Race, Class, and Neighborhood: Differences in the Residential Return on Individual Resources

Abstract

Using individual-level data from the neighborhood files of the 1970 Public Use Sample, the components of individual socioeconomic status (SES) education, occupation, and income-are treated as resources; and racial differences in the return on these resources, differences in neighborhood residential quality, are estimated, decomposed, and subjected to component analysis. It is documented that blacks receive a lesser return than whites; they reside in inferior neighborhoods despite similar resources. The notion is tested and supported that one mechanism explaining the lesser return is that blacks are channeled into predominantly black neighborhoods and are thus less able than whites to achieve class segregation. Channeling has a greater impact on economic factors than on social factors; on the latter, intraracial segregation seems more possible. As a final note, given the theoretical importance of community and neighborhood contexts, and thegeneral assumption in stratification theory that individual status (or parental status) is an adequate proxy for such context, a reexamination of studies of racial differences previously presumed to be net of class is suggested. The persistence of residential segregation by race has been demonstrated on many occasions (Erbe; Kantrowitz), and it has been shown to persist independent of occupational segregation and other forms of economic segregation (Duncan and Duncan; Kantrowitz; Simkus; Taeuber; Taeuber and Taeuber). Most recently, Simkus has demonstrated that up to one-fourth of occupational residential segregation can be attributed to racial segregation in both the occupational and residential distributions, and he redemonstrated the point that within-occupation residential racial segregation is extremely high. Using detailed tract level data from one SMSA, Erbe found that black professionals and managers, black college graduates, and blacks with incomes in excess of $25,000 lived in tracts comparable, respectively, to those of whites who were unskilled workers, school dropouts, and earned less than $3,000. Others have examined the effects of residential socioeconomic segregation, both structural effects (e.g., Morgan; Smith)