Who Moves into What Kinds of Neighborhoods? Spatial Sorting and Integration

William A. V. Clark, University of California, Los Angeles

The study in this paper extends previous work on residential patterns of new immigrants by exploring residential selection across space and over generations in the multiethnic context of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. This paper asks the question - who moves into which kinds of neighborhoods and how much residential sorting is occurring in the context of a rapidly changing ethnically diverse metropolitan area. The paper goes beyond the usual analysis of whether immigrants move into more white or Anglo areas and examines residential selection across a typology of neighborhood types in Los Angeles. Data from the Los Angeles family and neighborhood survey LAFANS is used to examine the nature of segregation, sorting and integration across both micro scale and meso-scale neighborhood geographies. It appears that unlike some work in the Canadian context both Asian and Hispanic groups demonstrate moderately strong relationships between their socioeconomic statuses and their neighborhood contexts.