The Fair Housing Act and Black Atlantans: Post-1970 changes in residential density

Abstract

ABSTRACT Due to restrictive racial housing policies, in 1970, 82% of Black residents in the city of Atlanta lived in 41 census tracts that had very high population densities. We take the density as a measure of the impact of these housing policies. The 1968 Fair Housing Act weakened these barriers to housing location choice. We explore by decade how Black residents adjusted to this high density and take the decrease in density as measure of the effect of the act. We find that there was substantial movement of Black residents out of these census tracts in the 1970s and that the exodus continued for several additional years. We also explore by decade the effects of density on the location of the Black population throughout the Atlanta region. We find that in each decade the change in the number of Black residents in census tracts is negatively and statistically correlated with the population density at the beginning of the decade. We find that it wasn’t until 2020 that the residential distribution of Black residents by density was similar to that for white residents.