“Not Just a Lateral Move”: Residential Decisions and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality

Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for research that considers residential selection as a social stratification process. In this paper, we present findings from work our team has done over the last 17 years to explore how people end up living where they do, relying in large part on systematically sampled in–depth narrative interviews with families. We focus on four key decisions: whether to move; where to move; whether to send children to school in the neighborhood; and whether to rent or own a home. We found that many residential mobility decisions among the poor were “reactive,” with unpredictable shocks forcing families out of their homes. As a result of reactive moving, housing search time frames became shorter and poor parents employed short–term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long–term investment thinking about neighborhood and school district quality. These shocks, constraints, and compressed time frames led parents to decouple some dimensions of neighborhoods and schools from the housing search process while maximizing others, like immediacy of shelter, unit quality, and proximity to work and child care. Finally, we found that policies can significantly shape and better support some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context.

Double Minority Status and Neighborhoods: Examining the Primacy of Race in Black Immigrants’ Racial and Socioeconomic Segregation

Sociologists have long viewed spatial assimilation as a measure of minorities’ socioeconomic progress. While assimilation increases as socioeconomic status (SES) improves, blacks remain more highly segregated than any other race/ethnic group. I use the locational attainment model to determine whether black immigrants—like their U.S.–born counterparts—are highly segregated. This paper broadens the segregation literature by determining: (1) black immigrant segregation patterns after controlling for individual–level characteristics, (2) the extent to which segregation varies by location, and (3) if racial segregation has the same socioeconomic consequences for U.S.– and foreign–born blacks. I find that black immigrants face high racial and socioeconomic segregation in mainly Caribbean settlement areas. However, black immigrants in all but two predominantly African settlement areas experience no segregation. Essentially, I find that there is a great deal of diversity in black immigrants’ segregation patterns stemming from differential treatment in the housing market based on African immigrants’ higher SES and/or African immigrants’ residential choices. Results in the two outlier African settlement areas (Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.) suggest that entry visa may play an important role in black segregation.

White and Latino Locational Attainments: Assessing the Role of Race and Resources in U.S. Metropolitan Residential Segregation

This study examines White-Latino residential segregation in six U.S. metropolitan areas using new methods to draw a connection between two dominant research traditions in the segregation literature and empirically analyze prevailing conceptual frameworks. Based on microlevel locational attainment analyses, we find that for Latinos, acculturation and socioeconomic status are positively associated with greater residential contact with Whites and thus promote lower segregation consistent with predictions of spatial assimilation theory. However, standardization and decomposition analysis reveals that a substantial portion of White-Latino segregation can be attributed to White-Latino differences in the ability to translate acculturation and socioeconomic assimilation into co-residence with Whites. Thus, consistent with predictions of place stratification theory, evidence suggests that spatial assimilation dynamics are limited by continuing race-based factors leading to the expectation that segregation will persist at moderate to high levels even after Latinos reach parity with Whites on social and economic resources that shape locational attainments. Therefore, we offer two conclusions. First, contemporary White-Latino segregation is due in part to group differences in social and economic resources that determine locational attainments and that this component of White-Latino segregation will continue to be significant so long as Whites and Latinos differ along these social and economic characteristics. Second, while spatial assimilation dynamics can promote partial reductions in White-Latino segregation, we expect segregation to continue at moderate to high levels because place stratification dynamics limit Latino residential integration even when Latinos and Whites are comparable on relevant resources.

Muslim/Non-Muslim Locational Attainment in Philadelphia: A New Fault Line in Residential Inequality?

This study examines Muslim/non-Muslim disparities in locational attainment. We pooled data from the 2004, 2006, and 2008 waves of the Public Health Management Corporation’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Household Survey. These data contain respondents’ religious identities and are geocoded at the census-tract level, allowing us to merge American Community Survey data and examine neighborhood-level outcomes to gauge respondents’ locational attainment. Net of controls, our multivariate analyses reveal that among blacks and nonblacks, Muslims live in neighborhoods that have significantly lower shares of whites and greater representations of blacks. Among blacks, Muslims are significantly less likely to reside in suburbs, relative to non-Muslims. The Muslim disadvantages for blacks and nonblacks in neighborhood poverty and neighborhood median income, however, become insignificant. Our results provide support for the tenets of the spatial assimilation and place stratification models and suggest that Muslim/non-Muslim disparities in locational attainment comprise a new fault line in residential stratification.

The Effect of Incarceration on Residential Mobility between Poor and Nonpoor Neighborhoods

This study examines the impact of incarceration on residential mobility between poor and nonpoor neighborhoods. Formerly incarcerated individuals move at high rates, but little is known about if or how incarceration impacts movement between neighborhoods of varying quality. I ground my approach in traditional accounts of locational attainment that emphasize pathways and barriers between poor and nonpoor neighborhoods. Results show that incarceration leads to downward neighborhood mobility from nonpoor into poor neighborhoods. Incarceration does not appear to trap formerly incarcerated individuals in poor neighborhoods. Additional analyses show that the effect of incarceration is initially strongest among formerly incarcerated whites, but that there is significant racial variation in neighborhood mobility across time. My results provide evidence that incarceration should be placed alongside human capital characteristics and structural barriers as an important predictor of mobility between poor and nonpoor neighborhoods.

A Comparison of Traditional and Discrete-Choice Approaches to the Analysis of Residential Mobility and Locational Attainment

This article contrasts traditional modeling approaches and discrete-choice models as methods to analyze locational attainment—how individual and household characteristics (such as race, socioeconomic status, age) influence the characteristics of neighborhoods of residence (such as racial composition and median income). Traditional models analyze attributes of a neighborhood as a function of the characteristics of the households within them; discrete-choice methods, on the other hand, are based on dyadic analysis of neighborhood attributes and household characteristics. I outline two problems with traditional approaches to residential mobility analysis that may be addressed through discrete-choice analysis. I also discuss disadvantages of the discrete-choice approach. Finally, I use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate residential mobility using traditional locational attainment and discrete-choice models; I show that these produce similar estimates but that the discrete-choice approach allows for estimates that examine how multiple place characteristics simultaneously guide migration. Substantively, these models reveal that the disproportionate migration of black households into lower-income tracts amounts to sorting of black households into black tracts, which on average are lower income.

The Distribution and Evolution of Physical Neighborhood Problems during the Great Recession

While the Great Recession had clear effects on economic growth, unemployment, and household wealth and earnings in the United States, it also likely affected the quality of neighborhoods. Situated in the literature on locational attainment and economic shocks, this research considers how a national economic crisis affects physical neighborhood problems and existing disparities between minority and white households in experiencing these problems (e.g., street disrepair, trash, abandoned buildings, window bars). Results indicate that neighborhood problems increased between 2005 and 2009 and large and persistent disparities existed between some minority groups and white non–Hispanics in experiencing these problems, even after controlling for potentially confounding factors. However, there is little support for the idea that disparities between minorities and white non–Hispanics in experiencing neighborhood problems increased during this time. These research findings suggest that large and pervasive shocks, such as an economic recession, can influence locational attainment by changing neighborhood quality in absolute terms but may not affect the relative hierarchy of place.

Accéder au meilleur quartier possible : types de famille et ségrégation résidentielle croisée à Montréal

Le sujet principal de ce texte est une forme très ciblée de ségrégation démographique : la ségrégation des familles avec enfants selon leur type. Cependant, puisque la répartition spatiale des familles avec couple marié, avec couple en union libre, monoparentales à chef féminin et monoparentales à chef masculin ne dépend pas uniquement de leur structure, il faut aussi considérer d’autres facettes de leur identité, notamment leurs caractéristiques socioéconomiques et ethnoculturelles. La combinaison de ces facteurs engendre une ségrégation croisée que nous explorons avec les microdonnées du recensement de 2006 pour la région métropolitaine de Montréal. Nous utilisons d’abord des indices de ségrégation pour mettre en évidence une ségrégation familiale « brute », puis nous avons recours à des modèles de locational attainment pour déterminer l’effet « net » du type de famille sur le revenu médian du quartier de résidence. Nous trouvons qu’il existe une interaction importante entre l’appartenance ethnoculturelle et le type de famille, ce qui nous conduit à relativiser les résultats de recherches qui ne prennent pas en compte l’hétérogénéité interne des types de famille.

Ethnic Origin and Residential Attainment of Immigrants in European Countries

Segregated ethnic neighborhoods are prevalent in most contemporary European cities. Whereas patterns of segregation have been studied extensively in America, research on immigrants’ segregation and residential location in Europe is relatively new. The present research utilizes data from the European Social Survey to examine patterns of locational attainment among immigrants across 13 European countries and the extent to which they are influenced by immigrants’ tenure in the host country, socio–economic characteristics, preferences for residential location, exposure to discrimination, and ethnic and cultural origin. The analysis reveals that residential attainment varies considerably across ethnic and cultural groups: immigrants from Asia or Africa as well as Muslims are less likely to reside in neighborhoods which are perceived to be inhabited mostly by Europeans. Although the effects of generation, ethnic origin, and Muslim religion on residential location are quite uniform across countries, some meaningful cross–national differences in patterns and levels of immigrants’ residential segregation are observed and discussed. Net of other effects, differential residential preferences and perception of discrimination are found to influence perceived ethnic composition of immigrants’ neighborhoods.