Segregation In Major Cities

This report has been prepared for inclusion in an edited book to be published in 2013 by
Russell Sage Foundation:
John R. Logan,
The Lost Decade?
Social Change in the U.S. after 2000.
Advisory Board
Margo Anderson
Suzanne Bianchi
Barry Bluestone
Sheldon Danziger
Claude Fischer
Daniel Lichter
Kenneth Prewitt
Sponsors
Russell Sage Foundation
American Communities Project of Brown University

us2010

discover america in a new century

Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009
Kendra Bischoff
Cornell University
Sean F. Reardon
Stanford University

Do not cite without permission of the author(s).
It has been peer-reviewed by an external reviewer and a member of the US2010
Advisory Board.

October 16, 2013

Direct correspondence to Kendra Bischoff ([e-mail]) or Sean
F. Reardon ([e-mail]). The research reported here was supported by the US2010 project of the Russell Sage Foundation and
Brown University. We are grateful to John Logan for leading the US2010 project, Claude Fischer for helpful comments on earlier drafts, Brian Stults for providing us with data files, and Lindsay Fox for her outstanding research assistance.

Every city or metropolitan area in the U.S. has higher- and lower-income neighborhoods. The extent to which these neighborhoods differ in their average socioeconomic status, however, varies considerably. Moreover, this socioeconomic residential sorting has grown substantially in the last 40 years (Reardon and Bischoff 2011a; Reardon and Bischoff 2011b; Watson 2009); the bulk of that growth occurred in the 1980s and in the 2000s.
We refer to the uneven geographic distribution of families of different income levels within a metropolitan area as “family income segregation” or, more simply, “income segregation.” Our use of the term “segregation” is descriptive; it denotes the extent to which families of different incomes live in different neighborhoods; it does not imply any particular cause of these residential patterns.1 We

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