DONDENA Seminar - Jessica Trounstine

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 schools.  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 earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from UC San Diego in 2004 and is the Centennial Chair and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.  She previously served as the Foundation Board of Trustees Presidential Chair of Political Science at UC Merced and as assistant professor of politics and policy at Princeton University.  She is the author of two award winning books, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (Cambridge University Press) and Political Monopolies in American Cities: The Rise and Fall of Bosses and Reformers (University of Chicago Press) and numerous articles and book chapters.  Professor Trounstine’s work studies the process and quality of representation in American democracy. She is focused on the ways in which formal and informal local political institutions generate inequalities.  Professor Trounstine’s scholarship is mixed-method; reliant on historical analysis, case studies, experiments, and large-n quantitative analyses.  She has served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice, city governments, and various community organizations; and serves on numerous editorial and foundation boards.