Housing and Zoning Reform is the Key to Equitable Education

Housing segregation by redlining, the illegal practice of denying credit, loans, and mortgages to individuals on the basis of ethnicity and race, was a discriminatory banking practice used throughout the 20th century to ensure that certain impoverished neighborhoods could not benefit from financial services. The term “redlining” came about during the New Deal when government officials and banks used maps to decide on which neighborhoods were worthy of government-issued home loans. The areas deemed not credit-worthy enough, and therefore “hazardous,”  by shading those zones on the map in red.  This biased financial strategy ended up preventing primarily black families in redlined districts from obtaining home loans regardless of their actual creditworthiness and ultimately entrenching these families in impoverished, economically depressed communities for generations. Additionally, despite the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act requiring banks to meet all credit needs of low-income neighborhoods, private lending decisions continued to be racially-biased, and there is even evidence of such bias existing today. 

Redlining practices, though now illegal and investigated by the Justice Department, continue to have pervasive residual ramifications across the United States, most notably in public education. A 2021 investigation by Harvard University researchers proved that the 1935–1940 redlining policies of the federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) is linked to contemporary educational inequities of public schools across the country in these once-redlined, segregated neighborhoods. As a result of historic redlining, school districts and students of color within these neighborhoods suffered the lowest credit ratings by the HOLC during the late 1930s, and were set on a long-term path of scholastic inequity.  Students in these districts now suffer a combination of low per-pupil spending on a district level, lower average test scores relative to schools in highly-rated districts, and–because of academic losses–an inability to be integrated into alternative school districts or learning environments. 

 Our current federal solutions to combat the residual effects of redlining in education, while well-intentioned, have fallen short, leaving millions of American children suffering irreversible achievement gaps due to extraordinary lack of school resources, insufficient high-quality teachers, overly large classroom sizes, and decrepit facilities. To date, the primary method used by the federal government to repair the damage to education in these neighborhoods has been to award a higher percentage of education funding, particularly federal Title I dollars, to schools in concentrated poverty areas. There is some rationale to this finance framework, the government has long understood that wealthier school districts which have wealthier tax bases have better school resources that directly translate into student achievement. However, the amount of federal funds now allocated to historically-redlined districts (about $1,300 per student) is woefully insufficient to close entrenched achievement gaps. Despite increases in federal funding for years, grade point averages and testing scores for students in these regions show long-term failure to improve. Part of this stagnation stems from recipient-school districts’ tendency to use Title 1 money for teacher development, not necessarily for student resources. But the bigger challenge is simply that paltry federal funds allocated do not make up for the enormous shortfall in education costs per student in highly impoverished school districts. According to the Annual Survey of School System Finances released by the US Census Bureau, country-wide per pupil spending increased to about $13,187 during the 2019 fiscal year. Moreover, the nation's largest school districts, New York City School, Washington D.C., Boston, and Atlanta spend between $17,000 and $28,000 per pupil. Limited additional Title 1 dollars to historically relined-districts cannot even hope to bridge these costs. Accordingly, education experts are looking for new ways to dramatically change the downward educational trajectory for students in historically-redlined and impoverished neighborhoods, and the answer they are looking for is new housing plans.  

The argument is that years of zoning laws and land use laws, which deliberately restricted population density in suburbs and rural areas, have been historically used to keep out lower income, racial diverse families. These antiquated laws must be dismantled to create new housing in wealthier enclaves with strong tax bases so that children can receive the benefits of better resourced education to close learning gaps. The federal government's long-term failure to redress the educational effects of redlining through Title 1 funding has spurred recent legislation to help create affordable housing in wealthier suburban highly-resourced school districts. In May 2022, the Biden Administration announced the Housing Supply Action Plan, which financially rewards jurisdictions for removing restrictive zoning and land use laws in their state or localities. This plan will function to boost affordable housing supply in wealthier neighborhoods, and will result in more underrepresented students sharing equitably in school district resources. The White House initiatives have already spurred traditionally hesitant states like New York and California to consider changing their zoning laws. Last year, the New York State legislature proposed three new zoning reform bills to end exclusionary zoning in many suburban and upstate neighborhoods, and Governor Cathy Hochul recently unveiled the New York Housing Compact, which accelerates housing initiatives and also focuses heavily on zoning reform. California’s efforts to rezone wealthy neighborhoods like Atherton in Silicon Valley to accommodate multi-family housing units have encountered opposition from some famous existing home-owners in what has been termed the “Not in My Backyard” (“NIMBY”) protest. Though overall, it is likely that education resource-sharing through ending exclusionary zoning will become the future of these enclaves.

An increase in new housing opportunities for underserved families in well-resourced, wealthier school districts will be a game changer for closing achievement gaps and changing the lives, opportunities, and potential for all of our nations’ students.