The Political Consequences of Concentrated Advantage

• In Event: Local Ideology and Polarization: Partisanship in Urban Governance

Abstract

The “concentration of disadvantage” in urban communities of color has long preoccupied urban scholars (Wilson 1987), who have documented both the political causes of spatial inequalities (Trounstine 2020; Massey and Denton 1993) and shown the consequences of place-based disadvantages for a range of life outcomes, including education, crime, and mental health (Sharkey and Faber 2014; Sampson 2011). But more recently, scholars have trained their eye on the other side of the boundary created by those same policies: pockets of concentrated advantage (Ternullo, Zorro-Medina, and Vargas Forthcoming). In so doing, they have begun to show these structurally and politically advantaged communities also matter for politics: longstanding policies have created race- and class-homogenous places that spatially concentrate politically conservative people (Nall 2015) who are adept at wielding local government to protect the quality of their public goods and the exclusivity of their communities (Fischel 2001; Trounstine 2018; Einstein, Glick, and Palmer 2019). But the nature of the relationship between politics and place in these advantaged communities is not yet clear. On the one hand, public policies have clearly helped segregate affluent, White, low-density suburbs and neighborhoods from lower-income communities of color (Jackson 1985; Massey and Denton 1993; Trounstine 2018); and on the other, scholars have repeatedly shown that places can shape several dimensions of political behavior (Ternullo forthcoming; Cantoni and Pons 2019; García Bedolla 2005; Hopkins 2010; Enos 2017; Cramer 2016). This suggests the possibility of a self-reinforcing relationship between place and politics, in which places concentrate and cultivate behaviors that reproduce the very dimensions of place conducive to those behaviors (H. Molotch, Freudenburg, and Paulsen 2000). But evidence as to whether advantaged communities produce distinctive political constituencies is mixed (Nall 2018). This is in part because studies tend to focus on one side of the relationship between place and politics – how politics shapes place, or how place shapes politics (although see Nall 2018 and Trounstine 2018 for important exceptions). This paper takes up these questions, asking: how is the relationship between place and politics reproduced? More specifically, how are the policies that created advantaged places now concentrating political behaviors that perpetuate their advantage? To answer these questions, I draw on a mixed-methods study that examines both sides of the place and politics relationship. I first show how politics affects place: drawing on a dataset of 540 residential zoning ballot measures in California from 1990-2020 and using a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design, I show that restrictive victories have systematically limited the supply of multi-family housing: in the year following a vote, the number of multi-family units permitted is 89% lower in places that voted restrictively, while the number of multi-family buildings permitted is 76% lower. Next, I show how place affects politics by combining evidence from a survey of suburban and urban residents conducted by Marble and Nall (2021), with more than 200 in-depth interviews with residents of three California suburbs, conducted between September 2022 and May 2023. I show that political decisions to limit housing density have spatially concentrated a lack of support for future policies to increase density: suburban homeowners and homeowners living in less-dense zip codes within suburbs and cities are far less supportive of policies to densify housing than their counterparts in cities and denser zipper codes. Place-based polarization has partially substituted for partisan polarization on these issues. I then elucidate the mechanisms undergirding the relationship between low-density and “lack of support” through the in-depth interviews with suburban residents. I show that the lack of support is composed of both active opposition to density – which is seen as urban encroachment into historically protected “suburban” ways of life – and a sense of disconnectedness from pro-density policies – because they do not appear to address suburban homeowners’ subjective conceptions of California’s housing crisis. I also provide qualitative evidence that these spatial concentrations result both from residential selection and the effects of place. But regardless of the processes that lead to this outcome, the outcome itself politically consequential: it means that whole towns and cities outside of urban centers will likely be more willing to use local government control to prevent the encroachment of density, and, as a result, prevent greater race- and class-integration. These findings contribute to research on the relationship between place and politics and to research on the contextual dimensions of support and opposition to housing density.

Author

• Stephanie Lynn Ternullo, Harvard