Abstract
This article uses newly collected data on communities receiving Neighborhood Legal Services Programs (NLSP) grants between 1965 and 1975 to evaluate the impact of NLSPs on civil disorders and resulting changes in property values in African American communities. We employ several empirical strategies, all of which confirm the NLSP’s effectiveness in combatting civil disorders and indicate a robust, positive relationship between NLSPs and property values. We find that NLSP funding increased property values by 2 percent. These results are consistent with a substantial reduction in riot propensities due to target government funding, and further support claims by the Kerner Commission report that the NLSP mitigated the damage resulting from the civil disorders.
- © 2018 Russell Sage Foundation. Cunningham, Jamein P., and Rob Gillezeau. 2018. “The Effects of the Neighborhood Legal Services Program on Riots and the Wealth of African Americans.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 4(6): 144–57. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2018.4.6.07. This project was generously supported by an NICHD center grant to the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan (R24 HD041028). The authors would like to thank William Collins and Robert Margo for sharing their data. Direct correspondence to: Jamein P. Cunningham at jamein.p.cunningham{at}memphis.edu, University of Memphis, Fogelman College of Business and Economics, 3675 Central Ave., Memphis, TN 38152; and Rob Gillezeau at gillezr{at}uvic.ca, University of Victoria, Department of Economics, 3800 Finnerty Rd., Victoria, British Columbia V8P 5C2.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.