Casey J. Dawkins

Recent Evidence on the Continuing Causes of Black‐White Residential Segregation

ABSTRACT: Black-white residential segregation, while on the decline, still persists at high levels in most US metropolitan areas. Despite decades of research into the underlying causes of black-white residential segregation, there is still much disagreement among scholars over the root causes of this phenomenon. This article examines recent evidence on the causes of black-white residential segregation. Evidence on the following hypotheses is examined: racial income differences, racial differences in tastes for housing services, racial differences in housing market information, racial prejudice, and housing market discrimination. Recent evidence suggests that household-level socioeconomic and demographic characteristics explain only a small proportion of the racial differences in location choices. Racial processes such as prejudice and housing market discrimination continue to drive black-white segregation patterns.

Are Social Networks the Ties that Bind Families to Neighborhoods

This paper examines the impact of intra-neighborhood social ties on the inter-neighborhood residential mobility of families with children using data from the 1997 and 2002 Child Development Supplements (CDS) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Results suggest that local kinship ties and the social networks of children deter the inter-neighborhood mobility of families with children. Among low-income families, local social ties are even more ‘binding’. These results have important implications for community development policy and housing programs that emphasize inter-neighborhood mobility.

Urban Containment and Central-City Revitalization

Abstract Planners throughout the 20th century have advocated containment of urban sprawl through a variety of means. Urban containment is incorporated into the growth management programs of several states, and growth management policies exist in at least 95 metropolitan areas. One objective of containment is to concentrate development within areas that are already urbanized, particularly in central cities. In this article, we examine the effects of the first round of urban containment programs (adopted prior to 1985) on the amount of development activity taking place in central cities and on the ratio of central-city to metropolitan-area development activity. Our findings indicate that central cities in contained metropolitan areas are attracting more development activity than cenral cities in uncontained areas. However, suburban areas in both contained and uncontained metropolitan areas continue to grow. We surmise that containment shifts development from exurban and rural areas to suburban and urban ones because of containment boundaries. One potential limitation of our ordinary least squares (OLS) regression modeling is that the relationship between containment and development activity may be multidirectional. That is, since central cities in metropolitan areas with higher growth rates in previous years are more likely to adopt policies to constrain future growth, containment programs may affect and be affected by the rate of central-city residential construction activity.1 Although we control for this fact to some degree by restricting our definition of the presence of urban containment to those metropolitan areas that adopted policies prior to the study period, any correlation between lagged construction rates and current construction rates would reintroduce the problem.

Urban Containment and Residential Segregation: A Preliminary Investigation

A fundamental purpose of traditional land-use controls is to exclude undesirable land uses from residential communities. However, such regulations have been shown to limit the ability of low-income households and people of colour to find suitable housing in decent neighbourhoods. Urban containment is an attempt to regulate land uses in ways that reduce if not eliminate social exclusion. This paper uses information from a nation-wide survey of metropolitan planning organisations to identify metropolitan areas with urban containment programmes in place. A theory is developed and a model is applied to 242 metropolitan statistical areas to test the hypothesis that areas with urban containment witnessed greater reductions in residential segregation than those without. Preliminary statistical investigations show this to be the case. Policy implications and an outline for further research are provided.

State Growth Management Programs and Central-City Revitalization

Abstract During the latter part of the 20th century, many U.S. state governments adopted growth management programs for the purpose of establishing a more proactive role in the regulation of land use. Although many scholars have recently begun to critically examine the implementation of these new state initiatives, few have explored their effects on patterns of intraurban land development. In this article, we develop a framework for thinking about the likely effects of state growth management programs on a central citys ability to attract new residential construction activity and investigate this issue using a panel data approach. Multivariate regression results suggest that these programs have observable effects on the spatial distribution of residential construction activity within urban areas. Furthermore, we accept several hypotheses regarding coefficient stability across states, regions, and program designs. These findings suggest that state growth management programs may be an effective tool for promoting the revitalization of central cities.

The Effect of Urban Containment and Mandatory Housing Elements on Racial Segregation in Us Metropolitan Areas, 1990–2000

ABSTRACT: Urban containment and state-imposed mandatory housing elements in comprehensive land use plans attempt to reshape development patterns. Urban containment programs reign in the outward expansion of urban areas by restricting development of rural land outside urban containment boundaries and focusing the regional demand for urban development areas within them. This article assesses the effect of urban containment and mandatory housing elements on the percentage change in racial segregation change among US metropolitan areas during the 1990s. Ordinary least squares regression analysis suggests that while metropolitan areas with strong urban containment efforts saw a higher percentage decline in Anglo/African American residential segregation during the 1990s than metropolitan areas without such policies in place, urban containment had no statistically significant effect on segregation between Anglos and other races. Mandatory housing elements made no difference in racial segregation change between Anglos and any other race. Policy implications are posed.

The Spatial Pattern of Black-White Segregation in US Metropolitan Areas: An Exploratory Analysis

This paper extends the discussion of the spatial Gini index proposed by Dawkins. Two spatial Gini indices, a nearest neighbour index and a monocentric index, are calculated for a sample of 237 US metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). For this sample of MSAs, an exploratory analysis is conducted to determine the relationship between the two spatial Gini indices and other traditional measures of residential segregation. Spatial segregation patterns across US census regions and selected US metropolitan areas are also examined. The analysis suggests that the Gini index provides a useful basis for a multidimensional investigation of residential segregation.

Space and the Measurement of Income Segregation

This paper proposes a new spatial ordering index that that can be used to quantify the dependence of a given pattern of income segregation on the spatial arrangement of neighborhoods. Unlike other spatial measures of income segregation proposed in the literature, the spatial ordering index is less sensitive to the presence of outliers, satisfies the “principle of transfers,” and is flexible enough to quantify a variety of spatial patterns of segregation. The index can be interpreted in terms of the ratio of two covariances. Properties of the proposed measure are demonstrated using an example from the city of Baltimore, Maryland.

Introduction - Segregation and neighborhood change: Where are we after more than a half-century of formal analysis

Beginning with the work of University of Chicago sociologists in the 1920s, social scientists have been interested in explaining the uneven group distributions of individuals and households as well as the dynamics driving these distributions by using a human ecological approach (McKenzie, 1924; Park et al., 1925; Park, 1936). By the 1950s, this approach began to take a sharp turn toward formal quantitative analysis, a turn that marked the beginning of segregation analysis. What was diminished by this change was the attention paid to both the spatial dimensions of local unevenness and the dynamic processes of neighborhood change. The first formal measure of segregation probably was introduced by Bell (1954), yet Duncan and Duncan’s (1955) dissimilarity index D was used far more widely to summarize residential segregation patterns for entire metropolitan areas. There are some disciplinary variations; for example, economists favor using the Gini index (Silber, 1989), which also has a long history, when measuring income segregation. But the study of segregation has become truly interdisciplinary, expanding from its sociological roots to attract the attention of economists (Galster, 1988; Bayer et al., 2004), geographers (Clark, 1986; Wong, 1993), and urban policy analysts and planners (Jargowsky, 1996; Dawkins, 2004).

Evidence on the Intergenerational Persistence of Residential Segregation by Race

Despite the substantial literature devoted to examining the causes of US Black-White residential segregation by race, there is little evidence on the persistence of residential segregation outcomes across generations. This paper examines the following two questions: Do households reside in neighbourhoods with racial compositions that resemble the household heads childhood neighbourhood? Do residential segregation outcomes persist across generations, controlling for household-level determinants of residential location choice? The empirical work relies on household-level data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) matched to the racial composition of the households census tract of residence to estimate regression models where the dependent variable is a measure of own-race residential segregation in 1980 and 1990 for each household head in the sample. The independent variables include various contemporaneous household characteristics, characteristics of each household heads parents in 1968 and the lagged 1968 neighbourhood racial composition of the household heads childhood residence. Results from several regression models suggest that households choose to reside in neighbourhoods with racial compositions that resemble the household heads childhood neighbourhood. Observable parental characteristics, particularly measures of parental interracial contact, explain much of the intergenerational persistence in segregation among African American households. Among Whites, the intergenerational persistence of residential segregation remains even in models with an extensive set of controls. Across both racial groups, the neighbourhood social ties of parents living in more integrated neighbourhoods are shown to reduce the propensity for children to choose segregated neighbourhoods upon reaching adulthood. These findings suggest that interracial contact may reduce the persistence of residential segregation over time.