Humanities scholars say that black and Hispanic families need much higher incomes than white families to live in comparably affluent neighborhoods. Since any number of federal laws prevent discrimination - just the opposite, the 2008 housing crisis was caused by it being easier to approve people who did not qualify for mortgages than deny anyone - how is that possible? In a recent paper, authors contend it must be racism and that black and hispanic families need much higher incomes to move up. Yet Asians, a smaller minority than both, do not.
Are they instead self-segregating?
It must be discrimination because the disparities occur at every rung on the income ladder, say Sean Reardon, the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford, and Stanford doctoral students Lindsay Fox and Joseph Townsend. A black household with an annual income of $50,000, for example, lives on average in a neighborhood in which the median income is $42,579. A typical Latino household with the same income lives in one only slightly better. But white households with exactly the same income will on average live in neighborhoods where the median income is almost $53,000 – about 25 percent higher. Among black and white households with incomes of $100,000, the neighborhood affluence gap is 20 percent. A very poor white household with an annual income of $13,000 lives on average in a neighborhood where the median income is $45,000 – 40 percent higher than in the typical neighborhood of a black family with the same income.
Yet since the disparity is uniform, that instead lends credence to the choice argument. Not so, say the academics. No one would choose to be in neighborhoods with fewer social supports, weaker school systems and more obstacles than the neighborhoods of their white counterparts.
There are some weaknesses to the claims. The authors acknowledge the preference of many people to live near others of the same race or ethnicity, but only barely, and focus on mortgage discrimination, despite that being the most easily debunked cause. The other weakness is their methodology. They used data obtained from the census and the American Community Survey and created statistical techniques to average racial composition and income distributions of neighborhoods across the United States - there is no regional or local breakdown, it is a simple national average which doesn't translate to meaningful conclusions.
The Stanford researchers do not dispute those findings, but dismiss that white people tend to live among white people and blacks and Latinos live among blacks even though that is true across the board 80 percent of the time.
Link: http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/neighborhood-income-composition-race-an...