Schools and Housing in Metropolitan History: An Introduction

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the interplay between educational policies and housing markets in metropolitan U.S. history during the twentieth century. A review of the literature in urban/suburban history reveals that most scholars have emphasized the centrality of housing policies and real estate markets in establishing patterns of racial segregation and metropolitan inequality while marginalizing or neglecting the educational policies and public school markets that simultaneously shaped these processes. The evidence in this forum challenges the dominant view that housing policies structured educational outcomes in American cities and suburbs, revealing that school policies often shaped housing outcomes as well.