Race and Municipal Annexation After the Voting Rights Act

Noah J. Durst

Journal of the American Planning Association, 2019, vol. 85, issue 1, 49-59

Abstract: Problem, research strategy, and findings: Cities annex adjacent communities for a variety of economic and political reasons, including efforts to capture a larger tax base. Cities sometimes refuse to annex low-income minority neighborhoods or annex them less frequently than they do nearby high-income White neighborhoods, a process known as municipal underbounding. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required federal oversight over municipal annexation in 15 states and succeeded in preventing the underbounding of many African-American neighborhoods prior to its effective invalidation in 2013 by the U.S. Supreme Court. I examine the annexation practices of 276 cities across 37 states to answer 3 questions: Did the Supreme Court’s action lead to declines in the annexation of African-American neighborhoods? Did such declines constitute municipal underbounding? Were they attributable to efforts by cities to bolster their tax base? I find that Section 5 cities annexed neighborhoods with approximately 3- to 5-percentage-point lower shares of African Americans after 2013, leading to the underbounding of these communities. I find no evidence that this was attributable to efforts by cities to annex only higher income neighborhoods. My analysis does not control for key neighborhood-level factors that may shape annexation decisions, such as property values, infrastructure conditions, and residents’ preferences for being annexed.Takeaway for practice: Planners should be aware of and remain vigilant to the underbounding of African-American neighborhoods. I argue that planners can work to prevent underbounding by encouraging the adoption of and using state laws that require third-party oversight over annexation and by leveraging federal funding for infrastructure improvements in underserved unincorporated neighborhoods.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01944363.2018.1556113 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjpaxx:v:85:y:2019:i:1:p:49-59

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjpa20

DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2018.1556113

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the American Planning Association is currently edited by Sandi Rosenbloom

More articles in Journal of the American Planning Association from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().