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The Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction: Racial Proxy Revisited

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Demography

Abstract

Understanding the factors that drive individuals’ residential preferences is a critical issue in the study of racial segregation. An important debate within this field is whether individuals—especially whites—prefer to live in predominantly white neighborhoods because they wish to avoid the social problems that may be more likely to occur in predominantly black neighborhoods (i.e., the racial proxy hypothesis) or because of racial factors that go beyond these social class–related characteristics. Through a multilevel analysis of data from the 2004–2005 Chicago Area Study and several administrative sources, we assess the extent to which the racial proxy hypothesis describes neighborhood satisfaction among whites, African Americans, and Latinos living across a broad range of neighborhood contexts. The racial proxy perspective applies weakly to whites’ satisfaction: whites report less satisfaction in neighborhoods with more minority residents, and only some of their dissatisfaction can be attributed to local social characteristics. The racial proxy hypothesis applies more strongly to blacks’ and Latinos’ satisfaction. In some cases, especially for Latinos, higher levels of satisfaction in integrated neighborhoods can largely be attributed to the fact that these places have better socioeconomic conditions and fewer social problems than predominantly minority communities. At the same time, effects of racial/ethnic composition persist in unique and somewhat divergent ways for blacks and Latinos, supporting the assertion that racial composition matters, above and beyond its relation to social class. Taken together, these findings suggest that individuals balance both socioeconomic and race-related concerns in their residential preferences.

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Notes

  1. Despite concerns about social desirability, whites’ reported preferences for living in neighborhoods that are predominantly white are quite consistent (e.g., Charles 2000; Farley et al. 1994; Krysan and Farley 2002; Zubrinsky and Bobo 1996).

  2. A separate set of studies has found that both hypothetical mobility preferences (e.g., Krysan 2002a) and actual mobility behavior (e.g., Crowder 2000) are influenced by local racial composition, net of social class–related characteristics. Most recently, Krysan and Bader (2007) analyzed blacks’ and whites’ preferences for living in actual communities in the Detroit area and demonstrated that whites are very unlikely to consider moving to communities that are not predominantly white, but that African Americans are unaffected by the percentage white in a community, net of social class characteristics. Finally, Krysan et al. (2009) used an innovative video experiment to show that net of local social class–related characteristics, whites view all-white neighborhoods as most desirable, and that the effect of racial composition is smaller among blacks, who identify racially mixed neighborhoods as most desirable.

  3. For the analysis of the subsample of city residents, we use a single model that pools together whites, blacks, and Latinos because small sample sizes prevent us from reliably estimating the relationship between racial/ethnic composition and satisfaction separately for each group.

  4. Specifically, respondents are weighted based on the overall nonresponse within their segment (block group), so that individuals residing in neighborhoods with particularly low segment-level response rates are weighted more heavily than those in neighborhoods with high segment-level response rates. Because our dependent variable of interest is neighborhood satisfaction, it is a reasonable assumption that individuals living in the same neighborhood (block group) will be highly correlated on our key dependent variable; thus, our weight accounts for differential rates of nonresponse across block groups and helps minimize, though of course does not eliminate, the effects of the low response rate in some segments.

  5. Table 5 in Online Resource 1 shows the mean level of perceived social problems by the proportion of white, African American, and Latino residents in the neighborhoods. Indeed, residents of neighborhoods with higher proportions of minorities tend to report more social problems.

  6. In supplemental analyses, we reestimated all models using tracts in place of block groups and found that the results are robust across both specifications.

  7. We replicated these models with a linear measure of the percentage of Latino residents and found the same substantive results reported in the text. However, we were unable to estimate these models with a linear measure of the percentage of black residents because of the extremely small numbers of white respondents in Chicago neighborhoods who live with moderate or high proportions of black residents.

  8. Table 6 shows descriptive statistics for our analytic sample, which comprises 622 respondents. About 17.7% of the sample was dropped because of missing information on perceived neighborhood social problems; most of this missing information came from the school dissatisfaction variable. The analyses were re-run without the school dissatisfaction measure, and the coefficients did not differ in sign or significance from those reported in the text.

  9. It is notable that whites report less satisfaction in neighborhoods with a high proportion of African American residents but similar levels of satisfaction in neighborhoods with a low or moderate proportion of black residents. This finding may reflect the idea that whites are tolerant of coresidence with blacks as long as blacks do not exceed a certain proportion of neighborhood residents, as suggested by “tipping point” theories of whites’ residential choices.

  10. Charles (2006) has emphasized the importance of Latinos’ nativity status in shaping residential preferences. She found that recent immigrants to the United States express the greatest preferences for living with coethnic neighbors, but that native-born Latinos and immigrants who have lived for a longer time in the United States report increased preferences for living with white neighbors. In the CAS sample, about two-thirds of the Latinos are immigrants. Because of the relatively small sample size (i.e., 204 Latinos), we are unable to systematically assess whether the relationship between racial/ethnic composition and satisfaction differs for immigrant versus native-born Latinos.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Robert Adelman, Nancy Denton, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper. In addition, the second author’s writing group colleagues—Tyrone Forman, Amanda Lewis, Omar McRoberts, and Beth Richie—provided invaluable assistance, feedback, and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Support for data collection came from the National Science Foundation (SES-0317740), the University of Michigan, the Ford Foundation, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Data analysis was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1R03HD051677-01A1), as well as the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. The article’s contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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Correspondence to Sapna Swaroop.

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Swaroop, S., Krysan, M. The Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction: Racial Proxy Revisited. Demography 48, 1203–1229 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-011-0047-y

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