Residential Segregation Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

Residential segregation most often refers to the separation of people into different neighborhoods based on their race and/or ethnicity, though neighborhood-level segregation can be computed using other characteristics of people, households, or neighborhoods, for example, social class, single-parent families, or home ownership. The association between the term residential segregation and race/ethnicity reflects the fact that segregation by race/ethnicity is far higher than segregation by other characteristics. Segregation is a social problem because where people live determines other aspects of their lives: what schools their children attend, access to transportation, availability of municipal services, job opportunities, and so on.

Since residential segregation is based on neighborhoods, it is important to understand how neighborhood is defined. Neighborhoods are usually approximated by census tracts, non-overlapping areas that cover an entire city or metropolitan area and contain approximately 4,000 persons. With the exception of subdivisions to accommodate population growth, tracts have the advantage of changing relatively little over time, making comparisons across time easier. Researchers who argue tracts are too large to capture what most people mean by a neighborhood instead use block groups, areas of about 1,500 people, as proxies for a neighborhood, though these get redefined at each census. The larger the unit used to define the neighborhood, the lower segregation will be, because the probability of finding two different people, say a black and a white, increases as the total number of people examined increases.

In its simplest form, residential segregation is measured by the Index of Dissimilarity. This compares the population of each neighborhood to the overall racial composition of the city or metropolitan area in which it is located. Neighborhoods whose population more closely matches the overall racial composition contribute less to the index, those that do not contribute more. The index ranges from 0 to 100, where zero indicates no segregation and 100 indicates total segregation, with no groups sharing any neighborhoods at all. Values below 30 are considered low, those between 30 and 60 moderate, and above 60 high. The value of the index can be interpreted as the percentage of either group that would need to change their neighborhood so that each neighborhood would reflect the race/ethnic distribution of the city as a whole. The advantages of this index are that it is easy to compute and understand, takes the city’s overall racial composition into account and does not impose an artificial definition of integration, is unaffected by the relative sizes of the groups, and has a long history of use. The main disadvantage of the index is that it compares only two groups at a time, a feature that is becoming more problematic as U.S. society becomes increasingly diverse.

Using the Index of Dissimilarity as the measure allows description of patterns of segregation for different groups in the United States in recent decades. First, African Americans are almost always the most segregated group, followed by Hispanics, and then Asians. In 2000, on average, African American segregation from non-Hispanic whites was 65.2, Hispanic segregation was 51.6, and Asian segregation 42.2. Second, the segregation of African Americans has been declining in recent decades, but that of Hispanics and Asians has been increasing, in part because of continued immigration of those groups; new immigrants tend to live near others of their group, thus replacing those who have moved out. On average, while black-white segregation declined 4.6 points between 1980 and 1990, Hispanic-white segregation increased 4.9 points, and Asian-white increased 2.1 points. Third, segregation tends to be highest in older, formerly industrial cities, in the Northeast and Midwest, with large black populations. For example, in 2000 the segregation of African Americans from whites in Detroit was 84.7, compared to segregation of 45.7 for Hispanics and 45.9 for Asians. Conversely, it is lower in newer cities in the South and West whose populations are growing. For example, in 2000 the segregation of African Americans in Phoenix-Mesa was 43.7, compared to 52.5 for Hispanics and 28.1 for Asians. Metropolitan areas that attract more immigrants also tend to have somewhat lower black segregation than those that do not. Fourth, the largest declines in black segregation are in smaller metropolitan areas with small black populations. Between 1980 and 2000, African American segregation declined by nearly 20 points in Dallas and Phoenix-Mesa, while it declined by less than 5 in Detroit and Newark, and increased by 0.2 points in New York City. Thus, in the larger metropolitan areas where more than half of metropolitan blacks live, segregation declines have been modest.

Social scientists also increasingly realize that the simple description of residential segregation as a matter of even distribution across neighborhoods is inadequate to fully describe the phenomena. Issues such as how much your group’s percent of representation in different neighborhoods differs from your group’s percent of representation in the city’s overall population (uneven distribution), who shares your neighborhood with you (isolation), how the neighborhoods your group occupies are themselves distributed across space (clustering), whether you live close to the center city (centralization), and whether your neighborhoods are densely crowded (concentration) all refer to other important aspects of segregation. Each of these has a specific measure attached to it. Places that are highly segregated on four or all five of these measures are known as hypersegregated places. Until 2000, the only group in the United States that lived in hypersegregated areas was African Americans. In 2000, Hispanics in New York and Los Angeles were also found to be hypersegregated. African Americans were hypersegregated in 29 places in 2000, including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, and Philadelphia, where they had scores above 60 on all five measures.

While people choose different neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, residential segregation is not simply the aggregate result of individual choices, but the result of actions on the part of government, realtors, bankers, and insurance agents to influence where specific groups live. At the extreme, apartheid, there are laws dictating where specific groups can live. Historical research on segregation has shown that the process of limiting where African Americans could live in northern cities moved from individual acts of violence and deed restriction to restrictive covenants that applied to whole neighborhoods, to a brief attempt by some places to pass apartheid laws that the Supreme Court promptly declared illegal, to the practice of redlining of certain neighborhoods that was developed by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) and carried out on an extensive scale under the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) with the cooperation of bankers and realtors. The final act of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which forbade discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. Studies have found that discrimination since then has become more subtle and is now often the purview of loan officers and insurance agents, as denial of mortgages and insurance results in the same loss of access as discrimination by a realtor.

The importance of segregation lies in its consequences: living in highly segregated neighborhoods limits the opportunities a person and his or her family have in a myriad of different ways. One important limitation is financial: houses in segregated neighborhoods tend to be worth less and appreciate far more slowly than comparable houses in white neighborhoods, directly contributing to the wealth differential between whites and blacks as well as restricting money available to pay for college or help with the down payment on a house for a child. Other consequences of segregation include job and transportation access, safety issues, exposure to crime and higher rates of poverty, and receipt of poorer municipal services. The effects on both adults and children of living in segregated neighborhoods have been extensively studied, and while there is some inconsistency among the findings, it is clear that there is spatial differentiation of neighborhoods and many behaviors, and that these are interrelated and vary systematically. Residential segregation by race/ethnicity, especially for African Americans, is not benign in its effects.

Bibliography:

Logan, John R., Brian J. Stults, and Reynolds Farley. 2004. “Segregation of Minorities in the Metropolis: Two Decades of Change.” Demography 41(1):1—22.
Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sampson, Robert J., Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. “Assessing Neighborhood Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 28:443—78.
Squires, Gregory D. and Charis E. Kubrin. 2006. Privileged Places: Race, Residence and the Structure of Opportunity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
White, Michael. 1988. American Neighborhoods and Residential Differentiation. New York: Russell Sage.
Wilkes, Rima and John Iceland. 2004. “Hypersegregation in the Twenty-first Century.” Demography 41(1):23—36.

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