Building Representation: The Politics of Development, Diversity, and Institutional Norms

Does the election of racial minorities to local office reshape land-use policy? Standard accounts predict that minority officeholders should transmit constituent preferences, which favor housing development, into policy. Using city-council election data for large U.S. cities (2010--2021) and a regression discontinuity design in close elections, I find that electing a minority councilmember increases total residential permitting by 21-33%, but almost entirely through single-family construction; multifamily permitting does not increase commensurately. Evidence from 60 semi-structured interviews identifies the mechanisms: minority officials prioritize homeownership as an equity strategy to close racial wealth gaps while expressing skepticism toward developer-led multifamily projects associated with displacement. Institutional norms of district deference give individual members near-unilateral authority over development, providing a pathway to policy influence that does not require a critical mass. The findings demonstrate that descriptive representation has substantive consequences for land-use policy, but that minority officeholders act on priorities rooted in their communities' experiences with exclusion rather than simply channeling the housing preferences expressed by minority voters in surveys.