Ann Owens

Neighborhoods and Schools as Competing and Reinforcing Contexts for Educational Attainment

Scholars hypothesize that both neighborhood and school contexts influence educational attainment, but few have considered both contexts simultaneously. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the author analyzes how school and neighborhood contexts are jointly related to high school and college graduation. She finds that the absolute level of neighborhood resources positively predicts earning a bachelor’s degree, while relative neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) compared to school peers’ neighborhood SES predicts high school graduation. Interactions between school and neighborhood characteristics reveal that low odds of educational attainment among students from lower-SES neighborhoods are reduced even more when a student attends school with more white and high-SES peers. Conversely, the high odds of educational attainment among students from higher-SES neighborhoods are further enhanced by attending school with more white and high-SES peers. Findings suggest that neighborhood SES may be a basis for relative deprivation within schools. Policy makers need to determine how students from different neighborhoods are integrated into a school’s structure and culture in order for policies that mix students from different neighborhood backgrounds to succeed. Attending a high-SES, largely white school does not eliminate (and may even exacerbate) the disadvantages of coming from a low-SES neighborhood.

Neighborhoods on the Rise: A Typology of Neighborhoods Experiencing Socioeconomic Ascent

Neighborhoods are an important source of inequality, and neighborhood change may lead to changing opportunities for residents. Past research on neighborhood upgrading tends to focus on one process: gentrification. I argue that a broader range of types of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent requires examination. This article documents the different types of neighborhoods ascending from 1970 to the present. Using principal components analysis and cluster analysis, I report the prevalence of socioeconomic ascent, based on increases in neighborhood income, rents, house values, and educational and occupational attainment, among five to seven types of neighborhoods in each decade. I also examine population and housing changes that co–occur with ascent to identify processes of ascent beyond gentrification. Overall, findings suggest mixed implications for neighborhood inequality. While white suburban neighborhoods make up the bulk of neighborhoods that ascend in each decade, minority and immigrant neighborhoods become increasingly likely to ascend over time, though displacement may occur.

Inequality in Children’s Contexts Income Segregation of Households with and without Children

Past research shows that income segregation between neighborhoods increased over the past several decades. In this article, I reexamine income segregation from 1990 to 2010 in the 100 largest metropolitan areas, and I find that income segregation increased only among families with children. Among childless households—two-thirds of the population—income segregation changed little and is half as large as among households with children. I examine two factors that may account for these differences by household composition. First, I find that increasing income inequality, identified by past research as a driver of income segregation, was a much more powerful predictor of income segregation among families with children, among whom income inequality has risen more. Second, I find that local school options, delineated by school district boundaries, contribute to higher segregation among households with children compared to households without. Rising income inequality provided high-income households more resources, and parents used these resources to purchase housing in particular neighborhoods, with residential decisions structured, in part, by school district boundaries. Overall, results indicate that children face greater and increasing stratification in neighborhood contexts than do all residents, and this has implications for growing inequalities in their future outcomes.

Income Segregation Between Schools and School Districts

Although trends in the racial segregation of schools are well documented, less is known about trends in income segregation. We use multiple data sources to document trends in income segregation between schools and school districts. Between-district income segregation of families with children enrolled in public school increased by over 15% from 1990 to 2010. Within large districts, between-school segregation of students who are eligible and ineligible for free lunch increased by over 40% from 1991 to 2012. Consistent with research on neighborhood segregation, we find that rising income inequality contributed to the rise in income segregation between schools and districts during this period. The rise in income segregation between both schools and districts may have implications for inequality in students’ access to resources that bear on academic achievement.

Income Segregation between School Districts and Inequality in Students' Achievement.

Large achievement gaps exist between high- and low-income students and between black and white students. This article explores one explanation for such gaps: income segregation between school districts, which creates inequality in the economic and social resources available in advantaged and disadvantaged students’ school contexts. Drawing on national data, I find that the income achievement gap is larger in highly segregated metropolitan areas. This is due mainly to high-income students performing better, rather than low-income children performing worse, in more-segregated places. Income segregation between districts also contributes to the racial achievement gap, largely because white students perform better in more economically segregated places. Descriptive portraits of the school districts of high- and low-income students show that income segregation creates affluent districts for high-income students while changing the contexts of low-income students negligibly. Considering income and race jointly, I find that only high-income white families live in the affluent districts created by income segregation; black families with identically high incomes live in districts more similar to those of low-income white families. My results demonstrate that the spatial inequalities created by income segregation between school districts contribute to achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students, with implications for future research and policy.

Assisted Housing and Neighborhood Poverty Dynamics, 1977 to 2008:

Changes in housing policy have led to the geographic deconcentration of assisted housing, with assisted units now located in more and lower-poverty neighborhoods. Little research examines how the changing location of assisted housing shapes neighborhood poverty rates. I use propensity score matching to estimate how neighborhood poverty rates changed as assisted housing was gained or lost from 1977 to 2008 using a national panel data set. Neighborhood poverty rates increased when neighborhoods gained assisted housing units, with larger impacts when neighborhoods gained many assisted units. Neighborhoods that lost assisted units also became poorer. However, losing assisted units had a negative effect on poverty rates: Poverty rates increased less compared with neighborhoods that did not lose units. Therefore, removing assisted housing from high-poverty neighborhoods slowed, but did not reverse, poverty rate increases. These findings emphasize the durability of neighborhood poverty and inequality even in the face of drastic policy changes.

Racial/Ethnic Transition and Hierarchy Among Ascending Neighborhoods

This article examines the racial/ethnic population dynamics of ascending neighborhoods—those experiencing socioeconomic growth. Drawing on Census and American Community Survey data from 1990 to 2010, we first explore whether changes in racial/ethnic composition occur alongside ascent. We find that, while most neighborhoods’ racial/ethnic composition does not dramatically change during this period, neighborhoods that experienced ascent are much more likely to transition from majority-minority to mixed race or predominantly White than nonascending neighborhoods. Then, we use microdata to analyze whether two potential drivers of ascent, the in-migration of higher-socioeconomic status (SES) households and changes in the fortunes of long-term residents, are racially/ethnically stratified. We argue that the process of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent perpetuates neighborhood racial/ethnic hierarchy. While most Black and Hispanic neighborhoods remain majority-minority, those that ascend are more likely to experience a succession of high-SES White residents replacing minority residents.

Has Income Segregation Really Increased? Bias and Bias Correction in Sample-Based Segregation Estimates

Several recent studies have concluded that residential segregation by income in the United States has increased in the decades since 1970, including a significant increase after 2000. Income segregation measures, however, are biased upward when based on sample data. This is a potential concern because the sampling rate of the American Community Survey (ACS)—from which post-2000 income segregation estimates are constructed—was lower than that of the earlier decennial censuses. Thus, the apparent increase in income segregation post-2000 may simply reflect larger upward bias in the estimates from the ACS, and the estimated trend may therefore be inaccurate. In this study, we first derive formulas describing the approximate sampling bias in two measures of segregation. Next, using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that the bias-corrected estimators eliminate virtually all of the bias in segregation estimates in most cases of practical interest, although the correction fails to eliminate bias in some cases when the population is unevenly distributed among geographic units and the average within-unit samples are very small. We then use the bias-corrected estimators to produce unbiased estimates of the trends in income segregation over the last four decades in large U.S. metropolitan areas. Using these corrected estimates, we replicate the central analyses in four prior studies on income segregation. We find that the primary conclusions from these studies remain unchanged, although the true increase in income segregation among families after 2000 was only half as large as that reported in earlier work. Despite this revision, our replications confirm that income segregation has increased sharply in recent decades among families with children and that income inequality is a strong and consistent predictor of income segregation.

Housing mobility and the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty

ABSTRACT This article uses mixed methods to identify factors that account for the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty, drawing on longitudinal data from the Moving to Opportunity study in Baltimore from 1994 to 2010. We use quantitative survey data from 504 young adults and qualitative interview data from 51 young adults to examine family characteristics during childhood that account for residence in high-poverty neighborhoods in young adulthood, considering whether housing assistance interacts with these characteristics to break the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty. In combination with housing assistance, family economic resources, social ties to high-poverty neighborhoods, entrenchment in high-poverty neighborhoods, and parents’ neighborhood experiences and expectations influence where young adults live in the next generation. Housing assistance has both replacement effects—substituting for what families lack—and enhancement effects—enabling families with more resources—on the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty. This study contributes to our understanding of neighborhood selection, intergenerational neighborhood outcomes, and the role of housing assistance.