Samantha Friedman

Nativity Status and Racial/Ethnic Differences in Access to Quality Housing: Does Homeownership Bring Greater Parity?

Abstract In this article, we use data from the 2001 American Housing Survey to evaluate whether nativity‐status differences in housing conditions vary by tenure and whether nativity status or race/ethnicity plays a more important role in determining housing conditions. Overall, when compared with native‐born households, recently arrived immigrant households are significantly more likely to be crowded, but either as likely or significantly less likely to live in poorer‐quality housing. Further analysis revealed, however, that race/ethnicity is a stronger indicator than immigrant status in predicting housing outcomes. Among homeowners, black and Hispanic households, regardless of nativity status, exhibited lower‐quality housing outcomes than native‐born and, frequently, foreign‐born whites. Thus, we find that minorities are doubly disadvantaged: They are less likely to attain homeownership than whites, and once they do, they are almost always significantly more likely to live in poorer‐quality housing.

Generational patterns in home ownership and housing quality among racial/ethnic groups in New York city, 1999

We use survey data for 1999 to evaluate how well the spatial assimilation model characterizes the generational patterns in housing conditions for racial/ethnic groups in New York City. Focusing on home ownership, crowding, and housing quality, bivariate analyses reveal that housing conditions improve across generations, but mainly for whites and other Hispanics. Among blacks, we find patterns of generational decline in housing conditions and socioeconomic status. Multivariate models reveal significant generational improvements among whites and Puerto Ricans with respect to home ownership and among whites, blacks, and other Hispanics, with respect to crowding. However, notable generational declines are evident for blacks in home ownership and housing quality. Broad support for spatial assimilation theory is evident in the associations of socioeconomic status with housing conditions, but the results for blacks raise questions about the overall primacy of the spatial assimilation model.

The World Settles in: Washington, DC, as an Immigrant Gateway

This study examines the ethnic geography of a new immigrant gateway, Washington, DC. According to Census 2000, more than 832,000 foreign-born individuals reside in the Washington metropolitan region. This research uses Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) data in an effort to map the residential decisions of immigrant newcomers by zip code from 1990 to 1998. Spatially, a very diverse, dispersed, and suburbanized pattern of newcomer settlement emerges, a pattern that contradicts many of the assumptions of the spatial assimilation model. Whereas the overall pattern is one of dispersion, an analysis of country-of-origin groups results in a settlement continuum ranging from concentrated (Vietnamese) to highly dispersed (Indians). Current research in Washington suggests that a pattern of heterolocalism (community without propinquity) may be a better model for understanding the role of immigrant settlement patterns and networks.

Bringing Proximate Neighbours into the Study of US Residential Segregation

The race and ethnicity of neighbours are thought to be critical in shaping household mobility underlying residential segregation. However, studies on this topic have used data at the census-tract level of analysis rather than at the proximate-neighbour level. Using a non-publicly available version of the neighbour-cluster sample within the American Housing Survey, this study incorporates data on the race, ethnicity and socioeconomic characteristics of the proximate neighbours of White, Black and Latino households and examines their impact on household residential satisfaction, out- and in-mobility. Results indicate that proximate-neighbour race and ethnicity matter in influencing endpoints of the mobility process and do not necessarily parallel those at the census-tract level. Implications of these findings are discussed as they relate to the study of residential segregation.

Declining segregation through the lens of neighborhood quality: does middle-class and affluent status bring equality?

Middle- and upper-class status along with suburban residence are together considered symbolic of the American dream. However, the question of whether they mean access to better quality residential environments has gone largely unexplored. This study relies on data from the 2009 panel of the American Housing Survey and focuses on a range of neighborhood conditions, including indicators of physical and social disorder as well as housing value and a neighborhood rating. Contrary to the tenets of the spatial assimilation model, we find that middle-class and affluent status do not consistently lead to superior conditions for all households. Neighborhood circumstances vary considerably based on householder race and ethnicity, with blacks and Hispanics experiencing the greatest disparities from whites. In addition, suburban residence does not attenuate such differences, and in some cases, well-to-do minorities do even worse than whites in neighborhood quality in suburbs.

Housing Tenure and Residential Segregation in Metropolitan America

Homeownership, a symbol of the American dream, is one of the primary ways through which families accumulate wealth, particularly for blacks and Hispanics. Surprisingly, no study has explicitly documented the segregation of minority owners and renters from whites. Using data from Census 2000, this study aims to fill this gap. Analyses here reveal that the segregation of black renters relative to whites is significantly lower than the segregation of black owners from whites, controlling for relevant socioeconomic and demographic factors, contrary to the notion that homeownership represents an endpoint in the residential assimilation process. The patterns for Hispanics and Asians conform more to expectations under the spatial assimilation model. The findings here suggest that race and ethnicity continue to be as important in shaping residential segregation as socioeconomic status, and raise concerns about the benefits of homeownership, particularly for blacks.

Census Data and its Use in the Study of Residential Inequality: CENSUS DATA AND RESIDENTIAL INEQUALITY

At the time of this writing, it was still unclear whether the citizenship question will be included in the 2020 census. On June 6, civil rights lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union sued the U.S. Department of Commerce to try to stop the U.S. Census Bureau from adding the citizenship question to the 2020 decennial census. This situation is an important reminder of the impact that the U.S. government and larger political system have on our research as urban scholars. Given the lack of clarity on whether the citizenship question will be included on the 2020 census, I would like to focus my response to John Logan’s essay on other important issues that he discusses, particularly as to how they relate to residential inequality, a core area of urban sociology. Logan’s essay focuses on the use of census tracts as proxies for neighborhoods, the reliability of census data, and the value of census data at the aggregate level when merged with individual-level data. The data and the issues that he covers are extremely critical to the study of residential inequality in metropolitan America. My response to his essay focuses on the importance of the use of census tracts and decennial census data, as compared to data from the American Community Survey (ACS), in the study of residential inequality. Then I will focus on two aspects of the 2020 census that are not given as much attention in Logan’s essay-–questions on race and Hispanic origin and new response categories in the relationship question. The two questions on race and Hispanic origin will remain similar to previous decennial censuses, despite the fact that tests have revealed that making Hispanic origin a separate category within the race question and eliminating the Hispanic origin question was shown to yield higher quality data (Porter and Snipp 2018; U.S. Census Bureau 2017a). For the first time in decennial census history, individuals in same-sex relationships will be able to explicitly identify themselves as such through the relationship question on the 2020 census (U.S. Census Bureau 2018). I discuss the implications that the data yielded by these questions will have for the study of residential inequality.

Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective: Making Sense of Contextual Diversity:

The residential segregation of minorities from whites has been the subject of much scholarly work since the publication of American Apartheid by Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton. While research continues in this vein, there are gaps in our understanding of other important but related aspects of segregation. In the United States and elsewhere, income inequality is high and continues to be on the rise, while at the same time racial and ethnic segregation has been declining. Surprisingly, a limited amount of research has documented the link between income inequality and residential segregation. Globalization has been a force that impacts inequalities in cities, but researchers have a relatively limited understanding of its impact on residential segregation primarily because the cities examined previously have been mostly in Western societies. Residential Segregation in Comparative Perspective is significant because it begins to fill some of these gaps in the literature. It is the first book, to my knowledge, to make a cross-national comparison of residential segregation in 11 cities throughout both Western and Eastern nations. The editors Th omas Maloutas and Kuniko Fujita were strategic in their choice of cities. They have included chapters on socioeconomic and/ or ethnically-based residential segregation in globalized and less globalized cities in the East and West (e.g., Tokyo, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Madrid); cities in Communist, post-Communist, and socially democratic societies (e.g., Beijing, Budapest, Paris); and cities in countries that have experienced significant positive and negative changes in their economies in recent years (e.g., Istanbul, Athens). By comparing and contrasting the segregation patterns in cities along all of these dimensions, the book offers a very detailed description of the variation that exists in such segregation. What is notable is that several findings in the book contradict patterns found in the existing literature, thereby raising important questions for expanding theories and research on segregation. For example, while income inequality is positively associated with income-based residential segregation in the United States, such a relationship is not always found in cities around the world. Interestingly, in Copenhagen, the levels of income inequality are quite low, but residential segregation by social class is relatively high. In Hong Kong and Tokyo, just the opposite is found. Levels of income inequality are higher in these cities, but the levels of residential segregation by social class are lower than would be expected, and the poor and disadvantaged segments of these cities’ populations are integrated with others of higher social standing. Another finding that contradicts the patterns in existing research is that globalization is not necessarily associated with high levels of residential segregation. Hong Kong and Tokyo are considered to sit atop the world city hierarchy, according to the highlyregarded ranking by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Yet, as mentioned above, they are surprisingly low in their levels of income-based levels of segregation. On the other hand, places like Copenhagen and Budapest, rank lower in the world city hierarchy, but their levels of segregation by social class are much higher than those found in Hong Kong and Tokyo. These findings suggest that the link between globalization and residential segregation by SES is not straightforward and merits attention in future research. Also noteworthy is the finding that the rich are more segregated from the poor than the poor are from the rich in nearly all of the 11 cities examined in the book. This has also been found in the United States and therefore is not new, but it has not been emphasized in the existing literature on residential segregation. Most researchers tend to focus on the poor and their access to residential locations in neighborhoods with nonpoor individuals. This largely stems from the fact that the study of racial residential segregation, at least in the United States, grew out of Reviews 715