More than Red Lines: 1930s Zoning and the Persistence of Racially Concentrated Affluence

Scott Markley, National Zoning Atlas
Saatvik Amravathi, Cornell University

Abstract to be added. Scholars have long recognized the salient role of residential segregation in reproducing racial wealth inequality over time. However, analyses into segregation’s influence on racial wealth inequality—and concomitant policy proposals—have overwhelmingly focused on only one side of the segregation coin: concentrated poverty and disinvestment in Black- and Hispanic-majority neighborhoods. Yet, as Goetz and colleagues (2019; 2020) point out, these racially concentrated areas of poverty cannot exist without their opposite: racially concentrated areas of affluence. In this study, we shift our attention to the latter to shed new light on how the mutually constituted geographies of racial inequality have taken shape over the past eighty years. Combining harmonized historical census tract data, Tabulated Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Area Description Sheets (THOLCADS), and National Zoning Atlas (NZA) data, we examine the extent to which local zoning rules adopted in the early-to-mid twentieth century have maintained affluent white exclusivity and residential segregation over time.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 128. Spatializing Race