Geography of racial coresidence

Abstract

Whereas most work on residential race relations in US cities is based on the concept of segregation, our approach studies this issue from a who-lives-with-whom perspective. To this end, we study coresidence profiles – percentages of a given racial subpopulation living in different population zones. Population zones are data-driven divisions of a city based on characteristic racial compositions. We used 1990 and 2010 decennial census block-level data for 61 largest US metropolitan areas to calculate coresidence profiles for four major racial subpopulations in each city at both years. Profiles for each race/year combination were clustered into three archetypes. Cities, where given race profiles belong to the same archetype, have similar coresidence patterns with respect to this race. We present the geographic distributions of co-habitation profiles and show how they changed during the 1990–2010 period. Our results revealed that coresidence profiles depend not only on racial preferences but also on the availability of racial groups; cities in the different geographical regions have different coresidence profiles because they have different shares of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian subpopulations. Temporal changes in coresidence profiles are linked to the increased share of Hispanic and Asian populations.