Racial Neighborhood Inequality in the United States, 1980-2010

Examined economic differences in the neighborhoods where whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians live in the U.S. Although it is commonly believed that blacks and Hispanics generally live in neighborhoods where poverty rates are higher than they are in the neighborhoods where whites and Asians live, very little research has tracked the change in racial disparities in neighborhood conditions over time. In prior research, this project's investigators found that racial differences in neighborhood economic conditions have diminished in the U.S. Since 1980 the decline in racial neighborhood inequality has been much faster than the decline in racial residential segregation. Because prior research on neighborhoods has focused on change in the residential segregation of different racial and ethnic groups, the trend in racial neighborhood inequality has been largely overlooked, and its causes are unknown. The objective of this project is to account for the decline in racial neighborhood inequality by investigating why it has declined faster in some metropolitan areas than in others.