Panel: Measuring the Effects of Residential Segregation on Minority Outcomes
(Housing and Community Development)

Thursday, November 6, 2014: 2:45 PM-4:15 PM
Tesuque (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Panel Organizers:  Justin P. Steil, New York University
Panel Chairs:  Raphael Bostic, University of Southern California
Discussants:  Rucker Johnson, University of California, Berkeley


Are Barrios Good or Bad? the Effects of Metropolitan Area Segregation on Latino Outcomes
Justin P. Steil1, Ingrid Gould Ellen2 and Jorge De la Roca1, (1)New York University, (2)Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy



Neighborhood Ethnic and Nativity Composition and Outcomes for Low Income Latino and African American Children
George Galster, Wayne State University and Anna Santiago, Case Western Reserve University



Immigration and Segregation
Michael Stoll, University of California, Los Angeles



Childhood Neighborhood Inequality and Adult Educational Attainment: A Multi-Cohort Longitudinal Study, 1995 to 2012
Ann Owens, University of Southern California and Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University


Depending on the group considered and the metric used, levels of segregation have displayed widely varying trends over the past three decades. Segregation levels between blacks and whites nationwide have declined but nevertheless remain quite high. White-Latino dissimilarity has shown only a small decline since 1980, while Latino isolation has increased, surpassing the already high levels of African-American isolation in 2010. White-Asian dissimilarity has remained largely unchanged, although Asian isolation levels have also grown. Segregation of the foreign-born has increased steadily. Neighborhood environments of blacks and Hispanics remain unequal to those of whites along important dimensions, such as access to high-performing schools and exposure to violent crimes. These neighborhood inequalities are amplified in more segregated neighborhoods. Research on the effects of segregation on African Americans has found that higher levels of metropolitan area segregation have a significant connection to low birth-weight outcomes among African-American women (Ellen 2000), to gaps in black-white educational achievement (Card and Rothstein 2007), and to disparities in high-school graduation rates, employment levels, and earnings (Cutler and Glaeser 1997). The effects of segregation on socioeconomic outcomes for Latinos and immigrants, however, have not been as extensively studied. There are reasons to believe that the effects of segregation may be different for Latinos and for immigrants than for African Americans. Existing research suggests that as compared to the drivers of black-white segregation, white avoidance generally plays a lesser role, while income differences and preferences for clustering with those who share the same language and customs appear to play a larger role (Bayer et al. 2004). The papers in this panel each examine the effects of residential segregation, whether by race or by income. The papers examine effects for native-born Latino young adults, for immigrants, and for Latino and African American children and young adults. Using census micro data, the paper by De la Roca, Ellen, and Steil examines the effect of metropolitan area levels of Latino segregation on socioeconomic outcomes of young, native-born Latino adults between 1990 and 2010 for 199 metropolitan areas in the United States. Owens and Sampson explore the effects of growing up in neighborhood contexts with different income mixes and measures of socio-economic advantage on educational attainment in young adulthood. The paper by Stoll examines the both the causes and effects of immigrant segregation. Using data from the American Community Survey, Stoll tests whether immigrant concentration exacerbates poverty, consistent with Wilson’s (1987) thesis in The Truly Disadvantaged, or alternatively mitigates poverty, consistent with theories of ethnic enclaves. The paper by Galster and Santiago exploits the “natural experiment” created by public housing waiting lists of the Denver Housing Authority to examine the degree to which neighborhood composition affects outcomes for low-income Latino and African-American children.
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