What is economic segregation?
Economic segregation is the physical separation of households according to income: Low income people are concentrated in some neighborhoods; higher income people are concentrated in other, different neighborhoods.
What are the negative effects of economic segregation?
Economic segregation is associated with a range of negative outcomes for poor families. As bad as it is to be poor, the effects of poverty are greater for poor families living in poor neighborhoods.
Studies by Raj Chetty and his colleagues as part of the Economic Opportunity Project have shown that there is a correlation between economic segregation and lower levels of intergenerational mobility: places with high levels of economic segregation have less inter-generational economic mobility <link>.
How is economic segregation measured?
There are a variety of statistical techniques that have been developed to measure the extent of economic segregation within metropolitan areas. One of the most common is the dissimilarity index, which computes fraction of high income or low income households that would have to move to a different neighborhood within the metropolitan area in order for each neighborhood to have the same income composition as the overall metro area.
Is economic segregation increasing or decreasing?
Whether measured by the dissimilarity index or by entropy measures, there is strong evidence that the degree of economic segregation has increased in the United States over the past few decades.
What are the nation’s most and least economically segregated metropolitan areas?
What causes economic segregation?
Economic segregation is shaped by a number of factors including income distribution (link) and importantly, public policy, especially land use controls and zoning restrictions. In most communities in the United States, the number of places where one can build higher density, lower cost housing (smaller single family homes, and apartments) are strictly limited. Some suburban communities zone nearly all of their land for large-lot single family houses, effectively excluding lower income housing.
How is economic segregation related to income inequality?
Economic segregation is related to income inequality. The higher inequality in a region, the greater will be the fraction of a region’s population concentrated in the “tails” of the income distribution. In general, higher levels of inequality are associated with greater levels of economic segregation. But economic segregation is a spatial measure, while income inequality is not, so places with the same amount of income inequality can have differing levels of economic segregation.
Can we measure the balance of incomes in particular neighborhoods?
Traditional economic segregation measures compute the variation in incomes across different neighborhoods within a metropolitan area. It is also possible to measure the distribution of income within an individual neighborhood (census tract). Impresa has developed the “Mixed Income, Middle Income” measure (MIMI) for individual census tracts.
How is economic segregation related to racial segregation?
Because some racial and ethnic groups have disproportionately lower incomes on average (African-Americans and Latinos), in many cases racial segregation is correlated with income segregation. There are many racially segregated, high poverty neighborhoods in US metro areas.
What about the modifiable areal unit problem? MAUP?
One statistical problem that bedevils computations of segregation is the “modifiable areal unit problem” also called MAUP. The computation of many indices of segregation, including the dissimilarity index, is sensitive to the size and boundaries of the geographic areas used. The more units into which an area is sub-divided, the higher will be the calculated score on a dissimilarity index. For example, in the limiting case (one unit) the dissimilarity score for a metro area is zero: no households have to move to make the distribution of the (one) neighborhood the same as the distribution for the metro area as a whole. Finer divisions of metro areas produce systematically higher measured levels of dissimilarity. A problem arises when comparing metropolitan areas wildly different sized neighborhoods. The commonly used unit for neighborhoods is a census tract, which includes an average of about 4,000 persons. But the physical size of a census tract can vary from a few blocks (in the center of a dense city) to square miles (on the urban periphery).