Policies influence the life trajectories of individuals by shaping the racial composition of places and creating differential access to opportunities. My dissertation examines the political economy of housing and traces the process of residential mobility from the creation of regulatory environments to household residential decisions within a housing market constructed by policymakers, developers, and financiers. I examine the relationship between the creation of the housing market and residential decision-making from the creation of regulations through land use policies, to developers’ decisions of both where and what type of housing to build, and then relate these decisions to household-level residential choices. In the first chapter, I test the theory underpinning the process of upzoning and find that while increasing the maximum allowable residential density in a municipality alone is not sufficient to promote racial inclusion, building housing, regardless of zoning change, is associated with an increase in non-Hispanic Black residents and a decrease in non-Hispanic White residents. In the next chapter, I examine the mobility patterns of LIHTC tenants and find that there are racial disparities in residential attainment among LIHTC tenants, particularly for access to resource-rich neighborhoods, with White LIHTC tenants being far more likely to have access to high-resource neighborhoods compared to Black, Hispanic, and Asian LIHTC tenants. In the last chapter, I study how actors influence the development of a zoning institution in a small town and find that rural defenders adopt the community-oriented rhetoric of neighborhood defenders in urban and suburban communities to the context of their rural area.