“This basically never happens in the US, where the rich have decamped in many cities, and city centers are invariably left-wing strongholds”
One of the features of exclusionary zoning which really surprised me are the associations with educational outcomes: test scores are better in areas with exclusionary zoning, spending per pupil is a lot higher, as are Chetty opportunity measures — these are good places for social mobility.
I think one way to rationalize this set of regulations is the decentralized nature of school funding and administration. In many developed countries around the world, there don’t seem to be massive differences in the funding or curriculum of public schools. As a result, you don’t often hear of people in, say, Italy or France moving to specific neighborhoods to access local schools. School quality is, at least compared to the US, relatively homogenous, at least at the within-city level (there do seem to be large regional variations in some of these countries).
As a result, with less scope for educational sorting, you typically see rich people live in the center of the city. And some of these people in the city center, in places like Madrid or Buenos Aires, vote for the right wing party. This basically never happens in the US, where the rich have decamped in many cities, and city centers are invariably left-wing strongholds.
So what explains this differential sorting of people and partisanship across countries?
We can’t prove it in our data conclusively, but I think a very plausible hypothesis is that tying school quality to local conditions generates incentives for rich people to decamp for suburban areas, exclude the poor through high bulk regulatory barriers, and thereby produce enclaves of high quality educational.
