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Does Black Socioeconomic Mobility Explain Recent Progress Toward Black-White Residential Integration?

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Demography

Abstract

Studies of racial residential segregation have found that black-white segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas has declined slowly but steadily since the early 1970s. As of this writing, black-white residential segregation in the United States is approximately 25 % lower than it was in 1970. To identify the sources of this decline, we used individual-level, geocoded data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to compare the residential attainment of different cohorts of blacks. We analyzed these data using Blinder-Oaxaca regression decomposition techniques that partition the decline in residential segregation among cohorts into the decline resulting from (1) changes in the social and economic characteristics of blacks and (2) changes in the association between blacks’ social and economic characteristics and the level of residential segregation they experience. Our findings show that black cohorts entering adulthood prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s experienced consistently high levels of residential segregation at middle age, but that cohorts transitioning to adulthood during and after this period of racial progress experienced significantly lower levels of residential segregation. We find that the decline in black-white residential segregation for these later cohorts reflects both their greater social and economic attainment and a strengthening of the association between socioeconomic characteristics and residential segregation. Educational gains for the post–civil rights era cohorts and improved access to integrated neighborhoods for high school graduates and college attendees in these later cohorts were the principal source of improved residential integration over this period.

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Notes

  1. For the sake of simplicity, we use the term blacks to refer to non-Hispanic blacks.

  2. Beginning in 1997, the PSID has been administered biennially.

  3. The 1969 wave was omitted because address information is unavailable.

  4. To assess the validity of this procedure for allocating the Hispanic population count across racial groups, an identical procedure was used to estimate for 1980 the number of non-Hispanic blacks and whites on the basis of counts of the number of blacks, whites, and Hispanics in tracts in 1980 and the distribution of Hispanics among racial groups in these tracts in 1990. Estimated percentages of tract populations that are non-Hispanic white (r = .9984) and non-Hispanic black (r = .9996) are nearly perfectly correlated with the actual percentages reported in 1980, even though the 1980s—in contrast to the 1970s—was a period of significant Hispanic immigration to the United States. Mean estimated percentages of non-Hispanic whites (77.98 % estimated vs. 78.35 % actual) and non-Hispanic blacks (11.71 % estimated vs. 11.76 % actual) across census tracts for 1980 also closely match the reported percentages.

  5. We included in preliminary models alternative measures of SES, including the highest attained occupational status in the family, the combined annual work hours of the family head and spouse, and homeownership as a proxy for family wealth. Because neither the composition of cohorts nor the association between these measures and residential segregation changed over the period of the study, we did not include them in the final models presented here.

  6. In preliminary model testing, we also included a control variable representing the subject’s birth year in some specifications to test for secular trends in segregation within our cohort groups. In all such models, the estimated coefficient for birth year was negative but small (b < .35) and did not approach statistical significance.

  7. To understand this curious pattern of association in the pre–civil rights era cohort, we examined the social and economic characteristics of those who had previously been imprisoned. We found that the small group of people (< 1 % of the sample) in the pre–civil rights era cohort who had served time in prison were relatively advantaged compared with the rest of the population, with noticeably higher average annual incomes and educational attainment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Temple University, 713 Gladfelter Hall, 1115 West Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Robert L. Wagmiller Jr.

  2. Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Elm and Carlton Streets, Buffalo, NY, 14263, USA

    Elizabeth Gage-Bouchard

  3. Division of Behavioral and Social Research, National Institute on Aging/National Institutes of Health, Gateway Building, Suite 3S600, 7201 Wisconsin Avenue, MSC 9205, Bethesda, MD, 20892-9205, USA

    Amelia Karraker

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Wagmiller, R.L., Gage-Bouchard, E. & Karraker, A. Does Black Socioeconomic Mobility Explain Recent Progress Toward Black-White Residential Integration?. Demography 54, 1251–1275 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-017-0593-z

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