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March 21, 2025: Jessica Trounstine Lecture
By Zack Taylor
NEST Distinguished Speaker Series
Protection of Privilege: The Segregation of Public Schools through Land Use Regulations
Friday, March 21, 2025 · 2:00–3:30pm · SSC 6210
Since the 1980s, schools in the United States have become increasingly segregated along race and class lines. Scholars understand that the underlying driver of this pattern is residential segregation along race and class lines. I propose that exclusive communities seek governmental policies that protect residential segregation (like banning multifamily homes in their neighborhood) to ensure race and class homogeneity in their neighborhoods and schools. First, I use an agent-based model to show that restrictive zoning produces racial segregation. Then, I use a novel dataset of more than 2 million parcels in the Bay Area of California and find that neighborhoods that were privileged in the 1940s are much more likely to have restrictive zoning today. As a result, housing types are geographically segregated in these communities. I find that the application of different development standards to different neighborhoods is strongly associated with race and class segregation across schools. Zoning segregation explains 27–32% of the total variation in race and class segregation within school districts.
Jessica Trounstine, Vanderbilt University, earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2004 and is the Centennial Chair and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Previously, she served as the Foundation Board of Trustees Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Merced and as an Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Policy at Princeton University. She is the author of Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (Cambridge University Press), winner of the Best Book in the Field from the Urban Affairs Association, the J. David Greenstone Prize, and the Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association. She is also the author of the award-winning book Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (University of Chicago Press), along with dozens of articles and book chapters. She was selected as a 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Trounstine's work studies representation and inequality in American democracy using varied quantitative and qualitative methods. She consults for various governments and community organizations, and serves on numerous editorial and foundation boards.