Housing
How Early White Flight Drove Racial Segregation
A new study suggests that racial sorting might have occurred even without the discriminatory housing policies we know bolstered segregation.
We already know that federal housing policies such as redlining, real estate practices like blockbusting, and the resulting “white flight” to suburbs in post-World War America caused cities to segregate, sealing generations of African Americans into poverty.
But even if these discriminatory policies hadn’t existed, the fate of our cities may not have been all that different, a new working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests.