Patterns of Place: Housing Supply, Racial Segregation, and the Suburbanization of Immigration

Abstract

Place is central to understanding inequality. However, recent decades have seen significant shifts in the urban layout of the United States. In this dissertation, I address changes in housing and immigration through a mixed-methods approach combining causal inference, decomposition methods, and qualitative approaches. In particular, I analyze three recent spatial dynamics: declines in housing development, variation in racial integration, and the suburbanization of immigration. Chapter Two examines Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B, a state law designed to override exclusionary zoning and expedite affordable housing projects, to analyze how informal opposition shapes housing outcomes. Housing affordability debates often focus on zoning regulations, but informal opposition through bargaining, delay, and deterrence also plays a critical role in restricting development. Using data collected from observations and public meeting records of 48 40B projects, I identify three key dynamics: density primacy, where opponents link concerns to project size; issue shifting, where objections evolve to sustain opposition; and policy learning, where opponents refine arguments to align with regulatory constraints. These strategies allow local actors to extract concessions and reshape developments even when formal mechanisms for denial are unavailable. Findings highlight the limitations of zoning reform alone in addressing housing shortages and underscore the need for policy solutions that mitigate procedural barriers to housing production. While public meetings are intended to facilitate community input, they often amplify opposition in ways that hinder new housing construction. In Chapter Three, I investigate whether increasing housing development reduces Black-White residential segregation. Debates over housing supply, from NIMBY opposition to YIMBY advocacy, have focused largely on the economic consequences of permitting new housing, but their broader social effects remain underexplored. Using a panel of metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2020, I find that metros permitting more housing experienced larger declines in segregation. To strengthen causal claims, I employ an instrumental variable approach leveraging geologic constraints on buildability. I also show that within metro areas, towns permitting more housing saw greater reductions in segregation, reinforcing the link between housing supply and integration. These findings highlight the broader social consequences of housing development policies, suggesting that increasing housing supply may be a key lever for fostering racial equity. In Chapter Four, I identify and question three assumptions about the suburbanization of immigration. The majority of immigrants in the U.S. now live in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Recent work on this phenomenon has focused on the outcomes of immigrant suburbanization, examining how immigrants encounter and make sense of different residential contexts. However, I argue that the literature has largely neglected to investigate the underlying process behind immigrant suburbanization. I analyze three assumptions related to this process: that moves to new destinations are driving suburbanization, that immigrants are suburbanizing more quickly than the U.S.-born, and that a suburb-specific mechanism is driving increases in immigrant-native neighborhood inequality. I use a series of decompositions to model each of these questions, finding evidence that largely cuts against these underlying assumptions in the field. In doing so, I show the value of situating spatial trends in immigration in the context of broader demographic trends and help clarify possible mechanisms driving immigrant suburbanization.