Income Segregation Research Articles

On the Impact of Public Housing on Income Segregation in France.

This article provides a geographic analysis of the contribution of public housing to income segregation in France from 1999 to 2015. The analysis is conducted with several segregation indices and at different geographic scales. Surprisingly, it appears that while home tenure (public vs. private housing) segregation has been decreasing, income segregation has been rising. With segregation decomposition techniques, we provide evidence that this is partly due to an increasing concentration of low-income households in public housing, which cancels out the effect of the spatial dispersion of public housing. Indeed, while public housing has become more homogeneously distributed geographically, which should help to reduce income segregation, the distribution of income within public (and private) housing has changed: households living in public housing were poorer in 2015 than in 1999. We also provide evidence of a sorting effect-the process of allocating public housing that is not random-so that the richest neighborhoods or municipalities receive wealthier-than-average public tenants.

Predictors of Access to Gifted Education: What Makes for a Successful School?

A wide research base has documented the disproportional enrollment in K-12 special education and gifted and talented services across racial and socioeconomic lines. This study extends that knowledge base by integrating multiple population-level datasets to better understand predictors of access to and enrollment in gifted and talented services and tested whether these variables remained predictive after controlling for state mandate to provide services, average district achievement, and average school achievement. Results showed that states varied, with some serving 20% of their students as gifted and others serving 0%. Similarly, within-district income segregation, income-related achievement gaps, and parental education were dominant predictors of a school offering gifted and talented services and the size of the population served, even after controlling for achievement and the presence of a state mandate. These findings suggest that gifted and talented programs are often made available based on school or community demographics rather than the needs of the students.

Impact of neighborhood socioeconomic status, income segregation, and greenness on blood biomarkers of inflammation.

Background:Neighborhood deprivation is linked with inflammation, which may explain poorer health across populations. Behavioral risk factors are assumed to largely mediate these relationships, but few studies have examined this. We examined three neighborhood contextual factors that could exert direct effects on inflammation: (1) neighborhood socioeconomic status, (2) an index of concentration at extremes (that measures segregation), and (3) surrounding vegetation (greenness).Methods:Using blood samples and addresses collected from prospective cohorts of 7,930 male (1990–1994) and 16,183 female (1986–1990) health professionals with at least one inflammatory marker, we prospectively linked neighborhood contextual factors to inflammatory biomarkers (adiponectin, C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, soluble tumor necrosis factor receptor-2). Log-transformed, z-scaled component measures were used to calculate an inflammation score. Neighborhood socioeconomic status and index of concentration of extremes were obtained from the 1990 decennial census and linked to participant addresses. Surrounding greenness was assessed from satellite data and focal statistics were applied to generate exposures within 270 m and 1230 m of the participants’ address. We fit multiple linear regression models adjusting for demographic, clinical, and behavioral risk factors.Results:Higher neighborhood socioeconomic status was associated with lower inflammation score in women (β for interquartile range increase = –27.7%, 95% CI: –34.9%, –19.8%) and men (β = –21.2%, 95% CI: –31.0%, –10.1%). Similarly, participants in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of high-income households were associated with lower inflammation score in women (β = –27.8%, 95% CI: –35.8%, –18.7%) and men (β = −16.4%, 95% CI: –29.7%, –0.56%). Surrounding greenness within 270 m of each participant’s address was associated with lower inflammation score in women (β = −18.9%, 95% CI: –28.9%, –7.4%) but not men. Results were robust to sensitivity analyses to assess unmeasured confounding and selection bias.Discussion:Our findings support the hypothesis that adverse neighborhood environments may contribute to inflammation through pathways independent of behavioral risk factors, including psychosocial stress and toxic environments.

Comment on Logan et al.: “The Uptick in Income Segregation”

Previous articleNext article No AccessCommentary and DebateComment on Logan et al.: “The Uptick in Income Segregation”1Kendra Bischoff, Ann Owens, Sean F. Reardon, and Joseph B. TownsendKendra BischoffCornell University Search for more articles by this author , Ann OwensUniversity of Southern California Search for more articles by this author , Sean F. ReardonStanford University Search for more articles by this author , and Joseph B. TownsendStanford University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 127, Number 5March 2022 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719531 Views: 381Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Segregation of Students by Income in Public Schools

Over the past three decades, children from low-income families have increasingly been attending different public schools than those from more affluent families. Though recent work has helped us understand patterns of income segregation between districts and schools within districts, we know little about segregation of students as they experience school: in the classroom. We attempt to advance knowledge of segregation of students by income at the classroom level. We use data from North Carolina that includes information on classroom assignments and students’ economically disadvantaged (ED) status. We assess whether ED students are clustered/segregated into different classrooms than other students. We find that within-school segregation rose by about 10% between 2007 and 2014 in elementary and middle schools we study.

Neighborhood Police Encounters, Health, And Violence In A Southern City.

The disproportionate rates of police surveillance and encounters in many communities in the US may be contributing to inequities in health and violence. Frequent policing in communities, which may often also be aggressive policing, has been associated with diminished health and well-being. This study adds to the growing body of research on this issue by examining the relationships between neighborhood police stop-and-frisk encounters and both health outcomes and violence rates in New Orleans, Louisiana, in an ecological, cross-sectional study using local police report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and census data. The average rate of police stop-and-frisk encounters was more than three times higher for Black adults compared with their White counterparts. Even after we accounted for concentrated disadvantage (a high percentage of residents of lower socioeconomic status) and residential racial and income segregation, neighborhoods with higher rates of encounters had significantly higher prevalence rates of smoking, physical inactivity, and poor physical health, and they experienced significantly more violent crime (18.35 more per 1,000) and domestic violence (49.91 more per 1,000) events than neighborhoods with lower levels of police encounters. There is a need for strengthened policy focused on the relationship between frequent policing and health and violence outcomes.

Inequality and income segregation in Brazilian cities: a nationwide analysis

Residential segregation has brought significant challenges to cities worldwide and has important implications for health. This study aimed to assess income segregation in the 152 largest Brazilian cities in the SALURBAL Project. We identify specific socioeconomic characteristics related to residential segregation by income using the Brazilian demographic census of 2010 and calculated the income dissimilarity index (IDI) at the census tract level for each city, subsequently comparing it with Gini and other local socioeconomic variables. We evaluated our results’ robustness using a bootstrap correction to the IDI to examine the consequences of using different income cut-offs in substantial urban and regional inequalities. We identified a two minimum wage cut-off as the most appropriate. We found little evidence of upward bias in the calculation of the IDI regardless of the cut-off used. Among the ten most segregated cities, nine are in the Northeast region, with Brazil's highest income inequality and poverty. Our results indicate that the Gini index and poverty are the main variables associated with residential segregation.

Public Housing, Income Segregation and Residential Sorting in Hong Kong, 1986-2016

Public Housing, Income Segregation and Residential Sorting in Hong Kong, 1986-2016

Public Transit Access and Income Segregation

Public Transit Access and Income Segregation

Gentrifying Cities, Amenities and Income Segregation: Evidence from San Francisco

Gentrifying Cities, Amenities and Income Segregation: Evidence from San Francisco

The idea of a city for people as a factor in the localization of protest voting in new residential complexes

The gradual formation of income segregation in the post-Soviet city leads to the localization of protest voting. New residential complexes are significant spatial elements of this process. The new housing attracts citizens with similar income levels and perception of the quality of the living environment, empowering urban segregation. Moreover, the gap between expected and experienced urban life is usually observed in the new housing, supported by frequent practices of deceptive marketing and concluding real estate transactions long before the construction is over. Following that, the discrepancy between the character of the urban environment inside and outside the residential complex forces the localization of protest voting within the new housing. The key concept in explaining that kind of a protest vote localization is “city for people”. The external attributes of the city for people, including safety, accessibility, sustainability, are promoted by developers as part of marketing campaigns and shape a latent demand from the buyers. However, the systematic lack of these claimed elements in new residential complexes leads residents to political protest and focus on the political component of the city for people. Citizens adopt a critical attitude towards the infringement of the rights of residents by developers and urban administration and a request for equal participation in city management. The paper critically observes the case of protest voting in the residential complex «Ya - Romantik» in St Petersburg. The significant lack of infrastructure empowers citizens there to manifest political claims and exercise solidarity. Also the prospective locations of the protest voting are discussed.

Student Assignment Policies and Racial and Income Segregation of Schools, School Attendance Zones, and Neighborhoods

Purpose: This article examines the relationship between educational and residential segregation in three school districts with differing approaches to student assignment. Racial and income segregation within school districts is often only examined at the school level, even as school patterns are often related to residential and attendance zone segregation depending on integration policies aimed at decoupling these relationships. Research Method/Approach: Using an innovative data set, the School Attendance Boundary Survey, along with Census and Common Core of Data data, this analysis examines racial and income segregation at the neighborhood, school zone, and school levels in three districts with varied student assignment policies to explore the relationship between districts’ diversity policies and school, attendance zone, and residential segregation. Findings: We find that, despite high residential segregation, educational segregation varies in these three districts. In the two districts that sought to increase diversity in their student assignment policies, educational segregation was lower than in the third district that did not consider diversity, despite similar levels of residential segregation. The findings suggest that district leaders’ use of diversity-focused student assignment policies may be one way to disrupt the link between residential and school segregation. Conclusions: Understanding the segregation of educational boundaries within school districts, and the relationship between school zone segregation and segregation at other geographic scales, offers insights into how district leaders could utilize student assignment policies to reduce racial and income segregation.

Income sorting by specialized services: Service differentiation by overlapping governments

AbstractBackgroundThe flexible boundaries of special districts allow for overlaps with each other that generate various specialized service bundles on a territorial basis. The combined overlapping boundaries may reveal willingness to have more services at additional costs as the special districts generally provide services selectively to those who reside within their boundaries.ObjectiveThis study aims to investigate whether overlapping special districts sort citizens by income level as reflected by the Tiebout model.MethodsThis study utilizes a cross‐sectional block group data of Ventura County in California, taking numbers of vertices of special districts as independent variable and household income as dependent variable.ResultsEstimation result demonstrates that a greater number of specialized services is associated with higher income levels and varies by service type.ConclusionFindings of this study imply that income segregation could be predetermined by jurisdictional boundary, and that other subjects of urban segregation may have similar pattern.

Discovering income-economic segregation patterns: A residential-mobility embedding approach

As most studies of segregation rely on the evenness dimension, this current study proposes a graph embedding approach to explore the usefulness of employing the isolation-exposure dimension to evaluate income segregation. While most segregation studies analyzed the static distribution of population subgroups, current study attempts to classify neighborhoods based on house value as a proxy of income, residents' exposure to people of different income levels as constrained by their mobility patterns, and amenities available in the neighborhood. This study exploits the graph embedding method to classify neighborhoods by combining their various attributes, static population distribution and mobility data provided by smart cards to analyze income segregation in Shenzhen, China. Results identify four types of communities with different economic statuses, mobility patterns, and amenity characteristics. They provide rich descriptions about the connections between income segregation patterns, population dynamics, and neighborhood characteristics. The study found that the more segregated communities, which are composed of the poorest and richest groups, are mostly in the peripheral regions of the city while the inner city has lower levels of segregation, mainly due to differentials in transit accessibility. The study demonstrates the great potential of the proposed method to incorporate multiple aspects to evaluate segregation.

Proximate sources of growth in neighborhood income segregation: Class-selective migration versus in situ change

The growth in residential segregation by income implies an increase over time in the neighborhood income gap between rich and poor households. This analysis uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, in concert with tract-level decennial U.S. census data, to quantify the relative contribution of two proximate sources of this increase: change in the income-class-selectivity of inter-neighborhood migrants and change in the class difference in neighborhood income among non-migrants, or in situ change. Change in the income-class-selectivity of migrants is likely to be particularly important for explaining the increase in the neighborhood income gap among blacks to the extent that declining housing discrimination enables middle-class blacks to access higher-income neighborhoods. Decomposition of the change between 1980 and 1990 in the class difference in neighborhood income shows that, among blacks, the increase in the neighborhood income gap between rich and poor persons is attributable in large measure to a change in migrant selectivity. An increase in the class difference in average income among the destination neighborhoods of short-distance migrants is a particularly important source of the growth in the class difference in neighborhood income among blacks. In contrast, among whites, the bulk of the increase in the class difference in neighborhood income is attributable to a divergence in neighborhood income between rich and poor non-migrants.

Mobility patterns are associated with experienced income segregation in large US cities

Traditional understanding of urban income segregation is largely based on static coarse-grained residential patterns. However, these do not capture the income segregation experience implied by the rich social interactions that happen in places that may relate to individual choices, opportunities, and mobility behavior. Using a large-scale high-resolution mobility data set of 4.5 million mobile phone users and 1.1 million places in 11 large American cities, we show that income segregation experienced in places and by individuals can differ greatly even within close spatial proximity. To further understand these fine-grained income segregation patterns, we introduce a Schelling extension of a well-known mobility model, and show that experienced income segregation is associated with an individual’s tendency to explore new places (place exploration) as well as places with visitors from different income groups (social exploration). Interestingly, while the latter is more strongly associated with demographic characteristics, the former is more strongly associated with mobility behavioral variables. Our results suggest that mobility behavior plays an important role in experienced income segregation of individuals. To measure this form of income segregation, urban researchers should take into account mobility behavior and not only residential patterns.

Income segregation's impact on local public expenditures: Evidence from municipalities and school districts, 1980–2010

Residential income segregation within local political jurisdictions has risen considerably since 1980 in the U.S. Despite this trend, and a growing body of research on wealth inequality and its impact on public sector size, income segregation's own influence over local public choice has not been thoroughly investigated. Using block-group income distributions for the years 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 income segregation is measured for individual U.S. municipalities and school districts, where the spatial distribution of income may carry the most political relevance. Estimates indicate that rising income segregation reduced per-capita spending growth considerably for both municipalities and school districts. These findings are robust to various model specifications and to the use of instrumental variables that adjust for the potential endogeneity of local income segregation. This evidence is consistent with the view that intra-jurisdictional income segregation undermines trust between community members and complicates collective action. However, a-spatial income inequality continues to be positively correlated with local public sector size, as suggested by recent empirical research.

Neighborhood Economic Change in an Era of Metropolitan Divergence

This study foregrounds the metropolitan area as a key driver of contemporary neighborhood economic change. The recent “Great Divergence” in metros’ economic, social, and political conditions suggests metros increasingly stratify neighborhood trajectories. Yet, many studies only consider neighborhood-level predictors of change or implicate metro-level factors more applicable to the twentieth century (e.g., manufacturing exposure) than the twenty-first. To clarify the metro's contemporary role, this study synthesizes multiple literatures, deriving novel hypotheses that link metropolitan skill agglomeration and income segregation to neighborhood economic change, and then tests them using multilevel models and data drawn from multiple sources, including the census, Opportunity Insights, and National Transit Database. Analyses, based on all neighborhoods within 325 metros between 2000 and the mid-2010s, suggest over 10% of the variance in neighborhood median income change resides between, rather than within, metros. As predicted, metro skill agglomeration dynamics appear to boost neighborhoods’ median incomes, and metro income segregation depresses them. Results remain intact after accounting for state fixed effects and controls for five plausible alternative explanations of metro effects. Overall, the study provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for future neighborhood change research highlighting the metro in general, and two higher order spatial processes—income segregation and skill agglomeration—in particular.

Invited Commentary: Is the Long Shadow of Childhood Disadvantage on Lifelong Health Getting Worse Over Time?

Social inequalities in health and their early-life origins have been extensively documented. Although the complex direct and intermediate mechanisms linking early-life disadvantage to later health are not yet fully understood, new findings on biological markers distinctly related with early-life experiences suggest a causal relationship. In this issue, Fuller-Rowell et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2021:190(11):2284-2293) step back to examine the role of childhood disadvantage in the United States in different periods, observing that the relationship with later health seems to have strengthened over time. The main explanation the authors bring up has to do with increased income segregation and changes in labor market composition that limit opportunities for persons with low educational attainment. In other words, while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class shrinks, and there are fewer interactions across different socioeconomic groups and the social ladder is blocked. Other evidence suggests that investments in children, through early education and academic support programs, could help reduce the consequences of childhood disadvantage on long-term health.

Exploring the global and local patterns of income segregation in Toronto, Canada: A multilevel multigroup modeling approach

Residential income segregation is a spatial manifestation of social inequality and is an important factor that influences access to resources, services, and amenities. In general, past research analyzing income segregation has applied index-based methods to describe the separation of low-income households at one spatial scale; however, existing studies have not yet considered how income segregation varies across multiple income classes, spatial scales, and local contexts. This study applies a multilevel multigroup modeling approach to explore the global and local patterns of income segregation between dissemination areas (micro-scale), census tracts (meso-scale), and neighborhoods (macro-scale) in Toronto, Canada. A global model that estimates the overall multiscale segregation of five income classes finds that the most affluent families had the highest levels of segregation and that the segregation of all income classes was strongest at the macro- and micro-scales. A local model that allows the micro-scale segregation measures to vary geographically shows that higher-income families were less segregated in the city center than in the inner suburbs, that middle-income families were highly segregated in areas serviced by public transit, and that almost all income classes had high levels of segregation in disadvantaged neighborhoods prioritized for investment by local policymakers. The methodological and substantive contributions of this study for understanding the complex patterns of income segregation are discussed.