Date/Time: Sep 29th (Thursday) at 8 pm ET (9 am KST Friday).
Speaker: Professor Sunkyoung Lee (University of Michigan)
Zoom link:
Title: “When Cities Grow: Urban Planning and Segregation in the Prewar US”
Abstract:
I examine the influence of the United States’ first comprehensive land-use regulations (“zoning”) and the growth of transportation infrastructure on segregation and intra-city migration in New York City from 1870 to 1940. Combining a new panel dataset derived from historical US federal population censuses with the newly digitized real-estate sales transaction records, I find that between-neighborhood socioeconomic segregation increased dramatically after the building of transit infrastructure, that zoning was largely an endogenous response to the socioeconomic segregation facilitated by transit infrastructure and that the combination of zoning and building new subways in a rapidly expanding city produced a pattern where inner-city neighborhoods zoned for factories and multi-family dwellings `flipped’ to African American majorities. I estimate the value of a “tipping point” beyond which mixed-race neighborhoods are no longer sustainable and show that housing prices in tipped neighborhoods decrease by 40% relative to non-tipped neighborhoods. Finally, while white and African American migrants from the rural South to New York City benefit from urban wage premia of about 40%, this premium is reduced for African American migrants living in segregated minority neighborhoods.
Discussion about this post