The (Express) Way to Segregation: Evidence from Chicago
How do man-made barriers shape racial segregation within cities?
I study the long-run effects of the construction of expressways in Chicago in the 1950s on racial segregation. These multilane roads (i) produce a local shock to residential amenities, and (ii) divide the areas they cross through, creating local barriers to the interaction of nearby communities. I find that expressways affect within-city racial segregation through two main channels. First, a price or disamenity channel: Racial segregation increases because of income differences between Black and white residents, which on average lead the two groups to react differently to changes in house prices induced by proximity to expressways.
Second, a physical barrier channel: Racial sorting appears to be affected by expressway-induced changes in accessibility to different portions of the city and, in turn, to neighborhoods with different demographic compositions. Motivated by these findings, I build a structural urban model to study the link between urban barriers and racial preferences in shaping the allocation of people across space. The model is used to estimate racial preference parameters and to undertake counterfactual experiments to inform current public policies targeting the social issues of transport infrastructures in US cities.