How Zoning Promotes Inequality in Education: The Case of the Buffalo Area

Summary

This report examines the ways in which zoning laws affect housing and schooling opportunities in the Buffalo region. It begins with an examination of two communities—the Martin Luther King Park neighborhood in Buffalo and the suburban Village of East Aurora. Earlier reports in this series have made similar comparisons of neighborhoods in Queens, Long Island, and Westchester County.1 In addition to the two Buffalo communities where discriminatory zoning has caused extreme segregation, this report also introduces a third Buffalo-area neighborhood—the community of Elmwood–Bidwell—where the city’s zoning policies allowed a mix of uses, building types, and densities that may point in the direction of a better future.

Creators/Authors

Richard D. Kahlenberg
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and was formerly a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. He is the author of Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See (PublicAffairs, 2023).