The roots of the California's housing shortage may lie in its cities’ desire to limit Black residents and to reduce environmental impacts

Historical data from ICPSR continue to be relevant to the examination of racially discriminatory policies against minorities in the US, in light of contemporary issues like housing shortages. In this article, author Joe LaBriola wanted to understand why some cities in California historically restricted homebuilding, which has led to increased housing costs and housing shortages today. He used a variety of data sources pertaining to residential growth controls in cities in California between 1970 and 1992, to see whether these regulations were put in place to exclude Black households, or for other reasons. His data sources included surveys of city planning officials about residential growth regulations, property tax revenue data, as well as census and voting data from reusing two of ICPSR’s oldest collections, Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-1970 (ICPSR 3) and Referenda and Primary Election Materials (ICPSR 6). They contain election returns for both presidential races during that era, and for 30 years of statewide environmental propositions, providing LaBriola with indicators of attitudes about segregation and environmentalism. After his extensive investigation, LaBriola found that the evidence points strongest to racial exclusion and environmentalism as reasons for instituting residential growth controls. Cities with fewer Black residents were significantly more likely to pass regulations that lowered residential density and reduced residential sprawl, and marginally more likely to pass explicit population caps, which was corroborated by greater segregationist sentiments on the county level. Concerns over local nature and resources also predicted anti-growth rules. There was less evidence that desires to keep out Hispanic, Asian, and foreign-born groups, or the fiscal motivations to preserve home values and ownership rates, had an impact.