OT: Zoning Laws and Largest Feeder Schools
I read with interest yesterday the post highlighting the largest feeder high schools for U of M.
LINK: OT: What are the largest feeder high schools for the University?
I was reminded of this while reading an article in today's New York Times, and also remembering a previous column in the NYT on the same topic.
- LINK: If You Care About Social Justice, You Have to Care About Zoning
- LINK: How Berkeley Beat Back NIMBYs
I never had completely realized that the roots of zoning laws were often a sneaky way of implementing racist policies in your own community. It always struck me when I was a student at Michigan 40 years ago that there was a dichotomy between the politics of numerous progressive, liberal communities and their social makeup. This is still true today. San Francisco is one of the most progressive cities in the country in terms of its resident's political persuasion. But the reality on the ground is that zoning laws and the lack of affordable housing make it virtually impossible for middle and lower income families to live there. The result is that those who work in service industries: restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, Big Box stores, often can't live anywhere near their place of employment.
This is particularly off topic for this website. However, let me bring it full circle. In today's NYT article on zoning, it mentioned a fascinating admissions policy at the University of Texas:
It [[ every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”]] happened again in 1997 and 2009 in Texas, when Republican legislators representing white working-class voters and Democrats representing Black and Hispanic constituencies came together to support (and then to defend) the Texas top 10 percent plan to admit the strongest students in every high school to the University of Texas at Austin, despite the opposition of legislators representing wealthy white suburban districts that had dominated admissions for decades.
I would love to see something like this happen at U of M. The article on largest feeder high schools for Michigan shows high schools in pretty exclusive communities, with all kinds of zoning laws on housing. If you go to the Michigan Daily article on feeder schools, it is somewhat disappointing that so many of the schools with high admission and enrollment rates are communities with a lack of racial diversity, and probably heavy zoning regulations on housing. For instance, Bloomfield Township is 88% white, with a median income of $144,000 . . . in 2007! I don't know the zoning laws there, but I'm going to guess they make it nigh on impossible for moderate income families to live there.
This may be of no interest to many readers, but I found it fascinating, and I'd love to see change, including my own community in west suburban Chicago.
SRK, this should spur some lively discussion. :)
I don't see easy answers to either question (zoning, admissions policy). I definitely see the potential for lots of continued hand waving (as in, "I've formulated the strategy. My work is done. The burden of implementation will be borne by the less fortunate and connected people in my metropolitan area.").
Can anyone in the know share how the Top 10% = admission to Texas is working out? I did read at some point that students that graduated from less privileged backgrounds and schools struggled once they got on campus.
To me a lot starts with tying property taxes to area schools, via millages. This always creates a set of have and have not schools.
This American Life covered the subject. Went into some detail about a student who initially hit a wall but ultimately succeeded at UT. We'll see if this link works:
Yep, it works. (Well, you have to put up a link a different way. But cutting and pasting the link worked. And I love This American Life.)
Here is how to put in a link:
- Go to the link icon above (it is just to the right of the B and I icons on the left.)
- When you left click on the link icon, it will give you a line where to post the link.
- Voila, you're done.
- Advanced: you can type out the "title" for the link, highlight the title you typed in, and then left click on the link icon, and paste in the actual link. By doing this, readers will see the hyperlink title in blue without all the unintelligible numbers and letters and special characters in an actual link.
April 19th, 2021 at 11:11 PM ^
Mr. Kass (Tech?),
It's nice of you to explain. Much better than the too-common snark.
I read recently they may move it to the top 6% soon. The issue is the yield is too high with 10%.
April 19th, 2021 at 11:30 PM ^
When Texas rolled out its Top 10% Rule in 1997, supporters said it would promote diversity on the state's college campuses and expand access to students at high schools that don't typically send students to the state's top institutions.
Two decades later, it appears the program has done none of those things, a new study suggests.
The study found that the program brought about no meaningful change either in the number of high schools that send students to the University of Texas at Austin or to Texas A&M University, or on the student diversity at either of those campuses.
I used to teach in Texas. What this policy creates is absolutely cutthroat academics, even at low-income schools. Every kid starts grade grubbing during the last 2 days of school to try and raise their grade from an 79% to a 90% so they can move up 6 spots in the class rank. Cheating was a constant battle, too. Honors/AP kids and parents would have a meltdown if they got a low grade on an assignment, which was really disappointing because kids felt like they couldn't make a mistake and, y'know, learn from it. In addition, many kids would not challenge themselves to take an AP class over an Honors class since they both had the same GPA boost (the Honors was less rigorous).
For the record, I don't blame them for playing the game...it incentivizes that behavior. I really enjoyed working at that school, but dealing with the gradebook was exhausting.
April 20th, 2021 at 11:17 AM ^
That sounds exactly like my experience teaching in Michigan, even though we have no such policy. Grade-grubbing is just a thing on its own, regardless of what carrots are attached to good grades.
I would love a world where children could go to school and receive the same education regardless of how much money everyone in their neighborhood makes or what culture they are raised in. I would also love a world where all people take responsibility and respect each other regardless of those same things.
I would go further into this, but doing so will seriously break the no-politics rule.
Amen. I simply realize that I had a lot of privilege and luck in having what was needed to attend Michigan.
What this also goes to show is how a lot of policy initiatives and paradigms may very well be somewhat benign in intent but insidious in execution - as a very small example of this, think about being a Congressional intern. That's often seen as a stepping stone to some K-street lobbying position or elected office, but those positions are often unpaid - and if you're living in DC an unpaying job is just not feasible unless you have a family that can float you for a summer or two, which inevitably means kids from well-off families have better access to those cushy positions.
EDIT: mea culpa, I double-checked myself, and Congressional interns at least are now paid, as of 2019.
Even staffers in DC, who have been around the Hill for several years barely make any money, which is pretty disgraceful. But that's another topic altogether.
There was an article a few years ago (can't remember if it was NYT, Atlantic or Politico) about how U of M was struggling to get kids from poor areas - both urban and rural - to apply. The perception of Michigan among the top students in those areas was that it was a 'rich kid' school and they wouldn't be able to get in (eventhough they almost certainly could) or afford it. And this was despite the university's efforts to increase the numbers of students from those areas and socioeconomic levels by offering generous scholarships and student aid. But, those kids would instead apply to places like Central or Wayne State or maybe Michigan State. This struck me as a failure of U of M's mission as a public university - a prestigious state school should be educating students no matter their background or ability to pay.
I strolled through a number of the feeder schools in that article and was surprised to not see my hs on there - it seems like there a lot of kids from my town/hs who go to U of M now. But, I was also struck at how many kids I knew when I was at Michigan who went to those same high schools even 20 years ago. And several of them came from fairly wealthy backgrounds.
This is 100% true in talking to students who are seniors this year. I think two students I've had even tried to get into Michigan (at least the A^2 campus). One got in, the other hadn't heard last I talked to her.
A couple notes.
The top 10% plan doesn't work as well as affirmative action to create diversity (it's original intent).
It's hard to say, but there are schools where no students are qualified to attend Michigan. I had to deny a few valedictorians back when I worked in admissions. Those were tough cases.
Kookie, I find that fascinating. (there are schools where no students are qualified to attend Michigan. I had to deny a few valedictorians back when I worked in admissions.) Is it just a lack of academic rigor? It seems impossible that geographically, kids in a certain area would lack the latent talent/brains/ability needed to succeed at Michigan. Can you explain more?
A lot of areas have schools of vastly differing qualities. Parents that have smart kids often make sure they get those kids into schools that will challenge them. Put it together, and you end up with schools without any top flight students.
That said, if there were geographical areas where nobody from any school in the area got in, that'd probably deserve more scrutiny.
Unfortunately, there are just some schools that provide very poor preparation for college. It's a combination of poor environment, curriculum, teaching, and the top students leaving via charters, schools of choice, or magnet programs.
I would not say that these schools had no students capable of succeeding at Michigan, but the students would have had extreme difficulty transitioning with their current skill levels. Michigan does not offer remedial courses, so just making a transition from Algebra I or II (the highest level of math offered) would have been really difficult. Not having reading test scores not remotely up to the college level was also common at many schools of this type. Thus, there is an ethical dilemma. Do you admit students to an environment where they have a low probability of success even though they are the best in their school? Before you say yes, it is also important to remember that dropping out has many lifelong costs on students and families (see debt crisis, income gap between graduates and dropouts). Sometimes, saying no is the best course of action for all.
I think this cuts to the real nub of why it's so difficult to make real changes in the socioeconomic composition of the student body. The students have already been in school for 12-13 years by the time they're applying for the University of Michigan, and the extremely wide range of possible outcomes after those 12-13 years is more of a gap than a 4-year tertiary educational institution can reasonably be expected to close. It is noble of Michigan and Texas and other universities to try to create balance and greater opportunities for more students, and they should by all means continue to try to find creative ways to do this. But the place where real change is needed is at the primary and secondary level, i.e. outside the control of the universities or their admissions offices.
Do you have an article to link that says this or is this just from your personal experience? My (admittedly anecdotal) impression was that while there is definitely uneven educations out there, tif kids were supported, they could get over that hump and do well. Sure it is hard early for them, but those that stick it out, could make it work.
This is anecdotal too, but here goes: when I'm in college I help an admissions counselor set up an Excel macro to generate graphs, and in so doing I (oops) get access to the full treasure trove of admissions data. It's fascinating. There's schools barely a couple miles apart, one of them a boatload of kids get accepted, the other zero or maybe one. I'm curious but I don't want to tip off where I get my data, so I ask generally vague questions like, hey, why does it seem there's so many kids here from little So-and-soburg? The answer comes right away: "Joe Smith. Teaches science at So-and-soburg High. They love him. He's an ace." I try it with a couple of other schools that seem to be college student factories, and in each case they can identify, by name, a teacher who was just that good at it.
Moral of the story: there are good and bad schools, but all it really takes is a good teacher. Sometimes only one good teacher. I know this for a fact, if not for Sister Helen Therese there's no way I get a college education.
This was mostly based on personal experience, but there was data and research to back it up. These are dated to give you an idea of what was known at the time, but more recent research has confirmed it.
A study on the importance of HS curriculum.
Key findings:
Of all pre-college curricula, the highest level of mathematics one studies in secondary school has the strongest continuing influence on bachelor's degree completion. Finishing a course beyond the level of Algebra 2 (for example, trigonometry or pre-calculus) more than doubles the odds that a student who enters postsecondary education will complete a bachelor's degree
Academic Resources (the composite of high school curriculum, test scores, and class rank) produces a much steeper curve toward bachelor's degree completion than does socioeconomic status.
NIMBY, NIMUni
From the dawn of time, those with the means to remove themselves from others have done so. Wealthy ancient Romans moved to the hills, medieval lords built castles, modern Americans use zoning. Minimum lot sizes, minimum home square footages, maximum lot coverage ratios, and only allowing single family housing are very common ways of keeping certain people out. Michigan's strong home rule system and powerful townships allow for these restrictions to happen at a hyper local level. I am a UM Masters of Urban Planning grad and currently write master plans and zoning ordinances mostly for rural communities - I see these restrictions and their impact on a daily basis.
Restrictive zoning coupled with strong townships have lead to unequal movement and to the distillation of poverty in certain areas and wealth in others. Unequal movement is felt strongly in the schools; while the state collects tax revenue and distributes it equally based on student counts, school facilities are funded by local millages. Additional resources are also rounded up by strong PTOs in wealthy communities. This disparity in resources leads to vastly different opportunities and outcomes.
Check out Harvard's Opportunity Insights Moving to Opportunity for some eye-opening data on how your neighborhood impacts your outcomes.
April 19th, 2021 at 10:08 PM ^
Someone with lots of money and great lawyers should challenge zoning in court. Maybe Google. They seem to have some ridiculously good lawyers.
April 19th, 2021 at 11:32 PM ^
Zoning was already adjudicated in SCOTUS. I don't think a new challenge will find a much sympathy in the current SCOTUS. Zoning is a good practice even if it has been abused. It should be reformed rather than completely abolished.
April 19th, 2021 at 10:13 PM ^
WOW!!! That link is incredible. The difference in general with the place you live is significant. I grew up in an area of Chicago pretty heavy with gangs, having teens murdered in the alley outside our house, and gang violence on my block and across the street. Fortunately for me, I went to what amounted to a magnet school . . . Lane Tech, which interestingly, is the 5th out-of-state High School listed in the original Michigan Daily article.
My question for you: can you read my NYT link, and comment on what is suggested there? More particularly the carrot,
President Biden would reward localities that voluntarily agree to jettison “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements and prohibitions on multifamily housing.”
And the NYT goes further:
Mr. Biden should add sticks to the carrots he has already proposed.:
The goal of changing zoning:
Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.
Westside, your field of expertise has to do with zoning. Do you have an opinion on whether or not what is proposed in the NYT article would work?
April 19th, 2021 at 11:19 PM ^
SRKass: I appreciate your interest in this often overlooked topic. Thanks for sharing your story and it is a testament to you character, hard work, and education that you were able to successfully navigate your early childhood experience.
Zoning is enabled by states and enacted locally, federal regulations are meaningless. I don't really buy Kahlenberg's argument that the Federal government can regulation zoning as a practice based on fair housing laws; I don't think plaintiffs will find any sympathy at SCOTUS. With that being said, there are way the federal government can coerce action - funding being the primary way. The Trump administration tried to dissuade communities from becoming Sanctuary Cities by threatening to withhold funding.
Ed Glazer in his opinion piece has a good idea in regards to using federal funding to change zoning practices: link zoning to infrastructure funding. Most people don't realize that suburbs were enabled/incentivized by the federally-funded interstate highway system. If federal funding for highways dries up, new housing in suburban locations will also dry up - no one will want to live in a place that has horrible traffic.
Residential zoning is fundamentally a housing issue and housing is a vast topic; zoning is only one of many factors that contribute to housing costs. Generally, home construction costs fall into six buckets (thanks to the National Homebuilders Association for this info, I added one factor based on my research): labor, lending, laws (zoning), land, lumber, and looking ahead (expected return). If the Biden Administration is serious about increasing home affordability, it must start working on all of these factors. It could work to loosen zoning via transportation funding, improve and fund job training for construction trades (there is a lot to this one but I'll keep it brief), keep lending rates low and back loans for non-traditional forms of residential construction (banks are often reluctant to lend to housing other than single family because they are naturally risk-averse and want to fund construction of tried and true housing products), construction materials cost could be lowered by reducing tariffs, and guarantee rents for multifamily developments. Obviously, all of these policy levers have secondary effects that must be considered as well.
Finally, home affordability is a function of wages. The generally accepted amount of wages devoted to housing costs is less than 30%. If you increase the denominator, you increase affordability. If folks made more money, they could afford more homes (there are a ton of factors here too but I simplified it as best I could).
As you can probably tell, I am more than happy to discuss this topic.
April 20th, 2021 at 12:38 AM ^
Really? Six-figure salaries are not enough to buy homes in some parts of the country and the problem is record low interest rates?
We have a supply constraint due to zoning laws. In my B10 college town (Bloomington), we have the highest housing costs in the state and people are going apeshit over allowing duplexes in the neighborhood immediately next to the university as they recently rezoned the area. Old rich people are scared of losing their sunlight!!! This is straight from the local paper (and I can easily find similar quotes from other areas.
This is a nuanced topic, no single aspect is the root cause of constricted housing supply or higher housing prices - that is why I listed all six on the supply side (the six Ls) and the primary factor from the demand side (wages). Lending is important and can be a barrier regardless of interest rates - lending practices have steered builders towards single family housing rather than multifamily. Zoning is important, probably the most important aspect of housing supply but it isn't a silver bullet.
Rich old people have the craziest fears lol. ADUs (accessory dwelling units, aka mother-in-law suites or granny flats) are mostly constructed using existing structures like garages or attics, not sun blotting monstrosities.
April 20th, 2021 at 11:01 AM ^
Interestingly, when I lived out in southern California (San Gabriel and Temple City, near Pasadena,) there were several people from church with a "mother-in-law' tiny house on their property . . . just a living area, kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom. I loved the idea, but realized much later that zoning in many areas prohibited this. I have a friend, fellow UofM grad, whose son is doing this in the Raleigh-Durham area, to better utilize huge lots. Fear (and sometimes hidden racism and class awareness) often keep this from happening.
April 19th, 2021 at 10:51 PM ^
Hello fellow MUPer! Class of ‘99
April 19th, 2021 at 11:21 PM ^
Nice! Class of 2010 MUPpet here.
I think you may be putting too much emphasis on zoning and not enough on the market. Change the zoning laws in a city like Bloomfield or Birmingham and you are just going to get really expensive smaller homes/apartments. A builder/landlord still has to turn a profit. You aren't going to see any real difference in price that is going to make a Bloomfield house affordable to someone living in Madison Heights.
And besides, the key to getting into a nicer area on the cheap is buying a run down fixer. Anything new is going to come with a new price tag.
I don't disagree that housing supply is driven by profit but the market is influenced by external factors, like regulations. If those regulations are relaxed, profits could increase and if other factors, like labor supply, are favorable, more new homes are built. I wouldn't downplay the impact of new construction on lower price housing. A relatively recent study found that new construction actually improved affordability in housing markets (housing market defined as a metro area - individual municipalities do not comprise a housing market). This is because people typically vacate a house in the metro to move into the new construction, the people that move into the recently vacated houses are moving from a different house, and so on down the line. So even if expensive smaller, profitable units are built in Bloomfield, it will improve affordability by freeing up houses elsewhere in the region.
A cursory glance at California’s Prop 13, who proposed it, and who defends it should disabuse you of any notion that the state is progressive in its housing and education policies.
it has been one of several culprits of the destruction of quality public education in the state - one which used to be the nation’s best.
April 19th, 2021 at 10:07 PM ^
Correct, prop 13 is the ONLY tax advantage California offers businesses and citizens
Howard Jarvis has entered the chat.
I know California has a similar top x% rule that has caused some issues but did get kids who were from more economically limited areas a chance at top notch education. I agree it's worth looking into at least.
April 19th, 2021 at 10:01 PM ^
Well, zoning laws are anti-freedom and dumb, but the place I grew up had plenty of zoning laws and didn't send many students to Michigan. There were one or two per grade tops and I don't think it has increased.
April 20th, 2021 at 12:29 AM ^
I’m a fan of plans like this. Speaking personally, I come from one of the worst school districts in the country. I did well in it, but I was woefully unprepared for college. It took me 7 years to finish. My transcript is a disaster.
But finish I did. It was hard, I nearly quit on multiple occasions — the papers to permanently withdraw were signed, but never submitted. And now 20ish years later I’m in a senior position working on multi-billion dollar mergers, doing quite well for myself, thank you. And I know there were a few other kids from my school who could’ve done as well or better than me with the opportunity, but didn’t get it (for reasons that only admissions offices know). What the exact right numbers are for how programs like this should work I won’t begin to opine on, because education policy is very far from my area of expertise. But I know that even if schools aren’t preparing their students for college, it’s still best for some (although sadly not all) of those students to be given the opportunity to attend the top colleges and universities in this country.
Michigan graduate, in Texas. Zoned to one of the good public high schools. The elder kid will start high school in August. Would love to see him or his sister attend UofM. But that's down the road.
10% rule keeps the kids motivated. That's also for ALL schools in the UT system. Getting admission to UT Austin requires top 6%. The competition in the high school my kids will go to is tremendous. We received the high school course selection package in January I think. The counselors were already talking about how that's not the only way to get to UT. They were telling the parents that kids even without a top 10% GPA can get to UT, if they are well rounded.
When we were looking for a house, some folks suggested that we move to a less competitive HS where the kids would stand a better chance to crack the top 10%/6%. Only time will tell.
Regarding the home values and parental net worth, the zip codes attending this HS rank quite high.
With restrictions on affirmative action (along with what I would guess is the tendency of admissions officers to break ties in favor of high schools they are more familar with) perhaps a top 10 percent admissions plan where presumably no one gets in who is even just outside of that 10% tier is the best way to achieve greater diversity. But I imagine, as has been said below, that a system like that would incentivize students to prioritize grades over extracurriculars, taking challenging classes in areas that weren't their strengths etc.
April 20th, 2021 at 12:24 PM ^
For instance, Bloomfield Township is 88% white, with a median income of $144,000 . . . in 2007! I don't know the zoning laws there, but I'm going to guess they make it nigh on impossible for moderate income families to live there.
FWIW, Bloomfield (and pretty much all the rich Oakland County communities) has a large number of empty-nest households. The school-age population is more diverse than the total. According to the latest data, Bloomfield Hills HS was 72% White, 10% Asian, 10% Black, and 5% of two or more races. 12% of the student body was from a low-income household.
That makes sense (empty nest households.) The original article I linked to pointed out that zoning laws are slightly more nuanced: they discriminate more on the basis of perceived "class" status, rather than strictly race. In other words, a wealthy community might have a fair amount of diversity ethnically, religiously, politically, culturally, but more homogeneity in terms of class and education level.