Steven R. Holloway

“The Color of Money” revisited: Racial lending patterns in Atlanta's neighborhoods

Abstract In 1988, the Atlanta Journal‐Constitution published “The Color of Money,” an influential series examining mortgage redlining in Atlanta. The articles documented wide lending disparities between white and black neighborhoods of similar income levels. Given sweeping changes in housing finance since 1988, we seek to determine whether Atlantas racial geographic disparities in mortgage lending have changed. Analysis of 1992 to 1996 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data reveals slight improvement. Atlantas depository lenders made 4.2 times as many conventional home purchase loans per owner‐occupied unit to middle‐income white neighborhoods as they did to middle‐income black neighborhoods; a decade earlier, this ratio was 5.2. Nondepositories post lower ratios, particularly for Federal Housing Administration‐insured loans, but this market segment raises concerns because of potential abuses. By the indicator of most enduring theoretical and policy interest—conventional home purchase lending by depositories...

Corporate Headquarters Relocation and Changes in Metropolitan Corporate Dominance, 1980–1987

During the last 30 years, U.S. metropolitan economies have experienced tremendous restructuring, and the locations of corporate headquarters have increasingly exhibited spatial shifts, both deconcentrating and dispersing. Theoretical explanations have suggested that the United States is entering the third of four stages, in which we are now witnessing the drive to regional maturity with no dominant regional center. Changes in the distribution of metropolitan corporate dominance between 1980 and 1987 are examined and related to two sets of explanatory frameworks, one spatial and the other structural. Changes in metropolitan corporate dominance were strongly related to spatial shifts in headquarters and asset location, especially shifts due to merger and acquisition activity. Changes in dominance were less strongly related to structural factors reflecting the degree of transition to the emerging service-based economy, even though population and location relative to New York were important. Finally, the effe...

The Racially Fragmented City? Neighborhood Racial Segregation and Diversity Jointly Considered

This article reflects on the racial configuration of urban space. Previous research tends to posit racial segregation and diversity as either endpoints on a continuum of racial dominance or mirror images of one another. We argue that segregation and diversity must be jointly understood; they are necessarily related, although not inevitably as binary opposites. Our view is that the neighborhood geographies of U.S. metropolitan areas are simultaneously and increasingly marked by both racial segregation and racial diversity. We offer an approach that classifies neighborhoods based jointly on their compositional diversity and their racial dominance, illustrated by an examination of the neighborhood racial structure of several large metropolitan areas for 1990 and 2000. Compositional diversity increased in all metropolitan areas in ways rendered visible by our approach, including a sharp reduction in the number of highly segregated white neighborhoods, transitioning mostly into moderately diverse yet still white-dominated neighborhoods, and a fourfold increase in the number of highly diverse neighborhoods. Even so, many highly segregated spaces remain, especially for whites and blacks. Latino-dominated spaces show a mix of persistence and emergence. Although compositional diversity is increasing, highly diverse neighborhoods are still rare and are the least persistent of all racial configurations. Our approach clearly demonstrates the “both/and”-ness of segregation and diversity.

Exploring the Effect of Public Housing on the Concentration of Poverty in Columbus, Ohio

Using boundary-matched 1980 and 1990 census tract data for the central county of the Columbus, Ohio, metropolitan area, the authors explore the effect that public housing has on changes in neighborhood poverty rates to evaluate the impact of governmental and institutional actions on recent increases in poverty concentration within urban areas. Three important findings emerge: Public housing concentrated poverty in Columbus during the 1980s, the effect of public housing on poverty concentration was greater among blacks than whites, and public housing concentrates poverty because host neighborhoods house the at-risk portion of the population and because public housing affects the surrounding housing market.

Patterns of Racial Diversity and Segregation in the United States: 1990–2010

The growing ethnic and racial diversity of the United States is evident at all spatial scales. One of the striking features of this new mixture of peoples, however, is that this new diversity often occurs in tandem with racial concentration. This article surveys these new geographies from four points of view: the nation as a whole, states, large metropolitan areas, and neighborhoods. The analysis at each scale relies on a new taxonomy of racial composition that simultaneously appraises both diversity and the lack thereof (Holloway, Wright, and Ellis 2012). Urban analysis often posits neighborhood racial segregation and diversity as either endpoints on a continuum of racial dominance or mirror images of one another. We disturb that perspective and stress that segregation and diversity must be jointly understood—they are necessarily related, although not as inevitable binary opposites. Using census data from 1990, 2000, and 2010, the research points to how patterns of racial diversity and dominance interact across varying spatial scales. This investigation helps answer some basic questions about the changing geographies of racialized groups, setting the stage for the following articles that explore the relationship between geography and the participation of underrepresented groups in higher education.

The Effect of Adolescent Neighborhood Poverty on Adult Employment

ABSTRACT: Neighborhood environments affect the long-term labor market success of America’s urban youth. Urban poverty grew more spatially concentrated during the 1970s and 1980s as industrial economies dramatically restructured. Some policies attempted to address the problems of impoverished neighborhoods by stimulating in-situ economic development, while others sought to geographically disperse the poor. Poverty grew less concentrated during the 1990s because of robust national economic growth and dispersal-oriented federal policies. Before celebrating, however, the long term effects of growing up in poor neighborhoods need to be considered. We used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data, geocoded to census tracts, to examine the effects of neighborhood poverty rates encountered during adolescence on adult employment. Living in poor neighborhoods during adolescence carries a long-term labor market disadvantage, caused at least in part by the limited ability to accumulate early work experience. Males appear to be more sensitive to these neighborhood effects than females.

Agents of Change: Mixed-Race Households and the Dynamics of Neighborhood Segregation in the United States

This article explores the effects of mixed-race household formation on trends in neighborhood-scale racial segregation. Census data show that these effects are nontrivial in relation to the magnitude of decadal changes in residential segregation. An agent-based model illustrates the potential long-run impacts of rising numbers of mixed-race households on measures of neighborhood-scale segregation. It reveals that high rates of mixed-race household formation will reduce residential segregation considerably. This occurs even when preferences for own-group neighbors are high enough to maintain racial separation in residential space in a Schelling-type model. We uncover a disturbing trend, however; levels of neighborhood-scale segregation of single-race households can remain persistently high even while a growing number of mixed-race households drives down the overall rate of residential segregation. Thus, the articles main conclusion is that parsing neighborhood segregation levels by household type—single versus mixed race—is essential to interpret correctly trends in the spatial separation of racial groups, especially when the fraction of households that are mixed race is dynamic. More broadly, the article illustrates the importance of household-scale processes for urban outcomes and joins debates in geography about interscalar relationships.

The Effects of Mixed-Race Households on Residential Segregation

This paper investigates how household-scale racial mixing affects measurements of neighborhood-scale racial segregation. This topic is increasingly important as mixed-race households are becoming more common across the United States. Specifically, our research asks two questions: What is the sensitivity of neighborhood racial segregation measures to levels of household-scale racial mixing? And what is the relationship between neighborhood racial diversity and the presence of mixed-race households? We answer these questions with an analysis that uses confidential long-form data from the 1990 U.S. census. These data provide information on household racial composition at the tract level. The results show that racial mixing within households has meaningful effects on measurements of neighborhood segregation, suggesting that patterns of mixed-race household formation and residential location condition understandings of neighborhood segregation dynamics. We demonstrate that mixed-race households are a disproportionate source of neighborhood diversity in the least racially plural neighborhoods. This article also reflects on the complications that mixed-race households pose for the interpretations of neighborhood-scale segregation and cautions against drawing conclusions about residential desegregation based on racial mixing in households.

The Disappearance of Race in Mortgage Lending

Abstract In the past 25 years, housing researchers, governmental regulators, industry advocates, and community activists have all relied on a unified analytical infrastructure that was developed in the 1970s to monitor racial and geographic inequalities in U.S. housing markets. Since the mid-1990s, however, several developments in the housing finance sector have undermined a key element of this system: data collected under the auspices of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975. The second-largest racial-ethnic group among mortgage loan applicants is now officially designated as “information not provided.” In this article, we analyze the causes and geography of this disappearance and its consequences for civil rights enforcement, academic research on redlining and discrimination, and community activism. Our analysis is simultaneously a cautionary narrative of the steady erosion of a valuable public data system and a strategic intervention intended to salvage the empirical contributions of the data for interdisciplinary research, community right-to-know purposes, and public policy development. Using Atlanta, Georgia, as a case study, we marshal a suite of multivariate techniques to disentangle the geographic, individual, and institutional factors responsible for the rise in unreported applications. We also devise a simple method to estimate the “true” racial and ethnic composition of the pool of unknown applicants. The contributions of this endeavor are mediated by the political and epistemological problems of racialization and categorical reification.

Where Black-White Couples Live

This study analyzes where households headed by Black-White, mixed-race couples live in cities. Using 2000 confidential U.S. Census data, we investigate whether Black-White households in 12 large U.S. metropolitan areas are more likely to be found in racially diverse neighborhoods than households headed by White or Black couples. Map analysis shows that concentrations of Black-White headed households are most often found in moderately diverse White neighborhoods. This relationship, however, varies by metropolitan context. Controlling for socioeconomic conditions reveals that Black-White couples are drawn to diversity no matter which racial group forms the neighborhood majority. In contrast, neighborhood racial diversity matters for households headed by Black couples only when they enter spaces containing many Whites or Asians; it matters for households headed by White couples only when they enter neighborhoods with a large number of Blacks or Latinos.