Luca Perdoni (LMU Munich)
Hector Blanco
Racial residential segregation in U.S. cities rose sharply during the first half of the twentieth century. We study whether early federal public housing contributed to this rise by examining the first projects built by the Public Works Administration in the mid-1930s, most of which were racially designated. Using newly assembled data on project locations linked to full-count Census records from 1910 to 1950 and comparing built to planned-but-not-built projects, we find that public housing reinforced the racial composition of project sites but had little effect on surrounding neighborhoods. The results suggest that early public housing played a limited role in shaping neighborhood-level segregation.