Single-family housing and education

Zoning policy is education policy.

By Richard D. Kahlenberg 

Education reporters understandably focus their attention on the actions of education policymakers and practitioners – U.S. Department of Education officials, state education leaders, school board members, teacher union leaders, principals, and teachers.

But they might want to spend more time following what the housing authority and city planning committee are up to as well.

As someone who has spent 30 years writing about education, but more recently added housing to my portfolio, it seems to me that we miss telling a big piece of the story of unequal educational opportunities when we fail to report on housing segregation.

Exclusionary policies that keep low-income students from living in more well-off neighborhoods make a real impact on student learning.

Researchers have concluded that contemporary zoning policies that prohibit multifamily housing is now “the most important mechanism promoting class and racial segregation in the United States,” according to Princeton University’s Douglas Massey and co-authors.

Unfortunately, zoning policy is typically missing from education coverage, including on the issue of school diversity.

Unfortunately, zoning policy is typically missing from education coverage.

 

For most students, where their families can afford to live determines where they go to school. And residential zoning laws, in turn, have a big say in who gets to live where in America.

In most urban residential neighborhoods, three quarters of residential land is set aside exclusively for single family homes, meaning that duplexes, triplexes, and larger apartments are illegal to build. In suburban areas, the exclusionary zoning rates are often even higher.

In the New York City suburb of Scarsdale, for example, multifamily housing is virtually banned. No students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch in the Scarsdale public schools in 2021.

Just eight miles away, in the New York City suburb of Port Chester, which has more relaxed zoning, many parents provide lawn care and childcare services to families like those in Scarsdale, but their children can’t attend Scarsdale’s high-performing public schools.

In Minneapolis, 14 of 15 high performing schools were located in areas where anything other than a single-family home was banned.

 

In Minneapolis, 14 of 15 high performing schools were located in areas where anything other than a single-family home was banned. 

 

Reporters might already be familiar with the manner in which redlining and racially exclusive covenants in the 20^th Century created neighborhood and school segregation, but they may not realize that exclusionary techniques are not just a relic of the past.

My own eureka moment came in 2010, when I was editing the publication of a fascinating study by RAND Corporation researcher Heather Schwartz on two interventions that Montgomery County, Md., officials pursued to improve opportunities for families and students.

The school board created a policy to invest $2,000 extra into higher poverty schools in the county to pay for research-backed ideas: reduced class sizes in the early grades, extended learning time, and better professional development for teachers.

Meanwhile, the county council and housing authority had created an “inclusionary zoning” policy, under which builders have to set aside a percentage of new market-rate housing developments above a certain size to be affordable for low income and working-class families. As a result, some low-income families end up in affluent areas, while others end up in poorer areas.

Schwartz examined which low-income children performed better over the course of elementary school. Over time, it turned out, the low-income students in wealthy schools that spent less money per pupil performed much better than the low-income students in poorer areas with the extra funding.

The report was aptly titled “Housing Policy is School Policy” because while the school board investment was beneficial, what the housing authority did was far more effective in raising student achievement.

While the Montgomery County policy in this case was “inclusionary,” most zoning rules, including in Montgomery County, are exclusionary.

 

What the housing authority did was far more effective in raising student achievement.

 

The examples of housing segregation are many, but finding coverage of this topic is another matter, especially as it relates to schools.

In a recent report on a school desegregation fight in New Jersey, for example, Chalkbeat discussed the need for social and emotional learning, more diversity among teaching faculty, more equitable school funding, and the possibility of moving to county-wide school boundaries. But its analysis was missing information on the ways in which exclusionary zoning policies fed segregation in the first place.

A recent report from St. Louis Public Radio on how school districts in the St. Louis area have been cracking down on parents faking an address to get their kids into a better school system did discuss the role of historic redlining in creating housing patterns, but the story did not discuss contemporary zoning laws that can keep families out of higher performing schools.

A recent CBS News story in Colorado analyzed findings from a new report on racial school segregation in the Denver Public Schools without mentioning the way exclusionary zoning might contribute to the problem.

Likewise, a recent Education Week story on the national state of school segregation on the 69^th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education appropriately discussed trends in segregation, the harms associated with it, and a new federal grant program to reduce it, but omitted any discussion of the role of how contemporary housing policies — not those from the distant past — exacerbate segregation today.

Who reports on this issue particularly well?

Jacqueline Rabe Thomas wrote a smart investigative piece for ProPublica and The Connecticut Mirror that connected the issue of exclusionary zoning with economic segregation and reduced schooling opportunities.

The investigation found that “more than three dozen Connecticut towns have blocked construction of any privately developed duplexes and apartments within their borders for the last two decades, often through exclusionary zoning requirements.” These same policies also excluded public housing developments.

Thomas noted that when residents in exclusive communities use zoning to thwart affordable housing, they frequently cite the need to preserve “a community’s character or the quality of its schools.” In 2001, the wealthy town of Westport, Conn., went so far as to purchase land near a school to prevent the construction of a mixed-income project that would have provided low-income housing for 15 families.

Above: Recommended piece by Jaqueline Rabe Thomas

It is natural and appropriate for education reports to focus primarily on what schools can do to combat segregation, such as creating magnet schools and diverse-by-design charters, but 2023 research from Tomás Monarrez of the Urban Institute finds that residential segregation — not gerrymandered school boundary lines — is the fundamental driver of school segregation.

Indeed, if students were all assigned to the very closest school, racial school segregation would actually be 5% worse than it is today.

The next time a residential zoning fight erupts in a community, education reporters should tune into how this affects schooling opportunities for children.

Do those opposed to more housing cite school overcrowding as one of their arguments?

Does that contention hold up to scrutiny or could the school district accommodate growth through a better use of existing facilities?

Are those objecting to change more concerned about the number of new students the development might bring, or the likely race and socioeconomic status of those students?

 

The next time a residential zoning fight erupts in a community, education reporters should tune in. 

 

There is some progress being made: Recognizing these and other inequities imposed by the exclusionary zoning laws, Minneapolis voted in 2018 to legalize duplexes and triplexes throughout the city. The states of California and Oregon have taken similar steps.

Even where there is not a current housing controversy, reporters can do some digging to ask:

What do the historical records — such as minutes to city council or school board meetings — indicate about how the community and the schools came to look the way they do?

What did officials and members of the community say about how past housing proposals might affect the schools?

Are the current demographics simply a reflection of the free market in housing at work, or were decisions about housing and schooling socially engineered by policymakers?

In many communities, there may be an important story to tell.Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a non-resident scholar at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and author of Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See. You can follow him at @RickKahlenberg.

Previously from The Grade
Journalism should help debunk the education myth it helped create
Where’s all the reporting about educational redlining?
Nice White Parents: a different way of covering school inequality
Bright spots and black holes in New England education coverage
“Evicted” Author Talks About Housing’s Impact On Poor Students & Education (This Week In Education)