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From Census Tracts to Local Environments: An Egocentric Approach to Neighborhood Racial Change

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Abstract

Most quantitative studies of neighborhood racial change rely on census tracts as the unit of analysis. However, tracts are insensitive to variation in the geographic scale of the phenomenon under investigation and to proximity among a focal tract’s residents and those in nearby territory. Tracts may also align poorly with residents’ perceptions of their own neighborhood and with the spatial reach of their daily activities. To address these limitations, we propose that changes in racial structure (i.e., in overall diversity and group-specific proportions) be examined within multiple egocentric neighborhoods, a series of nested local environments surrounding each individual that approximate meaningful domains of experience. Our egocentric approach applies GIS procedures to census block data, using race-specific population densities to redistribute block counts of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians across 50-meter by 50-meter cells. For each cell, we then compute the proximity-adjusted racial composition of four different-sized local environments based on the weighted average racial group counts in adjacent cells. The value of this approach is illustrated with 1990–2000 data from a previous study of 40 large metropolitan areas. We document exposure to increasing neighborhood racial diversity during the decade, although the magnitude of this increase in diversity—and of shifts in the particular races to which one is exposed—differs by local environment size and racial group membership. Changes in diversity exposure at the neighborhood level also depend on how diverse the metro area as a whole has become.

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Notes

  1. The census tract owes its existence to Dr. Walter Laidlaw, an administrator with the New York Federation of Churches who proposed in 1905 that New York City be divided into small, permanent spatial units to facilitate neighborhood comparisons over time. Adopting Laidlaw’s plan, the Census Bureau collected tract data for eight cities in 1910 and 1920 and for 18 cities by 1930. Howard Whipple Green, a Cleveland statistician, further promoted the tract concept from his position as chair of a special American Statistical Association committee charged with examining census enumeration areas. In response to his efforts, the Bureau published tract tabulations for all large cities and many smaller ones beginning with the 1940 census. The scope of coverage gradually expanded until 1990, when the entire nation was divided into census tracts. For more detail on tract history, see U.S. Census Bureau (1994).

  2. See Kumar et al. (2013) and Omer and Benenson (2002) for discussions of other quasi-individual and household-level approaches to measuring segregation.

  3. The tract-based findings are enriched by mixed-method case studies that examine neighborhood racial change from a more qualitative vantage point (see, e.g., Freeman 2006; Maly 2005; Wilson and Taub 2006; Woldoff 2011).

  4. The extent of change can be substantial, as illustrated by boundary modifications detected from data in the census tract relationship files (http://www.census.gov/geo/www/relate/). Three-tenths (29.4%) of the 66,304 tracts delineated nationally in the 2000 census had 2.5% or more of their 2000 population located in a different 1990 tract. Tract splits, mergers, and boundary revisions account for this instability.

  5. Past researchers have proposed concepts similar to the egocentric neighborhood, including home range (Everitt and Cadwallader 1972) and personal arena (Hallman 1984). Operationally, recent work by Hipp and Boessen (2013) comes closest to our approach but census blocks rather than individuals anchor the circular territories in their scheme.

  6. McKenzie (1923: 351) drew much the same conclusion nearly a century ago, noting that the average denizen of Columbus, Ohio considered ‘neighborhood’ that “area within the immediate vicinity of his home, the limits of which seem to be determined by the extent of his personal observations and contacts.”

  7. Sensitivity tests reported in Reardon et al. (2008) indicate that our results appear robust to different assumptions about the smoothness of racial compositional patterns across boundaries between blocks.

  8. Several tract-based studies also incorporate distance-decay functions to assess the impact of proximity on social and residential processes (e.g., Crowder and South 2008; Sampson et al. 1999).

  9. Potential ‘edge effects’—distortions in the racial composition of local environments situated on or near the metropolitan periphery—could occur because the parts of these environments that extend beyond metro area boundaries are treated as having no population. However, additional analyses have shown such effects to be negligible (Reardon et al. 2008).

  10. In the absence of standardization, the maximum value taken by E equals the natural log of the number of racial groups (1.386 in the case of four groups). Dividing computed values by this maximum produces E scores in the more familiar 0–1 range.

  11. We do not calculate similar measures for a member of the metropolitan population at large because this person’s exposure to specific racial groups will be nearly identical to the proportions of those groups in the population. If a metropolis is 20% Hispanic, for instance, then the average resident will live, by definition, in nested local environments that are all approximately 20% Hispanic.

  12. Elsewhere a parallel tool, the segregation profile, has been used to describe the extent to which patterns of racial residential segregation vary by spatial scale (Lee et al. 2008; Reardon et al. 2008, 2009).

  13. The decision to limit our attention to 500 and 4000 m local environments is motivated by (1) the need to conserve space and (2) the sharper contrasts apparent between these two types of settings. The 1000 and 2000 m local environments tend to exhibit patterns that fall in an intermediate range.

  14. We performed the replication with the GeoLytics Neighborhood Change Database (http://www.geolytics.com/USCensus,Neighborhood-Change-Database-1970-000,Products.asp) to insure constant tract boundaries at both time points. Mean 1990 and 2000 tract diversity (entropy) scores closely resemble the means for the 1000 m local environments shown in Table 1. But average tract-based diversity changes for the metropolitan areas and racial groups in Figs. 2 and 3 do not consistently match those previously reported for local environments of a single size. Equally inconsistent patterns emerge when the compositional exposure measures summarized in Table 1 and Fig. 4 are compared with their tract analogs (xP * x and xP * y ). In short, it is unclear which spatial scale, if any, tracts can be said to capture.

  15. Hall and Lee’s (2010) suburban study computes entropy scores that reflect multiple-category income, age, tenure, nativity, and household type dimensions of diversity. Comparable measures could be created for egocentric neighborhoods by applying our GIS procedures to block group data.

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Acknowledgements

Initial support for this research came from the National Science Foundation (SES-0520400 and SES-0520405) and the Penn State Children, Youth and Families Consortium. Additional support has been provided by the Penn State Population Research Institute, which receives core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD041025). We thank Yosef Bodovski, Steve Graham, and Matthew Marlay for their programming and technical assistance and Matthew Hall, John Iceland, and Derek Kreager for helpful comments on a previous draft of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University, 614 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Barrett A. Lee

  2. University of Alaska-Anchorage, Anchorage, USA

    Chad R. Farrell

  3. Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    Sean F. Reardon

  4. Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA

    Stephen A. Matthews

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Table 3 Sample metropolitan areas, 2000
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Lee, B.A., Farrell, C.R., Reardon, S.F. et al. From Census Tracts to Local Environments: An Egocentric Approach to Neighborhood Racial Change. Spat Demogr 7, 1–26 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-018-0044-5

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