Divided Regions: Racial Inequality, Political Segregation, and the Splintering of Metropolitan America

Where you live has a profound effect on your life chances. Among other things, it shapes the school your child attends, accessibility and availability of employment options, the type and attractiveness of housing stock, exposure to local crime, and the quality of public services. Economic and racial segregation makes the distribution of these opportunities highly unequal; less affluent Americans and racial minorities are disproportionately clustered in areas that rate poorly across all of these potential outcomes, and they lack the resources to move to more advantaged communities. Moreover, the poorest jurisdictions lack the fiscal capacity to tackle challenges like struggling schools, high crime, and overburdened public services, further compounding the negative effects of spatial inequality.

Cooperation among metropolitan municipalities – both resource-rich and poor – is a potential solution to the challenges created by spatial inequality. A regional rail network, for example, could be advantageous to both the inner city’s unemployed and its wealthier suburban residents – by allowing city dwellers to access jobs in the suburbs, and suburban residents to spend fewer hours in traffic commuting to their white-collar jobs in the city. However, examples of successful metropolitan cooperation remain limited. When and why do metropolitan areas fail to engage in these potentially valuable partnerships?

Based on an analysis of precinct-level data from the 1988 and 2000 presidential elections, political scientist Katherine Einstein has established that racial segregation correlates with political segregation. The more African American – and to a lesser extent, Hispanic – residential segregation there is in a metropolitan area, the more political districts tend to be segregated by political party. Einstein now proposes to build on this work by examining the impact of political segregation on the likelihood of engaging in regional coordination to implement redistributive policies, including mass transit, affordable housing, regional workforce development, and food banks.