This study will improve knowledge of trends in income segregation in metropolitan regions in the post-2000 period. The first goal is to measure more accurately how residential segregation by income has evolved in the last decade. The second goal is to analyze how changes in the income composition of neighborhoods ? such as neighborhoods that are gentrifying or becoming more impoverished ? are tied to outcomes for individual families. What kinds of people are entering, leaving, and staying in changing neighborhoods? Where do they come from and where do they go? What are the implications for their welfare? Neighborhood changes, changing forms of separation between more affluent and less affluent families, and minority access to better neighborhoods have a strong bearing on urban development related to housing inequality, affordable housing, and school disparities.
This study analyzes trends in income segregation since 2000, addressing two aspects of these trends. The first question is how measures of segregation are affected by the reduction in sample sizes in the American Community Survey (ACS), which scholars now rely on for data at the census tract level. There is good reason to believe that direct measures are biased upwards as sample sizes decline, so that results may show increasing segregation even if there has been no real change. The project will apply new methods of correcting for sample bias to the original sample data in a federal Research Data Center. Working with confidential data ameliorates other methodological limitations in published data including: 1) the suppression of data by race/ethnicity in tracts with small numbers of minority residents and 2) top-coding of the income distribution. The second question is how changes in the income composition of neighborhoods are produced through patterns of residential mobility. The project will make use of the original records from Census 2000 and 2010 and the 2008-2012 ACS that can be linked over time. The study will select neighborhoods that have experienced gentrification, poor neighborhoods that have become poorer, and affluent neighborhoods that have become more exclusive. In each type of neighborhood, it is possible to identify the number and characteristics of residents who remain from 2000 to 2010, who leave, and who enter. This research will offer new insight into how individual-level (mobility) behaviors aggregate to macro-level (neighborhood) outcomes, which is an enduring issue in social science.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
