In this project, we examine the mobility choices of black households between 1960 and 2000. We use household-level Decennial Census data geocoded down to the census tract level. Our results indicate that, for black households, one's status as an intermetropolitan migrant ' especially from an urban area outside the South ' is a powerful predictor of pioneering into a white neighborhood. Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, the ratio of these intermetropolitan black arrivals to the incumbent metropolitan black population is a powerful predictor of whether a metropolitan area experiences substantial declines in housing segregation.
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Structural versus Ethnic Dimensions of Housing Segregation
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-22
Racial residential segregation is still very high in many American cities. Some portion of segregation is attributable to socioeconomic differences across racial lines; some portion is caused by purely racial factors, such as preferences about the racial composition of one's neighborhood or discrimination in the housing market. Social scientists have had great difficulty disaggregating segregation into a portion that can be explained by interracial differences in socioeconomic characteristics (what we call structural factors) versus a portion attributable to racial and ethnic factors. What would such a measure look like? In this paper, we draw on a new source of data to develop an innovative structural segregation measure that shows the amount of segregation that would remain if we could assign households to housing units based only on non-racial socioeconomic characteristics. This inquiry provides vital building blocks for the broader enterprise of understanding and remedying housing segregation.
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Metropolitan Segregation: No Breakthrough in Sight
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-14
The 2020 Census offers new information on changes in residential segregation in metropolitan regions across the country as they continue to become more diverse. We take a long view, assessing trends since 1980 and extrapolating to the future. These new data mostly reinforce patterns that were observed a decade ago: high but slowly declining black-white segregation, and less intense but hardly changing segregation of Hispanics and Asians from whites. Enough time has passed since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s to draw this conclusion: segregation will continue to divide Americans well into the 21st Century.
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Has Falling Crime Invited Gentrification?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-27
Over the past two decades, crime has fallen dramatically in cities in the United States. We explore whether, in the face of falling central city crime rates, households with more resources and options were more likely to move into central cities overall and more particularly into low income and/or majority minority central city neighborhoods. We use confidential, geocoded versions of the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Census and the 2010, 2011, and 2012 American Community Survey to track moves to different neighborhoods in 244 Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) and their largest central cities. Our dataset includes over four million household moves across the three time periods. We focus on three household types typically considered gentrifiers: high-income, college-educated, and white households. We find that declines in city crime are associated with increases in the probability that highincome and college-educated households choose to move into central city neighborhoods, including low-income and majority minority central city neighborhoods. Moreover, we find little evidence that households with lower incomes and without college degrees are more likely to move to cities when violent crime falls. These results hold during the 1990s as well as the 2000s and for the 100 largest metropolitan areas, where crime declines were greatest. There is weaker evidence that white households are disproportionately drawn to cities as crime falls in the 100 largest metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2010.
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Who Gentrifies Low Income Neighborhoods?
January 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-02
This paper uses confidential Census data, specifically the 1990 and 2000 Census Long- Form data, to study the demographic processes underlying the gentrification of low income urban neighborhoods during the 1990's. In contrast to previous studies, the analysis is conducted at the more refined census-tract level with a narrower definition of gentrification and more narrowly defined comparison neighborhoods. The analysis is also richly disaggregated by demographic characteristic, uncovering differential patterns by race, education, age and family structure that would not have emerged in the more aggregate analysis in previous studies. The results provide little evidence of displacement of low-income non-white households in gentrifying neighborhoods. The bulk of the income gains in gentrifying neighborhoods are attributed to white college graduates and black high school graduates. It is the disproportionate in-migration of the former and the disproportionate retention and income gains of the latter that appear to be the main engines of gentrification.
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Locating Hispanic Americans, 1900-2020
July 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-50
This study examines Hispanic Americans' residential settlement patterns nationwide in the last 120 years. Drawing on newly available neighborhood data for the whole country as early as 1900, it documents the direction and timing of changes in two aspects of their location. First, it charts Hispanics' transition from a predominantly rural population to majority metropolitan by 1930 and also their growing presence in all regions of the U.S. while still maintaining a predominance in the West and Texas. Second, it provides the first evidence of the long-term trajectory of their segregation from whites in the metropolitan areas where they were settling. As shown by studies of more recent decades, Hispanics were never as segregated as African Americans. Nonetheless, similar to African Americans, their segregation from whites increased to high levels through the middle of the century, followed by slow decline. For both groups metropolitan segregation was driven mainly by segregation among central city neighborhoods prior to the 1940s. But new forms of segregation ' a growing city/suburb divide and increasing segregation among suburban places ' have become the largest contributors to segregation today.
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How Low Income Neighborhoods Change: Entry, Exit and Enhancement
September 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-19
This paper examines whether the economic gains experienced by low-income neighborhoods in the 1990s followed patterns of classic gentrification (as frequently assumed) ' that is, through the in migration of higher income white, households, and out migration (or displacement) of the original lower income, usually minority residents, spurring racial transition in the process. Using the internal Census version of the American Housing Survey, we find no evidence of heightened displacement, even among the most vulnerable, original residents. While the entrance of higher income households was an important source of income gains, original residents also experienced differential gains in income, and reported greater increases in their satisfaction with their neighborhood than found in other low-income neighborhoods. Finally, gaining neighborhoods were able to avoid the losses of white households that non-gaining low income tracts experienced, and were thereby more racially stable rather than less.
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Income, Wealth, and Environmental Inequality in the United States
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-57
This paper explores the relationships between air pollution, income, wealth, and race by combining administrative data from U.S. tax returns between 1979'2016, various measures of air pollution, and sociodemographic information from linked survey and administrative data. In the first year of our data, the relationship between income and ambient pollution levels nationally is approximately zero for both non-Hispanic White and Black individuals. However, at every single percentile of the national income distribution, Black individuals are exposed to, on average, higher levels of pollution than White individuals. By 2016, the relationship between income and air pollution had steepened, primarily for Black individuals, driven by changes in where rich and poor Black individuals live. We utilize quasi-random shocks to income to examine the causal effect of changes in income and wealth on pollution exposure over a five year horizon, finding that these income'pollution elasticities map closely to the values implied by our descriptive patterns. We calculate that Black-White differences in income can explain ~10 percent of the observed gap in air pollution levels in 2016.
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WHITE-LATINO RESIDENTIAL ATTAINMENTS AND SEGREGATION
IN SIX CITIES: ASSESSING THE ROLE OF MICRO-LEVEL FACTORS
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-51
This study examines the residential outcomes of Latinos in major metropolitan areas using new methods to connect micro-level analyses of residential attainments to overall patterns of segregation in the metropolitan area. Drawing on new formulations of standard measures of evenness, we conduct micro-level multivariate analyses using the restricted-use census microdata files to predict segregation-relevant neighborhood outcomes for individuals by race. We term the dependent variables segregation-relevant neighborhood outcomes because the differences in average outcomes for each group on these variables determine the values of the aggregate measures of evenness. This approach allows me to use standardization and components analysis to quantitatively assess the separate contributions that differences in social characteristics and differences in rates of return make towards determining the overall disparity in residential outcomes ' that is, the level of segregation ' between Whites and Latinos. Based on our micro-level residential attainment analyses we find that for Latinos, acculturation and gains in socioeconomic status are associated with greater residential contact with Whites, in agreement with spatial assimilation theory, which promotes lower segregation. However, our standardization and components analyses reveals that a substantial portion of White-Latino disparities in residential contact with Whites can be attributed to differences in rates of return; that is White-Latino differences in the ability to translate acculturation and gains in socioeconomic status into more residential contact with Whites. This is further elaborated upon by assessing the changes in contact with Whites for Whites and Latinos after manipulating single variables while holding all others constant. This can be interpreted as the role of discrimination which is emphasized by place stratification theory. Therefore we conclude that while members of minority groups make gains in residential outcomes that reduce segregation by attaining parity with Whites on social characteristics as spatial assimilation theory would predict, a substantial disparity will persist as Latinos cannot translate those gains into greater contact with Whites at the rate that Whites can. At the aggregate level of analysis, this means that White-Latino segregation remains substantial even when groups are equalized on social and economic characteristics.
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The Location of Displaced New Orleans Residents in the Year After Hurricane Katrina
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-19
Using individual data from the restricted version of the American Community Survey, we examined the displacement locations of pre-Katrina adult residents of New Orleans in the year after the hurricane. Over half (53%) of adults had returned to'or remained in'the New Orleans metropolitan area, with just under one-third of the total returning to the dwelling in which they resided prior to Katrina. Among the remainder, Texas was the leading location with almost 40% of those living away from the metropolitan area (18% of the total), followed by other locations in Louisiana (12%), the South region of the US other than Louisiana and Texas (12%), and elsewhere in the U.S. (5%). Black adults were considerably more likely than nonblack adults to be living elsewhere in Louisiana, in Texas, and elsewhere in the South. The observed race disparity was not accounted for by any of the demographic or socioeconomic covariates in the multinomial logistic regression models. Consistent with hypothesized effects, we found that young adults (25'39 years of age) were more likely to move further away from New Orleans and that adults born outside Louisiana were substantially more likely to have relocated away from the state.
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The Relationship of Personal and Neighborhood Characteristics to Immigrant Fertility
August 2002
Working Paper Number:
CES-02-20
We find that fertility varies by immigrant generation, with significant declines between the first and subsequent generations for groups with large immigrant population. However, we find that personal characteristics--such as educational attainment, marital status, and income levels--are much more important than immigrant generation in understanding fertility outcomes. In fact, generations are not independently important once these personal characteristics are controlled for. We maintain that declining fertility levels among the descendants of Mexican and Central American immigrants are primarily the result of higher educational attainment levels, lower rates of marriage, and lower poverty. For example, a four-year increase in educational attainment decreases children ever born (CEB) by half a child. We conclude that immigrant generation serves as a proxy for changes in other personal characteristics that decrease fertility. Neighborhood characteristics have some bearing on fertility, but the correlations are relatively weak. Among Mexican and Central American immigrants and their descendants, the most consistent predictor of children ever born (CEB) at the neighborhood level is the percentage of Hispanic adults. However, no neighborhood characteristics bear any statistical relationship to current fertility, the measure that emphasizes recent births. This pattern of evidence suggests that the observed relationships between neighborhood characteristics and fertility are based on selection into the neighborhood rather than on neighborhood influences as such.
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