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Temporary Integration, Resilient Inequality: Race and Neighborhood Change in the Transition to Adulthood

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Demography

Abstract

This article focuses on neighborhood and geographic change arising with the first “selection” of an independent residential setting: the transition out of the family home. Data from two sources—the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics—are used to provide complementary analyses of trajectories of change in geographic location and neighborhood racial and economic composition during young adulthood. Findings indicate that for young adults who originate in segregated urban areas and remain in such areas, the period of young adulthood is characterized by continuity in neighborhood conditions and persistent racial inequality from childhood to adulthood. For young adults who exit highly segregated urban areas, this period is characterized by a substantial leveling of racial inequality, with African Americans moving into less-poor, less-segregated neighborhoods. However, the trend toward racial equality in young adulthood is temporary, as the gaps between whites and blacks grow as the young adults move further into adulthood. Crucial to the reemergence of racial inequality in neighborhood environments is the process of “unselected” change, or change in neighborhood conditions that occurs around young adults after they move to a new neighborhood environment.

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Notes

  1. The original survey contained an oversample of low-income households, typically referred to as the Survey of Economic Opportunity component of the sample. See Brown (1996) for a discussion of the low-income oversample in the PSID. See Becketti et al. (1988) and Fitzgerald et al. (1998a, b) for analyses of attrition and representativeness.

  2. The geocode file does not include tract identifiers for survey year 1969.

  3. Fitzgerald et al. (1998b) addressed whether attrition has affected the representativeness of the PSID sample by comparing the PSID sample in 1989 with the Current Population Survey in the same year, and found very little evidence to suggest that attrition has led to an unrepresentative sample.

  4. See Online Resource 1 for more details on the measurement of home-leaving in both data sets and how it compares with other measures in the literature.

  5. The quadratic specification was chosen based on a descriptive analysis of the pattern of neighborhood change over the period of young adulthood, which is described in the Results section.

  6. This is a relatively low figure, which may be partly attributable to the definition of home-leaving, which treats residential independence as the key criterion to define home-leavers. A nontrivial number of young adults live with their own older relatives or the relatives of their partner at some point over the survey, and these young adults are not considered home-leavers.

  7. Patterns are extremely similar in the 15-year-old cohort of the PHDCN.

  8. Although I use the term “integration” to describe the change in African Americans’ neighborhood percentage black, it is possible that African Americans could experience a drop in percentage black and still live in equally “segregated” neighborhoods if they move to cities with lower overall presence of African Americans. My use of the terms “integration” and “segregation” reflects changes in the individual’s own neighborhoods over time, and does not consider the relative prevalence of blacks and whites in the individuals’ neighborhood compared with their prevalence in the city as a whole.

  9. Segregated cities are classified as those with dissimilarity indices greater than .70 in the census year closest to the year in which the young adult left home. Examples of the most-segregated metropolitan areas in 1970 are Cleveland-Lorain-Elyria, OH; Detroit, MI; Chicago, IL; Fort Myers-Cape Coral, FL; and Gary, IN. Examples of cities falling just below the .70 threshold in 1970 are Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA; Hattiesburg, MS; Minneapolis–St. Paul, MN-WI; San Francisco, CA; Washington, DC-MD-VA-WV; and Memphis, TN-AR-MS.

  10. Unlike the results in the PHDCN, trajectories of change among whites and blacks who exit highly segregated cities do not vary markedly for those with a college degree versus those without.

  11. The term “spell” refers to a series of consecutive survey waves in which the young adult is geocoded in the same census tract. Thus, a residential spell could include more than one address if young adults moved within the same tract.

  12. Secular growth in the population of groups other than whites and blacks may also contribute slightly to the patterns of unselected change. For example, the percentage of whites in African Americans’ neighborhoods declines slightly more than the percentage of African Americans rises, indicating that growth of other groups may be contributing to the decline in the proportion white.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Robert Sampson, William Julius Wilson, and Christopher Winship for their feedback on this article and the larger research agenda of which it is a part. Bonnie Lindstrom and William Clark also provided insightful comments on the article, and Donna Nordquist provided helpful assistance in working with the PSID geocode data. The research was funded in part by a grant from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

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  1. Department of Sociology, New York University, 295 Lafayette Street, New York, NY, 10012, USA

    Patrick Sharkey

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Sharkey, P. Temporary Integration, Resilient Inequality: Race and Neighborhood Change in the Transition to Adulthood. Demography 49, 889–912 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0105-0

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