Racial/Ethnic Inequality in Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status in the 2000s

Jeffrey M. Timberlake, University of Cincinnati
Alan Grigsby, University of Cincinnati
John Iceland, Pennsylvania State University
Kyle Crowder, University of Washington

In this paper we investigate change in the socioeconomic status (SES) of American neighborhoods during the 2000s. We develop a measure of change in neighborhood SES and then apply hierarchical linear modeling techniques to estimate the contributions of tract- and metropolitan area-level factors to that change. We focus on the racial/ethnic composition of neighborhoods in 2000 and home foreclosures, hypothesizing that neighborhoods with higher percentages of minority residents in 2000 and higher levels of foreclosures experienced negative or less positive change in neighborhood SES by 2008/2012. Findings indicate that neighborhood change during the 2000s was sensitive to the percentage of blacks and Asians in the neighborhood and that foreclosures had the expected negative effect on neighborhood change. At the metropolitan area level, we find that larger metro areas and those in the Northeast and West exhibited more positive average change in neighborhood SES than those in the Midwest and South.