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Ep. 121: Exclusionary Zoning and the Great Migration with Alexander Sahn

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Why is exclusionary zoning, which restricts land to expensive single-family houses, so commonplace in the US compared to other countries? Alexander Sahn shares strong evidence that local responses to a wave of migration by Southern Blacks in the middle of the 20th century played a big role.

Read about the Lewis Center's work at lewis.ucla.edu.

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Email Shane at at shanephillips@ucla.edu and follow him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Show notes:

Shane Phillips 00:00:06
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. 

This week we're talking to Alexander Sahn about how northern cities reduced land zoned for multifamily housing and expanded exclusionary zoning in response to increasing in-migration by Black Americans coming from the South during the Great Migration. 

The effects that he measures in his research are large, both in the amount of restrictive zoning that we can attribute to people pulling up the drawbridge during that era, and in the back of the envelope estimate of the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of multifamily homes that we didn't build in the decades that followed because of those changes. 

Beyond those headline results, which you'll hear about more in the episode, this conversation helped me to see some of our modern debates and battles over housing in a little bit of a different light. This is also one of those episodes that serves as a history lesson, which I always love to bring on the podcast and always learn a lot from myself. I hope you appreciate them too. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Brett Berndt and Tiffany Lieu. You can reach me by email at shanephillips@ucla.edu, and our Substack is at uclahousingvoice.substack.com, where every other week we publish an overview of research reports, articles and other things that we've been reading and listening to. 

Last week's reading list includes a really interesting study that estimates the greenhouse gas emissions involved in producing the materials that go into new housing. To my mind, it pretty much puts to bed the idea that we should be all that concerned with what are known as embodied emissions. But definitely give that summary a look and decide for yourself. We'll keep finding interesting and informative work to share with you all, both here and in the newsletter. 

With that, let's get to our conversation with Alexander Sahn. 

Alexander Sahn is an assistant professor of political science and the Thomas J. Pearsall Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he's with us to talk about the relationship between exclusionary zoning and the Great Migration. Alexander, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.

Alexander Sahn 00:02:41
Thanks, Shane. Thanks, Mike, Great to be here.

Shane Phillips 00:02:42
And you heard that right, my co-host today is Mike Lens yet again. We are making up for lost time, Mike. How's it going?

Mike Lens 00:02:51
It's my summer of podcasting. Couldn't be better.

Shane Phillips 00:02:54
So, Alexander, as you know, we always start by asking our guests for a tour of somewhere they know and love and want to share. I will note that after hearing our last episode, one of our listeners, Jim Gleeson, posted on blue sky that he suddenly felt the uncontrollable urge to take a trip to Milwaukee. I think he's based in London, perhaps, so, a big deal. You've got some big shoes to fill. Where are you going to take us?

Alexander Sahn 00:03:18
I'll tell you a little bit about my hometown, which is Ithaca, New York. Very difficult to get to but definitely worth the trip, particularly this time of year. So Ithaca is a small college town on the tip of Cayuga Lake, which is the largest of the kind of five Finger Lakes in upstate New York. It's a very unique place topographically. So during the last ice age there was a big deposit of kind of glacial material. And so the Finger Lakes area is characterized by the super soft shale rock, and so streams cut these really deep gorges. Hence the bumper sticker that you may have seen, Ithaca is gorgeous. So there's just kind of these waterfalls all over town, And so you know if you're going to visit you can start walking. There's three hills around Cayuga Lake and Ithaca College University is located on South Hill, Cornell University is located on the East Hill And you can kind of walk directly from Cornell's campus, which I think is the most beautiful college campus in the country, all the way to the downtown along the Cascadilla Gorge. It's these cascading waterfalls and pools, ferns kind of growing out of the shale, And then you get downtown and Ithaca is one of these downtowns that put in a big pedestrian mall, I think in the 70s and, unlike a lot of other places, kept it. So the Ethic of Commons is this kind of nice pedestrian promenade with shops, cafes and old pavilions where people play live music. And the downtown in the last probably 20, 30 years has added a ton of high-density housing, kind of YIMBY. Before the movement really started under the previous mayor, Svante Myrick, and longtime planning director just rezoned a ton of land downtown town And so it's kind of become this really nice you know live, work neighborhood, A lot of people kind of walking around, And if you kind of keep walking from the downtown towards the inlet of Keuka Lake, one of the main draws of Ithaca, if you're there on the weekend or even on the weekday, is going to the farmer's market, which is this kind of beautiful wooden pavilion right on the lake. People kind of come up and dock their boats there. Upstate New York's a big agricultural cultural region. This time of year things are actually growing And so it's a nice place to go hang out kind of soak in the Ithaca College chum vibes.

Shane Phillips 00:05:38
I'm looking at a map of the area right now, and I had heard of the Finger Lakes, but I don't think I'd ever really like looked at them from a map. And I'm wondering, when you were first talking about this area, if the topography has anything in common with like where State College Pennsylvania is at. Is there any kind of relationship there? Obviously they're not that far away from each other, but there's a very distinct kind of topography there of like the long narrow hills.

Alexander Sahn 00:06:04
Those ridge valleys that characterize the Appalachians are super unique.

Shane Phillips 00:06:10
Seems like the Finger Lakes are almost the inversion of that.

Alexander Sahn 00:06:13
So the Finger Lakes area, I think, is like distinctly outside of the Appalachian Mountains. And so it's rolling hills, but I think not the kind of mountainous terrain that you get in central PA.

Shane Phillips 00:06:27
Gotcha. So today we are talking about an article in the Journal of Politics titled "Racial Diversity and Exclusionary Zoning: Evidence from the Great Migration," and I should note that this actually came to my attention because it was cited by Matt Mleczko in his paper that we talked about in our previous episode. You guys overlapped at Princeton, as I understand it. So there's an important lesson there to always cite your friends and colleagues. 

Mike Lens 00:06:51
Always.

Shane Phillips 00:06:51
But the timing on this was really good because we just did three book club episodes on Yoni Applebaum's book, Stuck, and the Great Migration came up a few times in the book and in our discussions. And in the course of those conversations my co-host, stan, convinced me to pick up a copy of The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which is now on my bookshelf, though I have yet to actually read it. Maybe we can think about this interview as my prep for that 600-and-something page book.

Mike Lens 00:07:21
It's so good.

Shane Phillips 00:07:22
I am looking forward to it. Anyway, Alexander's research documents how, as Black Americans left the South as part of the Great Migration or the second Great Migration, technically northern cities responded by reducing the amount of land zoned for multifamily housing and thus the kinds of housing most likely to be within the financial reach of those same Black Americans. One part of our book club interviews that's stuck with me was Giselle Hale's comment on how the exclusionary zoning policies that started cropping up more than a century ago were so indisputably targeted at poor people and at people of color. Whatever rationale people want to use to defend those same policies today, I think there's no real question that was fundamental to their origin. This research is further evidence of that intent And, with this focus on black migration stretching from 1940 to 1970, Alexander is showing that the racist intent tent here was not just a problem of the early 20 th century when zoning originated. His main finding is that a one percentage point increase in the black population over this period, above expectations, was associated with a nearly one percentage point reduction in the share of residential land zoned for multifamily housing, which is pretty astonishing when you consider that the median U.S city only allows multifamily development on about 13% of its land. So, Alexander, Alexander, I think the best place to start is with a bit of background on the Great Migration. It's something that I'm sure nearly every American has at least heard of in elementary school history, perhaps.

Mike Lens 00:08:54
I dispute that. I think there's a lot of Americans that have zero idea.

Shane Phillips 00:09:00
Well, you might be right. I think they've heard of it. Whether they know anything about it or remember anything about it may be an entirely different story.

Mike Lens 00:09:07
I fear there's a growing number of Americans who are not allowed to learn this. But you know that's a whole other conversation.

Shane Phillips 00:09:13
Yes, fair point. We won't ask Alexander to comment on that. I'm not sure what his restrictions are there in North Carolina.

Mike Lens 00:09:23
Now we're really getting into it.

Shane Phillips 00:09:23
But in any case, I think, whether people have heard of it or not, I think those of us who know at least a little bit about it know that it was a time of unprecedented migration from the rural South to the urban North and Midwest and West, especially by black Americans. But, Alexander, what else should we know about that time in our history?

Alexander Sahn 00:09:48
So I think there's kind of three overlapping trends that inform what's going on in my paper that are kind of occurring in this time period between 1940 and 1970, kind of the post-war mid-century period. So of course the Great Migration as you cited. Isabel Wilkerson's book is just a fantastic history of this period. But the kind of basic bullet points are from the country's founding until roughly 1910, basically less than 10% of the Black population of the United States lives outside the US South. Obviously this is tied to slavery and the kind of economic system that follows after the Civil War. Then we see this kind of massive movement between roughly 1910 and 1970.. In 1970, nearly half of the Black population of the United States is living outside of the South. So they've moved to mostly cities in the Northeast, in the Midwest and out West And this is the largest internal migration in US history. Around 6,000,000 people move during this pretty short period of time. And it's also important to note that not only are people moving regions, they're also kind of moving types of places where they're living. So people are primarily leaving rural areas in the South, where they are working in agriculture as the sharecroppers, to urban areas in these other regions of the country where they're primarily working in kind of industrial manufacturing jobs, And the reasons for moving, I'm sure you can guess, are largely around kind of political and economic opportunity, Obviously prior to civil rights legislation in the 1960 s. Black Americans are politically disenfranchised in the South. They're discriminated against in kind of all manner of speaking, And economic opportunity is obviously obviously tied to this as well. They're not allowed to access you know, kind of high paying, good jobs. But also the South just doesn't have as much economic opportunity during this time period. It's slower to industrialize, And particularly, you know, in the 1940 s as the war effort ramps up and there's tons of manufacturing in places like Detroit or Los Angeles to build the kind of machinery to fight World War Two. There's just many, many jobs available. And so people leave the South, not just Black Americans, also white sunners, to kind of take advantage of this. And so there's, you know, kind of a lot of scholarship besides the Isabel Wilkerson book, The Warrants of Other Suns. But this kind of existing scholarship focuses largely on three kind of areas. So the first is the reactions of white residents of cities in the Northeast and the Midwest, to the arrival of these Black families, And so this is kind of where my paper fits in. But there's a great book by the economist Leo Bustan who kind of looks at how labor markets react and in particular looking at how white residents of these cities leave in response to Black families arriving. So you know what we would call white flight, The kind of. And a second bucket of scholarship on this is how Black families who arrived in these cities actually fared once they arrived, Were they able to actually take advantage of these kind of good labor markets and the opportunities that came with them. And here there's a really great paper by the economist Laura Durenancourt basically shows that while you know kind of opportunity was there when these Black families arrived, that it was kind of fleeting and that actually cities disinvested and kind of fell on hard times in exactly these same places where people moved to. And then the kind of third bucket of scholarship looks at how politics was reshaped by the kind of new coalitions that formed that incorporated Black Americans largely into kind of city politics. And so here there's a great book by political scientist Kenesha Grant who kind of looks at when Black voters are able to become pivotal parts of the largely Democratic coalitions that govern cities during this time. So that's kind of the overview on the Great Migration. There's kind of two other things that are moving during this time period that I wanted to mention. The first is the end of de jure segregation. So basically throughout the history of housing markets up until largely this point it is legal and widely practiced to discriminate on the basis of race and who you rent or sell a house to. But during this time period again, roughly from 1940 to 1970, 1970, legislation and court decisions are kind of chipping away at the ability for private actors to segregate on the basis of race or ethnicity. So restrictive covenants, which are kind of clauses in the deed of a land parcel that restrict who you can sell houses to, These are prominently restricting people's ability to sell to not just Black Americans but often to Catholics or to Jews. These are deemed unenforceable by court order in 1948.. Lending discrimination, so the ability for banks to kind of deny loans to people on the basis of their race and to deny loans to certain areas of cities. So we can think about these kind of famous redlining maps where different areas are graded for different credit worthiness on the basis of the racial, racial composition of the area. This is outlawed in 1968 through civil rights legislation, And then renting discrimination is kind of outlawed at the state level throughout the 1960 s. So for instance in California, the state passes the California Fair Housing Act in 1963.. In response there's a ballot proposition, Prop 14, which is voted on in 1964, which basically enshrines California's right to racially discriminate. And this passes in the state, but it was struck down two years later by the Supreme Court. And so the kind of sum of all these changes is that these kind of private coordination mechanisms which allow neighbors to get together, allow developers to maintain the homogeneity of neighborhoods, these are all kind of going away. And so what do people do when you know kind of coordination mechanisms go away, They turn to government. Government solves these kind of collective action problems. And so proponents of segregation basically are, I argue, demanding these kind of race-blind policies that are going to maintain the existing status quo of racial segregation. And so this is kind of where exclusionary zoning comes in.

Shane Phillips 00:16:18
And you have a short part of your paper that we don't really need to get into but just to share it here, where you actually look at the earlier wave of the Great Migration of black Americans and there was no association between more black population growth and the adoption of zoning codes. So at that time there was not really this drive to adopt zoning which you kind of you argue. That's evidence that because you had this de jure segregation available to you didn't have to go to the trouble of adopting a zoning code to do it indirectly.

Mike Lens 00:16:53
There were other mechanisms that you could have. Yeah.

Alexander Sahn 00:16:56
That's exactly right. So there was basically kind of no need for zoning on the part of the segregationists in the 1910 s and 1920 s because these other ways to maintain the homogeneity of neighborhoods existed. But by 1970, that's no longer the case And I think the last thing I'd point to that's changing during this time that's important and that facilitates the rise of exclusionary zoning is this large growth in the kind of urban planning bureaucracy in cities and the capacity of government to actually lay out these comprehensive zoning plans and tailor them to kind of specific neighborhoods neighborhoods. So there's a lot of historians and urban planners who are in on this. But basically, kind of in the beginning of the 20 th century there's this large new function of municipal governments which is to comprehensively regulate land use, both kind of within and outside of its boundaries, And this comes with a huge growth in internal staff. So we see cities hiring a lot of people for their urban planning departments. For the first time in the 20 s, 30 s, 40 s There's a lot of outsourcing of kind of private consultants to write these kind of initial waves of zoning codes which are being implemented in the 1910 s and 1920 s. But I think what really kind of turbocharges this is: the federal government takes an interest in this, particularly in the 1940 s. So the 1940 census is the first time when there's a census of housing separately from the census population, And this kind of reveals that large swaths of American cities have what was you know was called at the time, or what we consider today to be substandard housing. These are homes without you know working plumbing or electricity, that are kind of in dilapidated condition, And so there's large grants from the federal government to municipalities to kind of prepare these plans for post-war development. So there's, you know, a big freeze on housing construction during World War II. Building materials are directed towards the war effort But as that's kind of winding down, cities are looking to do these kind of big transformative, formative plans to kind of renew their city downtown cores and the kind of housing that's proximate to it, And this kind of sets the stage for urban renewal and these kind of large post-war work projects. And so I argue that you know, this capacity within cities to know where people live, to know the quality of housing and to be able to draw these comprehensive zoning maps is also key to the explosion in exclusionary zoning that we see following World War II.

Mike Lens 00:19:21
That all makes sense And that's an amazing summary plus a good reading list. I think if you were listening to some of the recommendations in there, it strikes me that there's like a lot of things that had to kind of come together to create the conditions for something like exclusionary zoning to have this impact, or for people to latch on to exclusionary zoning as, like this replacement for various forms of private discrimination, which you know. Really the collective action problem was always there, I think, with some of these more private forms, even to the extent that people created, you know, entire subdivisions and small towns of like with, you know, racial covenants. You know binding, like that's, that's still like, that's still a challenging, you know, collective action problem that a more robust planning regime can help solve. So, to spend a little bit more time on the motivation for this study- you know Shane talked about this research being, you know, additional evidence of, or further evidence of, racial intent behind exclusionary zoning. What are some of the things that previous researchers and scholars have found on the connection between exclusionary zoning and race?

Alexander Sahn 00:20:35
So there's a lot of kind of fantastic historical work that looks at kind of single city case studies that you know very kind of convincingly makes the argument that race and kind of zoning are intrinsically tied together. So some kind of examples of this: you know- and I believe it's Atlanta- there is explicit black and white zones that are kind of laid out in the initial zoning ordinance. This is struck down by a court saying: you know, you can't explicitly zone on the basis it's a race And they just keep the same borders and the same districts and they rename it. You know R 1 and R 2 zoning, So low and high density zoning. We see that kind of in the adoption of initial zoning codes, So in Chicago for instance, that areas with Black populations are zoned for higher densities than areas with kind of European immigrant populations. And we also see that areas where Black families live, are also more likely to be zoned for industrial and non-residential uses. So one of the kind of early arguments for zoning along public health lines is it's really important to separate homes from industrial uses to kind of preserve the health of people who live nearby factories that are polluting the air, polluting the water, And so if we're kind of taking that at face value. There is some disparate impact of zoning on Black populations in cities over kind of similar white immigrant neighborhoods, And there's also, again in these kind of urban history accounts, anecdotal evidence of downzonings in response to Black population growth where, when Black families arrived in the Great Migration to, for instance, Detroit, we see outright racial hostility, kind of riots preventing people from moving into certain neighborhoods, but then also the immediate kind of downzoning nearby, nearby. So what I tried to kind of build off of in my study is this observation that most places in the United States today have high levels of exclusionary zoning. Most places in the United States, at least kind of the large urban areas I'm focusing on, have a fair degree of racial diversity, And so what I'm trying to do is set up kind of an empirical test to look at places that have kind of more racial diversity than we would have expected, given a set of factors that I'll go into. I think a little bit later that these places should have kind of more exclusionary zoning, more of a backlash, than places that have less Black population growth during this time period. And instead of kind of looking at this on a case-by-case basis, I tried to look at this across over 100 central cities in the northern United States. So kind of looking at this a little more systematically. And the Great Migration in particular allows this comparison in a really neat way, because we can compare across places with different levels of population growth due to the Great Migration holding constant the same time, the same context, the same source of migrations. And so I would say, like you know, this is not really like a policy evaluation where we're testing the effect of something to try to like replicate it. There's, There's probably never going to be a domestic migration in the United States this scale again, But instead we can kind of use it to connect to like theoretical questions and social science about how people react to changing demographics and whether that kind of fosters cooperation or fosters conflict.

Shane Phillips 00:24:07
I mean it seems very relevant to the debates we're having over immigration. For example- And I mean this is something that I've heard come up a lot of times- is like: is a community that experiences a lot of migration from, say, Mexico or Central America, more or less likely to be supporters of immigration? And I think the answer to that is not obvious actually, because there's a kind of acculturation side to it where maybe by being close to these people you gain some empathy, but there's also a you know and the downsides that come with being exposed to new people, or just more people, and maybe the focus is on the downside. So I think there's certainly lessons for this today as well, to say nothing of just like it's good to know what happened in the past. So you make a point early in the paper that zoning has been around since at least 1916, when the first comprehensive zoning code was adopted, but that exclusionary residential residential zoning is newer. You have some really striking statistics about L.A and Chicago that I'll relate here, And I don't think L.A and Chicago are unique in this. They're just the ones that you pulled out and maybe the ones we had where data was really available for them. But starting with L.A in 1933, the city had zoning, but only 4.8 percent of land was exclusionary residential zoning, which I think you're just defining as prohibiting multifamily housing or restricting to single family only. And today, from 4.8 % in 1933, today it's nearly three quarters of the city's land. Chicago, just 2.9 % of land was exclusionary residential, compared to almost 80% today. I think that most of us nerds out there who have ever given any thought to exclusionary zoning as a concept tend to think of it as basically synonymous with exclusionary residential zoning or just with single family zoning more specifically. That may be close enough to the truth today, but it has not always been that way And that seems important to me in some way. So could you talk about that history a bit and why you thought this was even a point worth making in the paper?

Alexander Sahn 00:26:13
Definitely. So I think it's important to be clear about the definition. So this is both a paper about racial exclusion in the sense of discriminating against people on the basis of their race, but it's also a paper about exclusionary zoning, which doesn't really have anything to do with the identity of people who are occupying homes. The exclusion is of uses.

Shane Phillips 00:26:32
Not directly.

Alexander Sahn 00:26:33
Exactly On paper. It is a regulation, basically, that restricts uses that are not single family residential. So basically, you own a lot of land and the zoning code dictates what you can use that land for, And so what I find in the course of collecting data across large central cities in the United States in the early 2020 s is that a large swath of the residential land- places where people can build homes and live- are set aside exclusively for the construction of single family homes. And you know, this is probably something that listeners of the show or people more generally would expect, but we really hadn't been able to kind of put an actual number on it, And the reason that this is the case is it's just like extraordinarily difficult to compile and harmonize sources of data on zoning. So I spent a lot of time with some research assistants gathering current zoning maps from over 100 cities, But for each city there's dozens of zoning districts. They're all different, So an R 2 zone in Denver is not the same as an R 2 zone in Omaha Omaha, So you actually have to go and kind of match the individual zone to what is allowed in the municipal ordinance And basically, when we kind of sum up the districts that allow multifamily housing as a share of the districts that allow any type of residential, so single family or multifamily housing. I find that across large non-southern U.S cities only 13% of this residential land allows multifamily housing to be built. And I define exclusionary zoning as you know kind of this use restriction. But there's a lot of other things that we could think prevent the construction of you know kind of dense, affordable housing. So one you know kind of prominent example that would come to mind would be minimum lot sizes, So you could allow a duplex or you know kind of four units to be built on a piece of land, but you could require that this piece of land be really, really large and therefore increasing the land cost of actually putting housing there. And so I would just mention that there's a paper by Tom Quee, who's an economist, who kind of basically looks at a similar design that I do, looking at the effect of great migration but looking at minimum lot sizes in cities, And he finds largely the same thing: that places with more black population growth due to the Great Migration have larger minimum lot sizes, make it more expensive to kind of assemble and build on land.

Shane Phillips 00:29:14
And I think the point about minimum lot sizes is just interesting in its own right as well, because compare that to somewhere like Houston, putting aside the fact that Houston does not have zoning. If it did, its minimum lot size of 1,400 square feet in much of the city is: you know what you're building on? That is a single family home, It's a townhouse, It's you know like noticeably different in form from a single family home, but it is legally a single family home. You can buy it, fee, simple, etc. And so clearly not all single family zoning even is created equal. There's a very big difference, especially in a place where land values are pretty high, between a single family home on 1400 or 1600 square feet of land versus one where you can't build one on less than half an acre or more.

Mike Lens 00:30:01
I think another thing that comes to mind there is just the diversity of tools that you know cities use to shape the—

Shane Phillips 00:30:08
The Hydra. 

Mike Lens 00:30:09
OK, all right, I wasn't going to talk about the hydra, but here it is. You know, you chop the head off the hydra and it grows three more. So if you get rid of minimum lot sizes somehow, or you get rid of single family zoning, if you get, if you take any one tool away from a city, they'll find other ways to exclude types of housing or types of people as an extension that they might want to exclude.

Shane Phillips 00:30:32
We'll do minimum floor area, or we'll put a cap on heights, or yeah.

Mike Lens 00:30:34
And that creates additional measurement challenges for somebody like Alexander that did all this heroic work. There's other ways that cities could be exclusive. That's just kind of impossible to fully document and measure in any one paper. But undoubtedly your measure gets at things that are super, super important and kind of the top of mind things that a city would try to do.

Alexander Sahn 00:31:05
And I think as we look over time the whack-a-mole has led cities to kind of get more and more sophisticated. So these kind of early second wave, let's say zoning codes in the 50 s, 60 s, they aren't as complex, They don't have as many districts, And so I think the complexity that's accrued over time is largely finding kind of new ways to be creative about maintaining these exclusive districts. One other thing I would note is I focus in this paper on central cities. So these are kind of the core city in a labor market as defined by kind of where people commute to jobs. So you know, we can think of a region, let's say, having one central city like Boston, at the center of kind of this larger area. And I think focusing on the central city is important. Important because these are the places where we would expect multifamily housing to both exist before zoning and to be built after zoning. These today are the areas with some of the biggest housing shortages and high cost problems And these are also places that are typically more racially diverse. And so if we think about urban versus suburban municipalities, a lot of the suburban municipalities that are also created during the same time, largely to house white flight that is leaving the central cities. These places, probably from the get-go, had uniformly single-family homes. They were largely built by developers who kind of platted out the entire city and built everything in a kind of uniform manner And their first zoning codes didn't allow any multifamily development from the get-go. And I think this is, you know, well-illustrated. There's this new paper from the economist Gallagher, Schertz and Twinham who look at initial zoning, zoning codes in the 1920 s in Chicago and in kind of surrounding suburban municipalities in Chicago, And the finding that they have is that Chicago, the municipality, zones only 4% of land for single family homes in, I think, 1923 when the first zoning ordinance is adopted, But the surrounding suburbs zone 85% of their land for single family homes, And so there's just not a lot to explain. In these suburban municipalities They were kind of built like this in the beginning, And so from my perspective the puzzle is like: why does Chicago go from looking, you know, very different in 1920, where a lot of multifamily housing could potentially have been built, to very restrictive of this today? And so that kind of motivates this focus on the central cities, the places where we would expect to see looser zoning, zoning that allows for denser multifamily housing.

Shane Phillips 00:33:49
And coming back to the underpinnings of this study a little bit, you make a really interesting point that I think is going to stick with me about how dominant groups can deprive, or the means by which they can deprive, minority groups of public goods and services. That I just want to mention here quickly and you're welcome to add to. But one way to deprive minority groups, whoever they might be, of public goods is to create new jurisdictions. Just, you know, move away and wall yourselves off, And we saw a lot of that over this time period in the form of suburbanization and white flight. Another is spending less money on those public goods and services, sort of cutting off your nose to spite your face. You know your kids or schools are worse, but at least the new black or Latino or whatever migrants you know are not benefiting from it either. It's a sort of drained pool idea a little bit. But a third option is zoning, which allows you to segregate your population within your city's boundaries and that makes it fairly easy for the dominant group to target public goods to the dominant group and restrict them where this disfavored minority is segregated to, and it means that the people who belong to that dominant group don't have to move, unlike in the first option. So you know this is something that's unquestionably morally repugnant, but kind of I got to hand it to him that it's a pretty brilliant innovation in opportunity and resource hoarding.

Alexander Sahn 00:35:17
I think that's spot on. I would just add that a lot of the services that local governments provide, in particular, as opposed to, like you know, the federal government, which is providing national defense and welfare spending, a lot of the services provided by local governments, particularly in the United States, are really easy to kind of target spatially. So you think about schools, which have a catchment district. You think about public safety, where you have different police beats and precincts. You think about, you know, parks, roads, this physical infrastructure that you're more likely to use if you live right nearby, And so where you live really determines what quality services you get. And, as you know, the kind of traditional way to resource forward is to just draw a border and say, you know, municipality A, we're going to have high taxes, we're going to have great parks, we're going to have effective public safety, And municipality B, we're going to have lower taxes. And so, you know, economists have this idea that people are like rationally sorting across these lines to pick the bundle of goods and services that they want. But it also leads to areas within larger regions that are able to kind of capture a lot of the wealth that is generated by a larger labor market. So a suburban jurisdiction, you know that doesn't necessarily need to provide the infrastructure for commuters to get to downtown, to go to jobs. But, as you know, you can also do this, you know, within in a jurisdiction, by again just drawing some lines using zoning, making sure that some neighborhoods are homogeneously single-family, home, harder to buy into, more expensive, And while there's definitely some redistribution across the city line, a lot of these kind of spatially targeted things like parks, like roads, like public safety, are easy to kind of hoard in certain neighborhoods over others. And I'll just note that, like compared to other countries, the U.S federal system allows a lot of this in ways that other countries do not Like. The U.S is just very decentralized And you know you think about education, law enforcement, a lot of other countries. This is provided by the federal government. Funding is equalized across districts And in the U.S it's really just dependent on local preferences and local tax base And so we just see these really different outcomes even in areas that are right next to each other in ways where you go to kind of other other pure countries, you don't see this like stark gradient as much.

Mike Lens 00:37:44
So we've shown our listeners that you are very adept at describing and discussing several complicated histories and complicated facets of urban governance, but you have a study to tell us about as well, So let's talk about that.

Shane Phillips 00:38:00
We usually take about half an hour to actually get to the study itself, I think.

Mike Lens 00:38:10
We are right on time. So let's talk about how you measure the numbers and the facets of the Great Migration or in-migration and exclusionary zoning. A basic version of this study would just look at where black population growth was greater and lesser over that time period, But you went into this understanding that it's more complicated than that and there are things that we have to control for, And I'm sure you'll use a phrase like exogenous variation that we'll have to describe for our listeners.

Mike Lens 00:38:42
But so let's talk about how you tried to isolate the impact of this in-migration from city to city and the variation in that in-migration to an outcome as complicated as exclusionary zoning.

Alexander Sahn 00:38:57
I promise not to use the word exogenous.

Mike Lens 00:39:00
All right, I did, sorry.

Alexander Sahn 00:39:01
Here's my best shot. Yeah, as you noted like the logical way to start would just be to look at places that had more Black population growth, that became more racially diverse between 1940 and 1970, and kind of look at whether places that had more of this population growth have more exclusionary zoning. The thing that we would worry about doing that is that there is some relation between places that attract a lot, lot of migrants and places that are more likely to adopt exclusionary zoning. So we could tell a story where we have places with these really vibrant labor markets that people want to move to because there's good jobs, that also have kind of more planning capacity to exclusionary zone, that have, you know, kind of richer people who want to maintain the kind of economic and racial homogeneity of their neighborhoods. And so what I try to do in the paper is kind of find a way to look at the level of migration that we would predict, given factors that are all measured pre-1940, that don't plausibly relate to changes in zoning after 1940 and that are kind of unrelated to the political dynamics that lead to changes in zoning. And so I used this measure of predicted Black population growth that was developed by the economist Leah Boustan, who I talked about in an earlier answer.

Shane Phillips 00:40:27
Former guest.

Alexander Sahn 00:40:28
And that was built upon or refined by Ellora Derenencourt. And so to kind of give you just the brief overview of how it works, we kind of leverage two things. One is the pre-existing population flows. We know that people tend to move from a place to a new place if there are people from their original hometown that have already kind of made the move. Right, You think about this logically, it makes a lot of sense. You know someone who's already in Chicago, You know that you have a couch to crash on, They might be able to help you find a job, And so you're going to go there instead of going to St Louis where you don't know anyone. And so we see this across extended families, across social networks, that people tend to move to new places, conditional on prior levels of migration. And then the other thing that we interact with is kind of shocks, economic shocks that push people out. So we have a bunch of data on the kind of economic condition of various counties in the South prior to 1940. So, you know, one example of this is we have some data on the kind of agricultural suitability of different crops. Different crops mechanize at different times, meaning that the local labor conditions change and you know, let's say, counties that are growing tobacco versus counties that are growing cotton And, as a result, the economic, you know kind of motivation to move happens in different decades, And so basically it's kind of a lot of complex statistics and data work to try to get a measure of when people are going to move to different cities at different times in ways that are kind of unrelated to politics and unrelated to zoning.

Mike Lens 00:42:08
And a part of that is in addition to these family networks and social networks that influence your kind of origin and destination connections. There were transportation networks, right, There were rail lines, where you know that really kind of helped usher people along from particular origins to particular destinations. You know, you can just look at these origin and destination nation numbers. It's very clear.

Shane Phillips 00:42:33
Mike, was that true even in the second migration? I mean, it seems like it would definitely need to be true during the first wave because that's before mass adoption of the car. But once we're getting into the 1940 s, a little bit of a different story.

Mike Lens 00:42:43
It was like. You know, because so like, if you, if you ask a typical black Angeleno, of which there are fewer left than there used to be, but you know, most of their families came from Texas and Louisiana, like, and that's all the latter part, you know, obviously, like that's or not, obviously, but a lot of that is, you know, people moving via car, right, It's not just a rail migration, immigration. So yeah, I think that held from the 1940 s onward. My grandparents moved from Mississippi to Chicago. That was an extremely common trajectory. Sure, some of that was social networks, but some of that was just the relative ease of getting from point A to point B.

Shane Phillips 00:43:30
In that case on a train. 

Mike Lens 00:43:31
You know? I don't know, but I bet it was. I don't picture my grandparents having any access to an automobile in 1942 or whatever that was.

Shane Phillips 00:43:43
And I mean it's very much a side point, but, like, mass adoption of the vehicle was took place over many decades, mostly post-war, And you would imagine that it came for the rural black Southerners among the last.

Alexander Sahn 00:44:00
I don't actually remember if this is even in the final version of the paper, but at some point during this project I did download all the kind of rail timetables in the 1940 s And you do see that places that are connected directly by rail- so you know a county in Mississippi being connected to Chicago more likely to see movement to Chicago than St Louis- You know we actually see like rail lines tend to not cross the Mississippi River And so, as a result, even places that are really close by will have very different migration patterns. And so even if people are going by rail in the 1910 s and 1920 s, this then kind of creates this feedback loop where once the car comes around, even if the rail link doesn't matter anymore. You just know a lot of people who are living in the city. And you know we also see people in Chicago in places that have, you know, kind of black newspapers where there's kind of not recruitment but like they're telling people in the South, sending them newspapers saying like life is good in Chicago, you can get a good job, you can get a good house. You know kind of come, move here. And so this is all just kind of reinforcing this prior pattern of migration that's established.

Mike Lens 00:45:15
It turns out, many of those headlines were overselling the situation. But that's another story.

Shane Phillips 00:45:21
All right, so onward to the results. I shared that your headline finding is that a one percentage point increase in the black population above your predicted growth rate was associated with nearly one percentage point less residential land zoned for multifamily. So fill out that result for us. How should we interpret it? Is it a lot, is it a little? Hard to say? What do you think?

Alexander Sahn 00:45:44
So basically what I find is that areas that had more Black population growth, where the population became more racially diverse, cities responded by downzoning, by allowing multifamily housing to be built on less land. And the magnitude of this effect- kind of one percentage point of the residential land moving in response to a one percentage point growth in the Black population. This may seem small, but I think it's important to remember this kind of headline number, that 13 percentage points of the residential land allows multifamily housing to be built today. So when that is kind of the denominator, this one percentage point effect actually is pretty meaningful. It probably doesn't explain why all cities became so much more restrictive over this kind of longer time period.

Shane Phillips 00:46:34
Like Chicago, going from 4% exclusionary residential zoning to 80%, you almost couldn't have that level of black population growth to explain all of that.

Alexander Sahn 00:46:45
Exactly. But you know, in places which are experiencing you know 10 plus percentage points by population growth, you know the predicted change there as a result is going to be quite large. And so you know. I do think it points to part of why U.S cities today are so exclusionarily zoned, And I think it also kind of helps explain the difference between the U.S and other countries that allow just so much more multifamily housing to be built in cities, who didn't have the kind of tensions that come with having people of different races and ethnicities in the same city. You know, at the same time period that the U.S did.

Shane Phillips 00:47:27
Can you say a little bit more about that? Because I do think that point is really important And I think a lot of times exclusionary zoning sort of just gets pinned on automobility, just the time at which American cities- many of them- grew when cars were available and that we need to make sure there's room for them, to park them, to drive them, etc. That's going to shape how we design our cities and it's going to require us to spread things out. I don't think there's really much question that there is some truth to that. That played a role, But what do you think about that in relationship to this other explanation and what that says about other countries as well? Well, because I don't know, like, on the one hand, in many other countries, many of their cities did grow up well before the car. On the other hand, it seems like they very easily could have adopted more single family zoning, more exclusionary zoning to try to better accommodate the car, And that pressure just didn't seem to exist in the same way. Very ambiguous question here. That wasn't on our list at all, But this difference between the US and other countries and how much, much more exclusionary zoning we have, it does seem worth spending a little more time on.

Alexander Sahn 00:48:40
Absolutely. I think you know these are kind of complementary explanations, You know it's not one or the other, It's probably a little bit of both. And you know, U.S cities, as you note, were just kind of a lot newer than if we're thinking about you know kind of cities in Western Europe. They were more open to transforming the physical infrastructure to accommodate cars And I think part of that probably was related to the fact that we had this kind of large swath of urban housing right near the city center which was in pretty poor condition in 1940, 1950. And politically, I think it was just a lot easier to move people out of their homes for urban renewal when the inhabitants of those homes were people who were less politically enfranchised and who had less political power to kind of stop their neighborhoods from being destroyed. And this is what, you know, kind of a lot of histories of urban renewal point to. And so I think, stepping back to like how much of exclusionary zoning today you can pin on these demographic changes versus the automobile, I think they are really just entwined. The places that have more urban renewal are the places that had more land and more population that was easier to kind of push out, And these places are also adopting more exclusionary zoning to protect the few protected neighborhoods within these cities as a result.

Shane Phillips 00:50:15
That makes a lot of sense. One of the first questions that came up for me while reading this, and reading your results specifically, was whether this effect was really about black migration or just about increased migration generally. I think I may have learned this from Mike's book- actually Shout out to where the hood at- But my recollection is that white southern migrants outnumbered black migrants by a pretty wide margin. Maybe it depends on which of the waves of the great migration we're talking about, But in any case, the point is that if you're only measuring black population growth, maybe what's really going on is just that lots of southerners, of either race, black or white, were moving to certain places, and those places responded by clamping down on growth. And so you know, is this really a question of black migration? You, of course, anticipated this question or critique, and looked into it, so tell us what you found there.

Alexander Sahn 00:51:04
So, as you know, there's kind of like two concerns. One is that this is just about the stress of population growth generally. Cities are receiving all these new people. They think we're not going to be able to provide social services, to build the sewers, to build new schools to accommodate all these people, And so let's pump the brakes and kind of down zone to limit this population growth. And then the second thing is you might be able to tell a story where this isn't about race, this is about class, this is about, you know, kind of poor people who worked in agriculture, who are coming to cities, who don't share, you know, the same culture, who don't have the skills necessary to operate in these labor markets, And this is going to create friction, regardless of whether they're black or white. And so to kind of address this in turn, I basically kind of do two tests. One is to look at whether or not total population growth- growth not just black population growth- predicts a rise in exclusionary zoning, And the second is to look at rural white migration, whether this also predicts exclusionary zoning. And on both counts I find that there's kind of no relationship, that places that had more population growth overall, these places are no more likely to exclusionarily zone more land. And same thing with rural white migration. So this kind of procedure I talked about before to predict the number of arrivals in each city from the South, We can do the exact same thing with white migrants And, as you noted, they do go to those kind of slightly different places And so, as a result, we are able to kind of look at whether or not white rural migration affects exclusionary zoning today, and we don't find anything there. So you know, this isn't total, dispositive proof that things aren't operating through these channels, but I think it points to the relationship really being driven by Black migration And therefore I interpret this as being a story about race rather than class, or kind of general fiscal pressure from population growth.

Shane Phillips 00:53:06
I mean I understand not wanting to overstate the results, but I think this is a pretty compelling finding that you know, total population growth or white southern population growth from rural areas- no effect that you could measure and just change the race, and suddenly a very, very significant effect. So this may go without saying, but the hypothesized mechanism for how increased black migration leads to reduced multifamily zoning is, let's, euphemistically put as public opinion, but really just to say racism more formally, a concept that you describe in the paper called racial threat. You also did some work to substantiate that assumption that's what's driving these changes. So tell us about some of that and some of the alternative explanations that you looked into but ended up tossing out here.

Alexander Sahn 00:53:54
So to kind of like really put a pin on the point that this is about race. You know I try to tell the story where you know you have white residents of these cities. They are viewing their neighborhoods, or neighborhoods near them, change quickly and substantially, So they then agitate politically for the government to kind of do something about this to. You know, quote unquote- protect their neighborhoods. And so I use some kind of polling data from the American National Election Survey. So this is a study that's been run since the 1950 s, used to be funded by the National Science Foundation, where we're able to kind of ask Americans about their political opinions and track them over time. And this is really convenient because it has data going back to the 1950 s and the 1960 s, the time period that I'm looking at. And of course race was like a really central political question then as now, And so I'm able to look at whether or not the attitudes of white residents in areas, again, that received more black population growth during this time period are different than places that received less black population growth. And I kind of fit this into this theory in social science, political science, social psychology, called racial threat, And so you know we're generally interested in the conditions under which different social groups coming into contact leads to conflict or cooperation. You know, this is kind of how we build harmonious, pluralistic societies. So I try to kind of test this theory of racial threat, the idea that when people come into contact with a different racial group, that they are going to have kind of more negative attitudes towards that group rather than exposure kind of leading to more cooperation and kind of warmer attitudes. And so, using this kind of polling data, I do kind of two things. So the first is I want to check whether or not, like people are even noticing that things are changing around them. It could be totally the case that, you know, people are living in a white, homogenous enclave and you know, let's say, Chicago, and maybe they hear that something's going on across town but they don't actually realize that this.

Shane Phillips 00:56:07
It's not changing anything about their daily life. They're not interacting with the people that are migrating to their city.

Alexander Sahn 00:56:13
Exactly. And so I use some kind of poll questions which ask people: to what degree do you come into contact with black people in your workplace, while out shopping in your neighborhood, in your kids' local schools? And we find that these places where you know kind of on paper, we're seeing more people arriving due to the Great Migration, that white respondents to these surveys are saying, yes, I am seeing, kind of you know, more black people in all these kind of facets of my everyday life. So that's kind of like precondition number one. And then the second thing we look at is: does that change their attitudes? Do they become more warm and more favorable towards their Black neighbors and towards policies that are going to help Black people in the U.S, Or does the reverse happen? Do they kind of become threatened, fearful, resentful and develop these more exclusionary attitudes? And so I take you know kind of a bunch of different poll questions and kind of average over them across this time period And we find that people who live in these places where they're noticing more black people moving into the neighborhood, they become kind of more racially exclusionary, more racially conservative. You know kind of we can use a bunch of different languages to describe this, but they're basically they feel less warm towards.

Mike Lens 00:57:26
Racist.

Alexander Sahn 00:57:26
And, yeah, they become, they change their attitudes. And I argue that this then translates into kind of political pressure to do something about this in a race neutral or race blind way way. So you referenced some alternative explanations. You know there's a lot of things that we can think are going on. It's a long time period. There's a lot that's changing in these cities. You know, as I kind of alluded to in the beginning, two main things that I look into. One is the kind of institutions of local government we think are changing during this time period. So how kind of districts are drawn and votes are counted and who is represented on city city councils is kind of in flux in a lot of these cities. And this matters for zoning and housing production, because we have some research from my colleague Michael Hankinson, who I believe was a guest on this show, and the economist Evan Mast to basically show that.

Mike Lens 00:58:18
Also a former guest.

Shane Phillips 00:58:18
Also a guest.

Alexander Sahn 00:58:20
All right. They both show that these kind of ward-based city council districts- where you know, one person is representing a specific geographic area, that these create political incentives to produce less housing, when you're responding to hyper-local interests rather than the interests of the city as a whole. So it could be the case that cities are adopting more ward-based zoning As a result. It's driving this kind of change and it's not actually operating through this kind of mechanism of racial attitudes among the population. When we look at this, we actually see that, if anything, the opposite is happening, that cities are shifting to at-large districts, largely actually to dilute the political power of Black voters, who are still a minority in most of these cities, even though they are kind of making up a larger share of the population. And this is consistent with some other work by my colleagues, Jake Grumbach, Rob Mickey and Dan Ziblatt, who kind of show a similar thing where cities that had more Black population growth through the Great Migration are more likely to kind of adopt a city manager system, The idea that, like, power is kind of insulated from voters, you know, trying to kind of disenfranchise these new arrivals in cities. And then I'll just point to kind of one other alternative explanation, which is, you know, when we talk about zoning, we talk about housing production. The canonical theory that economists at least look to is this kind of idea that homeowners and property owners are driving the show here. So if we see an increase in homeownership as a result of the Great Migration, these people have these kind of attitudes, they're activated, they want to protect their property rights and so they're going to kind of demand downzoning. And when we look at this, I actually find that there's kind of no rise in overall or white homeownership and we do actually see some increase in black homeownership. There's a paper again from Lee Buston which basically shows that this happens because of white flight, that there are more vacant homes, property values are depressed and it actually allows Black families to kind of enter the homeownership market at higher rates. But you know, kind of stepping back and thinking about, you know how would this explain this rise in exclusionary zoning? That's probably a pretty unlikely story that we have, you know, Black homeowners who are coming in and becoming more conservative and driving this effect everywhere.

Shane Phillips 01:00:41
Especially when it's happening at the same time as there's this shift from district to at large elections and, like these, efforts to actually disenfranchise black voters.

Alexander Sahn 01:00:49
Exactly So, I think you know, given the kind of strength of the evidence pointing towards, you know, racially exclusionary attitudes and the lack of any kind of evidence for credible alternative explanations, I think this story where white voters in cities are pushing for exclusionary zoning as a way to maintain the homogeneity of their neighborhoods is kind of the most likely explanation for why we see this relationship between black population growth due to the great migration and exclusionary zoning.

Shane Phillips 01:01:21
So this is the last question for me. This is one of those papers that are very comprehensive in scope- And I can tell that's true because you have this finding that just kind of slipped into your appendix- mostly that in any other circumstance I think would be enough for its own journal article really. But we've been talking about exclusionary zoning, And one of the points that we made in our conversation with Matt Lechko is that zoning is really can- can- really only be- exclusionary if it's a binding constraint, If it's not preventing homes from being built or if it's not forcing them into more expensive locations or typologies. The problem probably is not the zoning. So what we really care about is the effect of zoning on housing production, because that's really, you know, housing supply is at the heart of scarcity and, ultimately, of affordability. So this is something else you looked into- And this was for the post great migration period from 1980 to 2018, and the results were pretty shocking, just in their sheer magnitude, at least from my perspective. So could you share what you found there?

Alexander Sahn 01:02:24
So you know, one thing that you could like look at this paper and say is: you know, this is all about changes that happened, like many, many decades ago, And housing prices didn't really start to rise in these cities until you know the 90 s- 2000 s. So I think you know, as you kind of alluded to, the answer here is there's this huge lag and when these zoning constraints actually become binding, when they start to matter- And that's basically when you know, cities exceed their zone capacity- And this doesn't happen in the 1960 s or 70 s or 80 s, because of a lot of the same dynamics that are happening during the Great Migration of white flight and depopulating of cities. You know, still today you have a lot of large cities in the Northeast and the Midwest that have half a million fewer people than they did in 1950. And so only when these cities are kind of filling back up does the zoning or supply restrictions start to bite. And you see this happen, you know, earlier in some places rather than others. And so one thing I do in the paper is I look at the kind of housing permitting trajectory of cities between 1980 and 2020, roughly, And here we're able to leverage data from the census- building permits And I just look at the relationship between this black population growth due to the Great Migration and the permitting of multi-family housing, in particular between 1980 and 2020.. So this is about a 40-year period, But kind of back to the envelope calculation. The estimate that I derive from this is that 40,000 fewer units are permitted every year due to the changes in demographics in these cities, So kind of absent a Great Migration, I estimate that 40,000 more units would have been permitted every year between 1980 and 2020.. And so this is about 1,900,000 units over this 40-year period. So obviously that's a really huge number. This is kind of just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so take it with a little bit of a grain of salt, But I think it speaks to this idea that these are places where there's more exclusionary zoning and it follows that less multifamily housing is going to be built as a result.

Mike Lens 01:04:33
It's certainly 1,900,000 units that we could use these days. Just California alone, but also in these particular cities.

Shane Phillips 01:04:42
And I think you have a stat, just as a point of comparison, that something like three and a half to four million multifamily units were actually built during that period. So that's, you know, a third reduction from what it could have been, basically. This is not a small number.

Alexander Sahn 01:04:58
So I think, yeah, two other implications that I would kind of draw from this kind of go back to the conversation we were having about comparing the U.S to other countries and how much this explanation stands in relation to kind of other explanations we have for why American cities don't allow a lot of multi-family housing to be built. The first thing I'd say is: you know, the types of cities that I'm looking at here are often the cities that are portrayed as having kind of the biggest housing affordability problem. And you know, some people kind of pin this as a you know blue state phenomenon, where we have you know kind of liberal hypocrisy, people who say that they want people to be able to access opportunity and to afford homes, But when it actually comes down to it, they vote in their economic interests to exclude. Another attribution here is there's this focus on proceduralism, the idea that we need to put all these layers of process and that the reason why blue cities are so unaffordable is because these liberal cities can't get out of their own way to build stuff. I think both of those arguments have merit, but I think this kind of presents an alternative explanation as well: The same places that both became these big liberal cities because they were racially diverse are also the places that restricted zoning as a result and made them more expensive in the long term. So there's kind of this common factor in cities being kind of liberal and in having exclusionary zoning And there might not necessarily kind of be a link between those two outcomes as a result. The second thing I'd say is that it also kind of reshapes the political geography within cities. You know so little of most cities are zoned for multifamily housing that it kind of concentrates the political conflict over permitting into specific neighborhoods and kind of draws the battle lines in kind of odd ways relative to if we were just starting from a blank slate and saying: you know, let's put some multifamily housing somewhere in the city, And so fights over development in areas like the Mission in San Francisco or Shaw in D.C create these kind of racial dynamics where you have areas that have been underinvested in for decades, where housing prices are now really kind of catching back up. This creates this dynamic where the kind of conflict over housing permitting in cities is very contentious and pits different groups against each other, while these areas that were kind of downzoned and remain kind of these single family only areas which still are predominantly white, kind of sit on the sidelines and they never have to engage in these permitting fights. And so, you know, I think this is kind of another legacy of the Great Migration and of these changes that happened during this time period. And yeah, it just, you know, kind of creates a way that we think about the conflict that kind of seems natural, but isn't necessarily so. It's path dependent on these changes that happened decades ago.

Mike Lens 01:08:04
That's, I think, a great illustration of why it's often helpful to have people from various disciplines studying complex problems like this, having those kind of insights from a political scientist that is thinking about issues of contestation, And so I do look forward to your next paper, in which you tell us how to solve all of these political conflicts and you provide a roadmap forward to that sort of ideal and utopia.

Alexander Sahn 01:08:33
We're working on it.

Mike Lens 01:08:34
Excellent, Good to hear. Good to hear.

Shane Phillips 01:08:36
Well, I do really like that framing, or I guess I don't like it, but I think it's a good framing of sort of the biggest beneficiaries of exclusionary zoning having created a system where they get to sit on the sidelines where the rest of us kind of fight over the scraps, right? I think that's really poignant, So we will leave it there. Alexander Sahn, thank you for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast.

Alexander Sahn 01:09:01
Thank you.

Shane Phillips 01:09:05
You can find our show notes and a transcript of the episode on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Talk with us and other listeners at uclahousingvoice.substack.com. The UCLA Lewis Center is on the socials, I'm on Bluesky and LinkedIn at @shanedphillips, and Mike is on Bluesky at mc-lens. Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.

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Michael Manville

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