Abstract
Historically, de jure systemic racism in the United States and the California housing market resulted in a lack of Black family access to housing in affluent neighborhoods, generating a Black-White wealth and income gap still observed today. Even after eliminating much of this outright discrimination, these economic gaps caused de facto segregation of many Black families from affluent and primarily White neighborhoods. This practice is especially prevalent in California, where housing costs are particularly burdensome, and Black families are unlikely to find affordable housing in affluent school districts. Black children are likely to attend Black-White segregated and low-socioeconomic status (SES) school districts. This study, grounded in critical race theory and the education debt model, empirically documents how higher average home prices in California keep Black children out of affluent districts more likely to boast higher standardized test scores. Holding other explanatory factors constant, I use panel data regression first to measure the impact of housing affordability in a district on the degree of Black-White segregation in that district, and in a second regression, the influence of the degree of Black-White segregation on the average sixth-grade-level performance of Black children on math, English, or combined standardized tests. The importance of the empirical-based regression analysis I offer is to document these relationships and the magnitude at which they occur. The goal is to show that local housing policies that explicitly keep less affluent Black households from residing in California school districts are a new form of "Jim Crow Laws" that work to maintain Black-White opportunity gaps. It is reasonable to think of the "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) attitude towards the allowance of affordable housing as serving as a clear form of structural racism. Findings indicated that a lack of affordable housing correlated with a significant increase in Black-White school segregation.
Furthermore, as Black-White segregation increased, Black-White achievement disparities in overall and math standardized test scores increased by 2.81 and 4.74 grade levels, respectively. If Black-White segregation decreased by one standard deviation, overall and math achievement gaps fell by 13% and 21%, respectively. Thus, I make the case that the state’s lack of housing affordability is a direct contributor to White-Black test score gaps. This finding could further support the California Reparations Task Force in implementing public policy to increase housing affordability and address the equity gaps for Black Californians.