Abstract
Residency requirements impose restrictions on the domicile of individuals. Contemporary debates over residency and rights increasingly foreground immigration, citizenship, and belonging. This essay, however, shifts scale and addresses the exclusionary power of residency requirements associated with municipal employment. And just as race continues to play a central role in national debates over belonging, I illustrate that race continues to matter in local public employment. The analysis centers on a cluster of towns in northern New Jersey that required firefighters to live in member municipalities. The towns used the exclusionary power of residency requirements to privilege the employment of local residents, thereby reducing the employment chances of Blacks who lived near, but not in, the towns. The NAACP joined several individual plaintiffs in successfully challenging this tactic. This case study relates then to recent court decisions on race and public employment but also offers a critique of the role of municipal residency requirements as a tool for reform. The analysis points to the irony that residency requirements designed to be inclusive can operate to be exclusive at the same time.
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Acknowledgments
Carla Castillo and Jonathan Chipman provided valuable research assistance. Sheila Culbert and Serin Houston offered guidance and lively debate during the framing of this essay. They, of course, bear no responsibility for the ideas herein. And last, but not least, thanks Kingsley. Your support in grad school helped build the foundations of a career I could not have imagined in the early 1980s. This essay on applied geography, municipal employment, race, and public policy is for you.
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Wright, R. (2020). Residency, Race, and the Right to Public Employment. In: Chen, Z., Bowen, W.M., Whittington, D. (eds) Development Studies in Regional Science. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 42. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1435-7_5
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