ZONING FOR PEACE

Since there are obvious limits on integration through universities, mixed neighborhoods offer a useful alternative. The problem is that mixed neighborhoods have a proclivity toward being unstable, as Tomas Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, demonstrated.⁸⁶ Suppose homeowners are happy to live in mixed neighborhoods, but not in neighborhoods mostly dominated by another group.

David Card studied the increase in segregation that happened in the United States in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and it does indeed look like there is this tipping point property.⁸⁷ If the fraction of blacks in the neighborhood was less than some number, it remained stable; if it became higher, there was a large outflow of the white population in subsequent years. Chicago, for example, had a particularly low tipping point. If the black population in a neighborhood was less than 5 percent in 1970, it remained at that level afterward, but if it was any more than that the fraction of whites soon plummeted. On average across US cities, Card and his colleagues found tipping points ranging between 12 percent and 15 percent.

The way to prevent the segregation implied by the tipping point logic is to build public housing targeting low-income residents and disperse that housing throughout the city, so there are no “pure” neighborhoods available.

The challenge of implementing such a policy is mostly political. It seems easy enough to imagine how to do it well if the political will is there: spread the public housing around, give everyone a lottery number, have a public lottery every time new housing becomes available, and make it easy to check that the winners get the housing. The difficulty is that public housing in fancy neighborhoods is very tempting for local politicians to use as patronage, but with enough political will it can probably be overcome.⁸⁸

Nevertheless, in the near future, while most poor people still live in low-income neighborhoods, shared schools are another way to integrate the population. For this to happen, children will need to be moved. Busing a large number of children to foster school diversity, as it was done in Boston at some point, is however unpopular, in part for the very good reason that young children do not enjoy being bused. The best idea may be to allow children from designated low-income neighborhoods to attend schools outside their neighborhoods. The METCO program in the United States, which organized the busing of minority children to majority schools, was shown to be beneficial to the minority children without any harm to the test scores of majority children. The latter, who would have mostly spent their lives in largely white enclaves, ended up being exposed to a much more diverse population, which as we have seen durably affects worldviews and preferences.⁸⁹