Race and Municipal Annexation After the Voting Rights Act

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.

Keywords:

• annexation
• municipal underbounding
• racial discrimination
• voting rights

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank James Dell for assistance with the collection of data for this study. He is also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for thorough and insightful comments.

RESEARCH SUPPORT

Data collection for this research was funded by the Provost Undergraduate Research Initiative at Michigan State University.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be found on the publisher’s website.

Note

Notes

1 I refer throughout this study to the Supreme Court invalidating Section 5, although technically Section 5 was not invalidated. The Court invalidated only the coverage formula in Section 4.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noah J. Durst

NOAH J. DURST ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University.