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Race, Adolescent Exposure to Segregation, and Adulthood Residential Mobility into and out of Lower-Poverty Neighborhoods

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Abstract

Little research has sought to understand the association between adolescent exposure to segregation and Black-White differences in mobility into and out of neighborhoods of greater economic resources in adulthood. Prior research has typically adopted a narrow conception of neighborhood economic resources, specifying neighborhoods with poverty rates below 20% as non-poor vis-à-vis poor neighborhoods that possess poverty rates of 20% or more. Research using this conception has shown that Blacks are more likely to reside in poor neighborhoods than Whites. However, neglecting segregation’s association with mobility into more economically-advantaged communities misses how segregation structures exposure to opportunity for Blacks and Whites. We assess this theme using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics linked to population censuses. We demonstrate that adolescent segregation, measured aspatially with the dissimilarity index and spatially with the index of spatial proximity, decreases Blacks’ probability of moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods—neighborhoods that we define as having poverty rates of less than 10%—and raises their chances of migrating into higher-poverty neighborhoods in adulthood—neighborhoods with poverty rates greater than or equal to 10%. Whites’ mobility patterns suggest that adolescent segregation increases their probability of moving into and out of lower-poverty neighborhoods as adults. Our findings provide insight into the mechanisms that perpetuate Black-White stratification, while pointing to potential policy changes to ameliorate racial differences in exposure to areas of greater economic advantage as well as improving the equitability of investment in higher-poverty communities.

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Notes

  1. We select 1979 as the starting point for our study because we include employment status as a covariate in our analysis and the PSID did not consistently collect employment information for females in cohabitating or married relationships prior to 1979.

  2. The average poverty rate by period is 13.04% from 1979–1990, 11.85% from 1991–2000, 11.62% from 2001–2010, and 13.20% from 2011–2015 (U.S. Census 2020).

  3. In .84% of the observations did a household originate in a higher-poverty tract that became a lower-poverty tract by the next observation period, and in .42% of the observations did a household originate in a lower-poverty tract that experienced an increase in the local poverty rate to above 10% by the next observation period. We also conducted a supplemental analysis of the findings presented in the Results section where we removed these in situ neighborhood-poverty type transitions. The substantive conclusions from these supplemental models are highly similar to those reported below.

  4. For respondents in couples, the values for the variables years of education, employment status, and age are for those who were part of a PSID household at age 17.

  5. It is possible that long-term exposure to high levels of segregation (dissimilarity ≥ 60 = high) across adolescence (ages 13 through 17) has a potentially stronger association with adulthood patterns of residential mobility than segregation measured at age 17. Thus, in a supplemental analysis we estimated the relationship between average exposure to segregation between ages 13 and 17 on adulthood residential mobility patterns. Our results from this analysis are highly similar to what we present here.

  6. It is possible that the observed associations between exposure to segregation in adolescence and adulthood residential mobility in Tables 3 and 4 could be due to adulthood segregation. Therefore, we conducted a supplemental analysis where we control for segregation in adulthood in these tables. The results from this analysis indicate that the focal association between adolescent segregation and adulthood residential mobility remains robust to the inclusion of adulthood segregation.

  7. Upon further investigation the relationship between segregation at 17 and adulthood residential mobility for Whites is not statistically significantly different from zero.

  8. The marginally significant coefficient for segregation at 17 for Blacks (p < .10) in Model 3 of Table 4 is a slightly different quantity of interest with a different estimate of uncertainty than the adjusted predictions of segregation at 17 for Blacks that draws from Model 3 of Table 4. Because of this, the range of adjusted predictions illustrated in Fig. 2 can be significant while the effect of segregation at 17 for Blacks in Model 3 of Table 4 can be marginally significant. This slight discrepancy in statistical significance underscores a broader issue with p-values determining the meaningfulness of statistical relationships.

  9. We estimated whether the effect of clustering for Whites migrating from a higher- to a lower-poverty neighborhood was significantly different from zero through the use of average marginal effects. We also conducted the same analysis on the opposite residential mobility pattern for Whites. Both tests revealed that the effect of clustering for Whites did not pass the threshold for statistical significance.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the guest editor of Spatial Demography and anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

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Gabriel, R., Leibbrand, C., Hess, C. et al. Race, Adolescent Exposure to Segregation, and Adulthood Residential Mobility into and out of Lower-Poverty Neighborhoods. Spat Demogr 9, 309–339 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40980-021-00090-x

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