Patterns of White Avoidance, Residential Mobility, and Integration in Diverse Cities and Communities

Daniel Lichter, Cornell University
Domenico Parisi, Mississippi State University

Our goal is to shift attention from the usual concerns about residential integration and attainment among ethnoracial minorities to emerging patterns of spatial integration among whites in America’s growing multiracial communities and neighborhoods. Our fundamental research questions are two-fold: (1) Do U.S. whites avoid or move into racial diverse cities and suburbs; and (2) Are emerging patterns of white avoidance and exposure segmented by socioeconomic status (i.e., education, income, and family structure)? To accomplish these goals, we use proprietary household data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics linked with population data from the U.S. decennial censuses and American Community Survey. We provide, for the first time, national estimates of the residential mobility of whites into and out of racially-diverse metropolitan areas, cities and suburbs, and blocks. By nesting blocks within places (i.e., cities and suburbs), we can map and model white mobility from places undergoing rapid racial change at multiple levels of geography. We examine whether whites are moving to predominately white blocks, even as surrounding suburban places and the broader metropolitan area have undergone significant increases in racial diversity over the study period. We provide an empirical benchmark of diversity using the entropy measure (E), which is a multiracial measure of diversity that takes into account the presence of more than one racial or ethnic group in the city. Unlike previous studies, we identify streams of movers, focusing in particular on both the origin and destination of white movers, broadly conceived. That is, we identify the racial composition of the origin and destination metropolitan areas, cities and suburbs, and blocks of both inter- and intra-metropolitan white movers. Previous studies have typically excluded the residential attainment of new in-migrants from other metropolitan areas.

Presented in Session 10: Internal Migration and Residential Segregation