Abstract

Forthcoming JRER Paper

Court-ordered Busing and Housing Prices: The Case of Pasadena and San Marino

Steven Carter
Department of Economics
University of California, Irvine
3151 Social Science Plaza
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
Email: sjcarter@uci.edu

Abstract:

In 1970, the Federal District Court ordered that no school in the Pasadena School District would be allowed to open with a “majority minority population.” To comply with this order, Pasadena began busing many of its minority students to other within-district schools with smaller minority populations. This article will examine the effect of this integration policy on housing prices, using home sales data gathered from within the Pasadena and San Marino Unified School Districts (busing was not implemented in the latter district). The results indicate that the busing policy does not have a significant effect on the house prices.