Considering Race

[Sun-Kev]

Re: The Statistics of Neighborhoods

I am interpreting the article to claim that spatial heterogeneity is partially determined by income-level. Is there a distinction between people making "choices" and the "outcomes" observed as it relates to spatial heterogeneity? Furthermore, how does the model take into account that income (and thus, peoples' ability to make choices) is a function of race? Could one argue that historically (and presently, to a significant extent) the poor and people of color are not able to exercise much agency in determining where they live? Policies such as redlining or racially discriminatory financial services were/are racially and ethnically-based and directly influence(d) peoples' wealth-building and income-generating capacities.

"First, patterns of spatial sorting by income are in general neighborhood dependent (Fig. 2A), so that there is no model of choice that fits all local cases. Second, we see in addition, when we average over neighborhoods, that choices (or at least outcomes) are income group dependent, Fig. 2B. This means that richest and poorest households are more spatially segregated than middle-income groups (49, 51–53). This points to different motives for the spatial concentration of different groups at the neighborhood level, with high-income groups presumably exerting their economic prerogative to concentrate into the same neighborhoods, while poorest households possibly have no choice but to live where rents are low (38, 49, 54). It is poignant, as a result, that most of the space of US cities (red in Figs. 1A, S1-17) is occupied by poor and typically strongly economically segregated neighborhoods."

[tamos]

I wonder what sort of research could build on your findings, specifically incorporating a focus on racial/cultural/ethnic heterogeneity.

Related: What if we looked at somewhere beyond NY? Outside the West? In many places spatial heterogeneity is even more pronounced (think skyscrapers juxtaposed with slums), these places often have interesting ethnic/racial dynamics as well. Can we speculate what impact that would have on your findings?

[lmbett]

There has been a lot of research in sociology of spatial sorting on race, so we decided to not start there. But needs to be explored, and I think it would be most important to do together with income and other variables to see how much of he effect is race, how much is poverty and whether this is changing ...