this.

Jessica Trounstine:

Thank you very much.

Wioletta Dziuda:

This is a very interesting paper. This finding per se, I think even though suggestive and consistent with some sort of racial ideas behind those land use restrictions, this doesn't per se say that these restrictions are motivated racially, it might be the case that white people just have preference for whatever this regulations do, white people might have preference for single family housing, they might have preferences for lack of commercial buildings and so on and so forth.

So even though we know the history of this country, so this finding per se, I think is consistent for a lot of stories.

Anthony Fowler:

And Jessica talked about this in the interview and she has a view, and I think the evidence itself only tells you so much. What do we think as a group? Or what do you know, maybe we don't agree, but how clear is it that the motivations of these town council members who are imposing these regulations, to what extent do we think this is just a taste based thing? Or is there actually something more nefarious going on where these white town council members are sitting around and saying, we'd like to make it harder for other people to move into our neighborhood. And particularly we'd like to make it harder for certain groups that we don't want. What are some ways we can do that? What do you guys think?

William Howell:

She doesn't present any direct evidence about what the motivations are of voters. So I guess I would rely upon what's the most parsimonious explanation that one can offer on the basis of the results that are put before us. And I guess I would suggest that the most parsimonious explanation, I don't know if it's the right one, but the most parsimonious one that's consistent with all the findings in this paper, is that with any talk about provision of public goods or collective action problems, we can simply say white residents would prefer not to live around people who are black and brown, and they support these policies as a way to keep them from being able to move into the neighborhood.

And that has nothing to do with building roads or supporting schools or a taste for three story or four story buildings that we're going to accommodate. It's tied directly to the findings on offer, which has to do with the racial composition of your neighborhoods.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I think I would agree with what Will have said, I think first of all we have some historical evidence that initially those land use restrictions were passed exactly because the the Supreme court outlawed straight up restrictions on racial composition of any neighborhood. So people just figured out how to use the restrictions that we are able to impose to still keep their neighborhoods white and segregated.

Now, is this still true today? I think she controls for wealth and she controls for house ownership. So, what we should see is that if you have two neighborhoods that differ only in racial composition, they should really have the same desire to have good schools and good public roads. So the fact that we find that the wider neighborhoods are more likely to actually implement those restrictions, I think that sort of supports this parsimonious explanation.

And finally in Europe we also have white people, actually we have mainly white people, so it's hard to make a comparison, but people have preference for living in cities. Cities in Europe are extremely dense and people enjoy that, they enjoy the amenities the density provides. And it's very hard for me to believe that for some reason white people in America, white people have developed this taste for single family home, which is completely independent of any racial undertones, but white people in Europe and minorities in the United States or people of color in the United States have not developed this taste.

Anthony Fowler:

That's interesting. I haven't thought about that, that's an interesting one. If Nebraska would look like Amsterdam, if only there were just white people in Nebraska, that's the story. I don't know if I buy that, I don't think that's quite right.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, probably that's a little bit... probably that's my European bias, but there's something to say about the value of density, this is something that as a foreigner you're always positive in the United States, why wouldn't you want the high-rise here if the high rise comes to your neighborhood you're going to have restaurants, you're going to have a butcher shop or bakery next door, because there's enough density to support this and that doesn't seem to be happening, so.

Anthony Fowler:

There is this, there's ethos in America that we selected for all the Europeans who wanted to come over and have big land and explore the frontier and have a big yard and all that, I don't understand all of that myself, but.

Wioletta Dziuda:

But that wasn't always the case, no, if you look at the history of American citizen here, you guys know much more than I do, but there was this white flight and people before like being in the cities, for some reason cities have developed and then people developed a taste for single family homes.

Anthony Fowler:

Yeah, I find this story mostly convincing think you guys are right, I think economics is a clear part of it as well, I don't think race is all of what's going on here. I think there's a clear... the flight of rich people from cities was partly because of race, but also partly because they don't want their tax scholars going to help out all the poor people, they want to have their own nice neighborhood, but they're with a really well-funded schools and the well-funded libraries and all of that. So some of it is that wealth story, but I'm sure you're right that some of it is a race story as well. And maybe it's hard to tease those things out observationally, but that seems almost obviously right.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah. And I think what also might be happening is that we as human beings are excellent at finding justification for our behavior, and I think a lot of neighborhoods that are voting for those land use restrictions, they do talk about that we want to have good schools, we don't want to have pollution, we want to have beautiful parks and roads with little congestion, those might be just the justification that... some of them might be, yeah, we truly want those things, but I think there might be part of us that that just uses those economic explanations as as a justification for as one thing to keep those neighborhoods segregated.

William Howell:

Hey, if you're getting a lot out of the research that we discussed on this show, there's another university of Chicago podcast network show that you should check out. It's called Big Brains. Big Brains brings you the engaging stories behind the pioneering research and pivotal breakthroughs that are reshaping our world, change how you see the world through research, keep up with the latest academic thinking with Big Brains, part of the university of Chicago podcast network.

Anthony Fowler:

So let's push on that a little bit more, is there something wrong inherently with somebody who they really want to live in a community with low density and with only single family homes and big one acre lots and whatnot, suppose, I mean, surely there are people who would prefer that, and suppose they all find a like-minded community who all prefers that, they create a community and they pass these zoning laws, is there something inherently wrong with that? Is there something morally upsetting about that to us?

William Howell:

Yes and no, so there are a number of ways to worry about this paper, one is to say, having read it and learned that the production of these land use regulations generates segregation, that then ones persistent willingness to get behind them, even if what your sort of core interest is, I like the open air, right? And I want to see the skyline, because I don't want any building over three stories, that can be morally troubling, right?

William Howell:

The other piece, and this is something that we struggle with here, and this is what's I think we're trying to make sense of is, what are your true tastes, choice about what? What are your true intentions? And when the evidence is all the way through that white people and white locations are getting behind these things, and you'd have to then have an explanation for why, well, it's white people who like to look at the, they like the lower buildings, right? But people of color do not, or the white people like the parks and people of color do not, right?

So trying to say it's just a difference in taste and that's troubling, right? And then I think the other way in which it's morally troubling and you guys have both pointed to this, is that these land use regulations come on the heels of a very long history of racial covenants in the sale of homes, land use regulation that was explicitly racial in its orientation and a whole lot of evidence too that we see that for instance, when people look at schools and think about where to send their kids.

One of the first things that they go to if they want to find out what the racial composition of the school is and what you might say is, well, that's a proxy for something that is reasonable, but the more straightforward explanation is no, that's because they care about the racial composition of the school directly, straight, right?

And so we only have this paper that's putting all this front and center particularly then with some of the models, the conditioning on the wealth of the district, and you still find these effects on race.

Wioletta Dziuda:

If we believe that this race explanation is the right explanation, then clearly we should work on restricting local communities ability to pass those laws. But I want to go back to the premise of Anthony's question. The premise of Antony's question was, suppose that there's no race, suppose that we have those restrictions because people really like parks and people really like good schools, would we be against that?

And my visceral reaction is yes, I would be against that, so I was trying to think why, and I think there's more going on than just racism. Racial people are trying to sweep poor people, they are trying to avoid basically income redistribution or wealth redistribution, consumptional redistribution. And the way I think about it, we live in the country, we have some electoral system and then our representatives, they decide how much distribution we should have.

And then I think this movement to undo this redistribution on a local level, because I can build a small community and keep my goodness within this community and keep poor people outside, that's not how we should organize our conscious, we should have just one system where we decide using the medium voter, the swing voter, how much distribution we should have, and then everything else that tries to undo the system is probably not efficient.

Anthony Fowler:

No, this is a great, this is a great point, which is, should we even be talking about these zoning regulations per se? Or should we instead be talking about the broader structure of our government? How much federalism do we want? How much autonomy should local governments even have? And I think there are obvious trade-offs there, I think if you say the federal government is in charge of everything, then I mean, there's certainly downsides to that, but the better solution to all of this is to say maybe public goods should not be so controlled by your own city or town council, maybe we have never had the lead problem in Flint, Michigan if in fact there was a federal water safety board with much more authority that was overseeing all of this.

And funding for school shouldn't be determined by how many rich people live in your neighborhood and whether your potholes get, et cetera. You could have these... I think that's a really interesting discussion to have, and is that the leverage or we'd be better off focusing on these land regulations?

Wioletta Dziuda:

When I think about how should we organize our society, I have this bias, again, I'm from Poland, I grew up in a communist country and I have this strange bias towards regulation by the central government although I should have the opposite reaction, but I think there is room for planning, I think we should have plans, we should have neighborhoods where it's absolutely not legal to build a factory or polluting factories especially, or there should be neighborhoods where it's not okay to build a high rise, because it's going to block your view of Michigan. I can see a reason for having some thought out planning, but once we think about how the city should be organized, I think then that's it, I think local communities should not be able to impose restrictions, especially the restrictions that are hard to justify.

One thing is to say, I don't want to have marijuana dispensary next to a school or in an area where there are lots of families who have children. But another thing is to say, I only want houses that are two stories high. I mean, that seems like a little bit ad hoc, it's just—

William Howell:

So the story that they would, advocates of that, I mean, the race neutral story that they would say, is that we are concerned about zealous developers who are going to come in and ruin the character of our neighborhood, and we're going to have congestion problems and our roads are going to be clogged. And so it's about protecting that which makes our community special.

Sure, it's not about the two stories per se, nothing magical about that, but if you allow people to come in and build huge multi unit dwellings on small parcels of land, what comes with that are too many cars on the street, garbage that's overflowing in the alleys and the rats, we're going to start having rat problems, so there it is, right? That's what I'm standing up for. And so there's your planning, right?

Anthony Fowler:

And what you're pointing to Will, is interestingly a real dilemma for Progressives I think, because very often it is the Progressives that are pushing for those kinds of regulations that say, well, you can't tweak the neighborhood too much, because there's something really important here about the character, et cetera. And very often you end up with very progressive places like San Francisco and Boston and Seattle being just the kinds of places that implement all of these regulations in the name of some kind of progressive ideal, whether it's environmental racism or preserving history or whatever it is that...

And what are they doing they're, the property values are through the roof and nobody... only the very rich can move in and you've got, yeah, so it's kind of interesting, right? How do you grapple with those competing considerations?

William Howell:

I think that that's right, I think that this paper drives kind of a cleavage into progressive politics, conservatives can stand by and say, Look, I'm against government intrusion as a matter of principle, and I certainly don't think that we should be redistributing wealth or limiting the ability of people to take advantage of their property rights in the service of some... the provision of some public good, that's what makes me a conservative, but then you've pointed to these other places, the San Franciscos and the Bostons are where there's a whole lot of support for them, they're in the name of the things that liberals like in the name of advancing the provision of public goods and using the power of government in order to enhance, right? Our schools and our roads and that's what makes us good liberals, right? Along comes professor Trounstine and shows that these have these hugely differential effects along the lines of race.

And they propagate segregation, yeah, I think this presents a real dilemma for Progressives, if I were a conservative living in San Francisco and I wanted to open up more property to development, so that poor people could come in, I would certainly hold up this paper and say, you see it's not just about allowing poor people to live and flourish within the boundaries of San Francisco, it's also about attending to this thing that you liberals profess to care a whole lot about, which is about desegregating cities. And in fact, the policies that you're advancing are doing just the opposite.

Anthony Fowler:

I'd like to come back briefly to this question of central planning, Jessica talked about it in the interview, Viola brought it up as well. There's clearly an argument, there's an argument that I think there's a very good argument that how good your school is and how well funded it is should not be determined by whether you live in a rich neighborhood, but why are we so sure that central planning will be to more equitable outcomes? There are externalities and you do have to make decisions and you have to put the trash dump somewhere, and you have to allocate resources somewhere.

And we also know that the nationwide political process is often kind of biased in favor of those who are willing to participate the most, and those who are the most active and those who give the most money to campaigns, et cetera, and lobby and so forth. And so isn't it conceivable that even if this was all federally administered, we would still have unequal outcomes if not worse?

Wioletta Dziuda:

Well, the short answer is I'm an economist and we in all our models, we have a benevolent social planner. So the planner that maximizes the social welfare, and that's somehow—

Anthony Fowler:

Well, even maximizing social welfare in the way that most economists would advocate for or put in their models is not the most equitable in a lot of other senses, right? I mean, that's adopting one particular normative view to say, oh, well, the trash jumps should obviously go next to the people who have the lowest willingness to pay to not live next to the trash though. That's a very unequal outcome, even though it's economically efficient.

Wioletta Dziuda:

No, of course, so I envision a social planet that has the preferences that I would have for social equity and so on, but no, I think you're making a very good point. And then you say, well, but there's political economy, we don't have social planners, we have representatives and they're corrupt, or they just care about reelection, then their reelection might not go together with the provision of socially optimal solutions.

I don't know, I think it's just a little bit of a blind faith, but at least I know that there is a way to plan, there isn't a solution that's better than the current solution where rich people have great schools and poor people have bad schools, and you know what? This I guess we should strive, I don't know whether the government in the United States would be able to provide more equitable outcomes, but at least I think we should try, and I grew up in a country where education for example was provided centrally. And I grew up in a teeny tiny place in the middle of nowhere, and I got exactly the same education. Of course not exactly the same, but almost exactly the same as people in the [inaudible 00:36:44]. And I was able to go to the university and so on.

So there are examples where perhaps on average education maybe is not great, is not the best, but at least it's much more equitable and it's not bad.

William Howell:

Notice though that local land use regulation is itself a kind of central planning, it's just happening at the local level. So the argument for no central planning or sort of the argument for no regulation, that's a case for limiting these all together. The politics I think that we're unearthing here is that you can imagine, and we're observing our local residents resisting or pushing back against federal policy by enacting their own land use regulations, and a whole list of other policies as well. Which suggests that not only is there kind of a division of labor and a system of federalism, but there's all kinds of tensions that course through the system and generate all kinds of inefficiencies. And we've learned from Jessica's paper, all kinds of troubling outcomes too.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Yeah, so again I think there's a lot of reason to have decentralization and local governance, but I think historically there were racial injustice issues and redistribution issues, pitted the federal government against the local governments. And usually the federal government had the more push for the more equitable, more ethically right from 2021 perspective solutions than the local governments. And I think those land restrictions might be one example of situations like this.

Anthony Fowler:

All right, what's your bottom line? Will?

William Howell:

There are moments when you go back and you say, did I make the right decisions in life? And here I guess I'd say, am I studying the right things? And I'd love the research agenda that I've picked that I spend much of my life trying to make sense of. So I think the American presidency and separation of powers issues, but there are moments where I think, boy, there's some really interesting politics happening elsewhere. And in the last 10, 15 years in particular, there've been a group of younger scholars, they've mostly been women who have gone in and unearthed all kinds of really interesting findings and pulled back the curtain on some really important politics.

And Jessica Trounstine is among the very best in this group, in this paper is kind of emblematic I think of her work and there are these big, interesting open questions we have yet to get a handle on. I mean, we were struggling with over the course of our conversation. She herself said, we have so much more to learn that's of course, true, but along the way we are learning, and I learned a lot from this paper.

Anthony Fowler:

That's really high praise by the way. Sometimes every once in a while we say like, oh man, that's a great paper, I wish I had thought to write that paper, but Will went one step further and said, he wished he could go back and start off on a whole new research Agenda, and made different life decisions in his twenties.

Wioletta Dziuda:

So I completely agree with Will, I think it's great that Jessica is working on this issue, I think it's great that she's talking about those issues publicly, she has a book, given what she finds in her research and what other people have found and have some historical accounts, I think it's great that we have this information. And hopefully this is going to lead to some change. And we all know the country has been struggling with racism and institutional racism and so on, and this is just a teeny, teeny tiny part of that, but I think the more we talk about those teeny tiny parts, the more progress we make.

Anthony Fowler:

I agree with everything that's been said. And yeah, I think this is fascinating, I think this is something that, I mean, Will's comment points out that this is not the kind of thing that most political scientists, if you take kind of your introductory seminars in graduate school, it's not the kind of topic that you get a lot of exposure to, but it probably should be to be honest, we probably should be thinking about these kinds of issues more than we more than we do, and I think it's great that Jessica has done this work and and kind of quantified the extent to which these kinds of regulations are having these important impacts.

So I like the paper a lot, I liked the topic a lot and I'm eager to see where the research agenda goes, and I'm also eager to see what kinds of political and policy impacts there are of this kind of research.

William Howell:

Thanks for listening to Not Another Politics Podcast.

Wioletta Dziuda:

Our show is a podcast from the Harris school of Public policy, and it's produced by Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.