School District Defragmentation is a Housing Issue
Segregated, fragmented school districts create perverse, anti-growth incentives that compound their discriminatory effect.
In 2005, a coalition spearheaded by the progressive activist group New York Communities for Change (NYCC) brought a federal lawsuit against the Incorporated Village of Garden City, an ultra-wealthy (and ultra-white) Long Island bedroom community located right in the center of Nassau County. The previous year, the village had blocked the development of affordable housing on a 25-acre lot by enacting an exclusionary zoning ordinance banning multi-family housing on a plot of county-owned land which an affordable housing nonprofit, the Mutual Housing Association of New York, intended to develop. The lawsuit would not be completely resolved until 2017, and while Garden City ultimately lost the case, only fifteen units of “affordable” housing have been built since. That’s fifteen units in a 150-unit luxury development in a commercial district on the outskirts of the village—essentially in a mall parking lot—which opened in 2023. That an elderly, wealthy, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly homeowning, leafy suburb has heavily resisted new building is probably of little surprise to anyone reading this blog. Yet, this should have been a victory for everyone in favor of building more housing and against racial segregation. The Second Circuit court ruled that exclusionary zoning, “though not overtly race-based, was directed at a potential influx of poor, minority residents” and was therefore discriminatory. At the time, NYCC was predicting that this would enable massive new building opportunities for affordable housing for Black and Brown people in Garden City and places like it. Why has this not come to pass?
Garden City was far from the first or the last municipality to use exclusionary zoning to engage in discriminatory housing policy. These are never plainly stated, of course, rather laundered through “legitimate policy concerns.” One of the most common of these is the specter of school overcrowding. Housing and schooling, while obviously directly linked, are not typically thought of together when discussing segregation. This is a fundamental error, as school district fragmentation is one of the primary drivers of housing segregation, especially in areas where school attendance is strictly accorded by district boundaries. The relationship between housing discrimination and schools was recognized already by the Supreme Court in 1973, but perhaps never more clearly than through the discriminatory actions the City of Yonkers took that ultimately led to the landmark 1987 case United States v. Yonkers Board of Education. Yonkers was essentially shown to have used every power at hand, including Section 8 voucher manipulation, to restrict low-income residential housing to about a single square mile in Southwest Yonkers, preserving the existing patterns of segregation in the school district. The basic mechanism is thus:
Schooling is the largest local expenditure in most municipalities
School districts with a higher tax base produce higher-performing schools, while school rating systems primarily reflect demographic data and the level of parental education, i.e. they rate highly whiter, wealthier districts with higher rates of secondary and tertiary education.
Parents, when deciding where to move, go “district shopping” for their children, driving up property values in high-performing school districts, which are correlated with less diverse neighborhoods. This is proven by residential segregation across school districts being stronger among children than adults.
Lower-performing districts thus struggle with greater levels of resource need, while higher-performing districts can entrench their wealth
Incumbent residents are incentivized to “protect” these privileged enclaves, which form the basis for their home values, by opposing development intended for low- and middle-income households (which are disproportionately Black and Brown)
As we see in an environment where there is a highly fragmented school district map that maps onto tiny municipalities, as is the case in much of the Northeast, it is perversely rational for homeowners to oppose affordable housing development. This is compounded by the practice of fiscal zoning, which is the formalized practice of instrumentalizing exclusionary zoning to reduce impact on local schools. As a result, municipalities and the residents they represent come to see all new housing is essentially a fiscal drain on their coffers and resolutely oppose it. This is discriminatory and promotes segregation, but not only that; it restricts housing supply, contributing to the broad crisis of affordability that deeply worries so many in America.
To attack this problem, New York, like many Northeastern and Midwestern states with similar district structures, must defragment its school districts. We can look to elsewhere in the country for how this could work. Long Island, as an example, has 125 public school districts spread over its only two counties. In Southern states, larger, often county-wide school districts are the norm (though this is currently being threatened by school district secession that makes southern districts look more like northern ones). This corresponds to dramatically fewer segregated schools. A study by researchers at LSE found that, in New York, 1 in 10 schools enrolls ≥ 99% non-white students. Meanwhile, the typical white schoolchild attends a school that is 78.4% white, despite only 50.2% of students being white. Virginia, as a counterexample, is certainly no postracial utopia. However, only 1 in 100 schools enrolls ≥ 99% non-white students, and the typical white schoolchild attends a school that is 12% less white than in New York.
This trend carries over to housing construction: DC suburbs in Northern Virginia with much higher levels of consolidation are building significantly more housing than the New York suburbs on Long Island. In 2024, Fairfax County, with its single school district, issued 2,861 new residential building permits. Nassau and Suffolk combined to issue only 2,237 permits, despite nearly doubling the population of Fairfax.
School district fragmentation is creating fiscal pressures on municipalities that are strangling housing supply and rewarding racist discrimination. Action must be taken on the state level. As it stands, there is no power that could step in and consolidate districts without local approval, which wealthy communities are exceedingly unlikely to accept. The state legislature must pass legislation empowering and mandating the State Board of Education to forcibly defragment Long Island school districts. If we want integrated schools, we need integrated and more housing. If we want integrated housing, we need integrated schools. Only targeted exercise of expanded state capacity will be able to slice this Gordian knot.
