Residential Inequality Research Articles

Good Neighbors for Fair Housing

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fair housing movement made up of white-collar professionals and housewives rapidly emerged in the Route 128 suburbs outside of Boston. The Boston network, which eventually included thirty-five hundred members and thirty-seven chapters, became the largest and most active example of a national phenomenon. Tracing the evolution of the fair housing movement complicates standard narratives of suburban politics, modern liberalism, and the civil rights movement. The movement’s combination of localized and legal tactics played a crucial role in creating the grassroots support and legal means to fight racial discrimination and came to shape state and federal housing policy. Yet its suburban-based and individualist political outlook imposed serious constraints on the efforts to eradicate the root causes of residential inequality and solidified larger patterns of spatial inequality in Massachusetts and the nation.

Change in Racial and Ethnic Residential Inequality in American Cities, 1970–2000

We complement and extend research on change in racial and ethnic residential segregation by estimating determinants of change from 1970 to 2000 in four measures of residential inequality—dissimilarity, entropy, isolation, and net difference—between American Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Latinos. Because we use a longer time horizon and multiple measures, our findings clearly demonstrate some convergence in residential location patterns across groups, indicating gradual spatial assimilation in U.S. metropolitan areas. Although Blacks continue to be more segregated than either Asians or Latinos, residential inequality has declined more rapidly for Blacks than for the other two groups, particularly in terms of neighborhood socioeconomic status. We also find that all three groups, but particularly Asians, have been converting income gains relative to Whites into improved neighborhood socioeconomic status more than into increased residential integration with Whites.

Separate, But How Unequal? Ethnic Residential Stratification, 1980 to 1990

Much recent scholarship has focused on inequality in the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods in which different racial and ethnic groups are concentrated. However, the most widely used measures of residential inequality merely describe the extent to which groups are nominally differentiated in residential space. I use 1980 and 1990 U.S. Census data to calculate levels of and changes in residential stratification—the degree to which members of one group tend to live in more advantaged neighborhoods than members of another group—between whites and blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Results both confirm and qualify conventional interpretations of residential inequality when measured as nominal–level segregation. For example, although in 1990 Latinos and Asians were similarly and only moderately segregated from whites, Asians experienced dramatically lower levels of neighborhood disadvantage. I also find that although levels of segregation were nearly identical in central cities and suburban rings, residential stratification was much lower for suburban residents than for their central city counterparts. I conclude by discussing implications of the findings for theoretical and empirical research on residential inequality.

Interracial homicide: A macrostructural-opportunity perspective

Using data for 154 cities, we test a model of the determinants of interracial homicide that is informed by both Blau's macrostructural theory and elements of the general criminal opportunity perspective. Consistent with Blau's theory, in a multivariate analysis the relative frequency of interracial homicide is positively related to racial heterogeneity, population size, and population density, and inversely related to racial residential segregation and racial socioeconomic inequality. We also find that the level of employment is positively related to the rate of interracial homicide. This result is consistent with the hypothesis, derived from routine activities theory, that the dispersion of activities away from primary group locations and toward more racially heterogeneous settings increases the volume of intergroup contacts. Overall, our analyses reveal that a macrostructural-opportunity perspective offers considerable insight into the determinants of intercity variation in the racial patterning of homicide.

Residential inequality in Sweden: A conceptual distinction

This article focuses on two concepts that have been used to study the living conditions of different social groups in Sweden, “residential segregation” and “housing market segmentation”. Distinctions between the two concepts are made in reference to four areas. Although the relation of the groups in question to a basic social inequality is a point of contention in the tradition of residential segregation, when it comes to housing market segmentation the literature more clearly points to a basic inequality in society. Both concepts imply a certain physical hierarchy associated with the residential living of specific social groups. In reference to both concepts one can point to additional attributes that make one or more residential areas or particular form of tenure more advantageous or attractive than others. Finally in reference to residential segregation one would generally assume that the extra benefits from living in a higher quality area would cost more. A similar assumption, however, cannot be made ...