Federally financed affordable housing developments do not typically include yoga studios or rooftop clubs with spectacular skyline views. But in recent years, developers have been using public subsidies to build affordable apartments designated for artists that include such amenities.

A new study of this kind of housing in Minnesota suggests it might worsen racial segregation by bypassing black and Latino people in favor of younger, white tenants.

Such artist developments, which receive federal tax credits, became much more common after 2008, when developers in Minnesota persuaded Congress to exempt these projects from a law that required subsidized buildings to be open to anyone in the general public who met income guidelines. The exemption applies nationally but is heavily used by developers located in Minneapolis and St Paul.

A new study by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School criticizes the decision to lavish public subsidies on buildings that draw mostly white tenants and benefit few of the region’s most economically vulnerable people. According to the authors, nearly all of the artist units were in buildings that were more than 80 percent white. By contrast, about 80 percent of the residents of traditional subsidized housing in Minneapolis and St. Paul are members of minorities. The artist developments represent “the whitest, youngest and highest-income subset of subsidized housing in Minneapolis and St. Paul — by a wide margin.”