Intergenerational Neighborhood Attainment and the Legacy of Racial Residential Segregation: A Causal Mediation Analysis

Trapped in Place? Ethnic and Educational Heterogeneity in Residential Mobility and Integration of Young Adults in Brussels

Spatial assimilation theory asserts that immigrants' socioeconomic progress leads to residential adaptation and integration. This association has proven robust in USA and European urban areas through much of the twentieth century, but drastic change of ethnic and class compositions yet persistent (neighbourhood) inequality in the urban landscape urge us to reconsider the dynamic interaction between stability and change. In this study, we investigate to what extent education shapes residential mobility differently for young adults with varying ethnic and social origins. Focussing on Brussels, we use multinomial logistic regressions on linked longitudinal population-based censuses from 1991 and 2001 and register data for the period 2001-2006. Analyses show that dispersal away from poor inner-city neighbourhoods appears least likely for the offspring of poor low-educated non-Western households, regardless of their own educational attainment. While our approach roughly confirms traditional arguments of socio-spatial integration, it also reveals how educational success generates opportunities to escape poor neighbourhoods for some but not for others. With this, it points at the subtle ways in which factors and mechanisms in traditional spatial assimilation theory affect residential behaviour of young adults over their life course, at the intersection of specific locales, ethnic groups, social classes and generations.

Racial disparities in the pattern of intergenerational neighbourhood mobility

Neighbourhood context is known to shape one's life chances, but much of neighbourhood disadvantage is passed down from parents to children. The gap in social and economic achievements between Black and White families in the United States may partially be explained by differences in the intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood context. Using census tract socio-economic data, we created a national ranking of US census tracts. We then examined intergenerational neighbourhood mobility using 2828 parent-child pairs from a longitudinal household survey. We found that White children, compared with Black children, were more likely to inherit higher neighbourhood ranks from their parents. Income and education had smaller negative effects on neighbourhood rank for White children than Black children, all other things equal. Black children whose parents were in the bottom 25th percentile neighbourhood rank tended to move up in neighbourhood rank. But by much smaller magnitudes than their White counterparts. Our findings indicate that different patterns of intergenerational neighbourhood mobility between White and Black families may be an important factor for persisting racial disparities in the neighbourhood context.

Examining Multilevel Correlates of Geographic Mobility in a Sample of US Young Adults Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, geographic mobility, previously viewed as an indicator of economic stability, was declining among young adults. Yet, these trends shifted during the COVID-19 pandemic; young adults were more likely to move during COVID-19 for reasons related to reducing disease transmission and fewer educational and job opportunities. Few studies have documented the individual and neighborhood characteristics of young adults who moved before and during the pandemic. We used data from a cohort of young adults aged 18-34 in six metropolitan areas to examine individual- and neighborhood-level predictors of mobility before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample was majority female, white, and educated with a bachelor's degree or more. Residents in neighborhoods they lived in were mostly White, US-born, employed, and lived above the poverty level. Before the pandemic, identifying as a sexual minority was significantly related to mobility. During the pandemic, being younger, single, and non-Hispanic were significantly related to mobility. Higher neighborhood poverty was significantly related to mobility before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future studies that examine young adult populations who moved during the pandemic are needed to determine whether COVID-19 related moves increase economic instability and subsequent health-related outcomes.

The Childhood Origins of Climate-Induced Mobility and Immobility

The literature on climate exposures and human migration has focused largely on assessing short-term responses to temperature and precipitation shocks. In this paper, we suggest that this common coping strategies model can be extended to account for mechanisms that link environmental conditions to migration behavior over longer periods of time. We argue that early-life climate exposures may affect the likelihood of migration from childhood through early adulthood by influencing parental migration, community migration networks, human capital development, and decisions about household resource allocation, all of which are correlates of geographic mobility. After developing this conceptual framework, we evaluate the corresponding hypotheses using a big data approach, analyzing 20 million individual georeferenced records from 81 censuses implemented across 31 countries in tropical Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. For each world region, we estimate regression models that predict lifetime migration (a change in residence between birth and ages 30-39) as a function of temperature and precipitation anomalies in early life, defined as the year prior to birth through age four. Results suggest that early-life climate is systematically associated with changes in the probability of lifetime migration in most regions of the tropics, with the largest effects observed in sub-Saharan Africa. In East and Southern Africa, the effects of temperature shocks vary by sex and educational attainment and in a manner that suggests women and those of lower socioeconomic status are most vulnerable. Finally, we compare our main results with models using alternative measures of climate exposures. This comparison suggests climate exposures during the prenatal period and first few years of life are particularly (but not exclusively) salient for lifetime migration, which is most consistent with the hypothesized human capital mechanism.

Spatial Assimilation at a Halt? Intergenerational Persistence in Neighborhood Contexts among Immigrant Minorities in Norway

Spatial assimilation theory claims that immigrants’ acculturation and socioeconomic progress will lead to converging neighborhood attainment relative to non-migrant natives. Recently, it has been argued that equalization of local services and life chances across neighborhoods in egalitarian welfare states may delay spatial assimilation by reducing immigrants’ incentives to move out of low-income areas with many (co-ethnic) immigrant neighbors. In this article, we extend this argument to study whether neighborhood equalization also contributes to intergenerational persistence in neighborhood contexts among descendants of immigrants in Norway. Using administrative data, we find that immigrant descendants as adults often remain in neighborhood contexts that resemble their childhood neighborhoods, characterized by relative economic disadvantage and comparatively few ethnic majority residents. Intergenerational persistence in neighborhood contexts is strongest among descendants of immigrants from Pakistan, the Middle East, and Africa. The remaining immigrant–native gaps in spatial economic inequality largely reflect differences in individuals’ education and earnings, family background, and childhood neighborhood context, but these factors matter less for ethnic neighborhood segregation. For both economic and ethnic dimensions of neighborhood attainment, childhood neighborhood context is the factor that matters most in accounting for immigrant–native gaps, whereas individual socioeconomic attainment is the least important. Overall, our findings point to a pattern of “uneven assimilation” among immigrant descendants, where spatial assimilation is slow despite rapid socioeconomic progress across immigrant generations in the egalitarian Norwegian welfare state.

Association of Racial Residential Segregation Throughout Young Adulthood and Cognitive Performance in Middle-aged Participants in the CARDIA Study

Importance

Neighborhood-level residential segregation is implicated as a determinant for poor health outcomes in black individuals, but it is unclear whether this association extends to cognitive aging, especially in midlife.

Objective

To examine the association between cumulative exposure to residential segregation during 25 years of young adulthood among black individuals and cognitive performance in midlife.

Design, Setting, and Participants

The ongoing prospective cohort Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study recruited 5115 black and white participants aged 18 to 30 years from 4 field centers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois; and Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California. Data were acquired from February 1985 to May 2011. Among the surviving CARDIA cohort, 3671 (71.8%) attended examination year 25 of the study in 2010, when cognition was measured, and 3008 (81.9%) of those completed the cognitive assessments. To account for time-varying confounding and differential censoring, marginal structural models using inverse probability weighting were applied. Data were analyzed from April 16 to July 20, 2019.

Main Outcomes and Measures

Racial residential segregation was measured using the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic, and the mean cumulative exposure to segregation was calculated across 6 follow-up visits from baseline to year 25 of the study, then categorized into high, medium, and low segregation. Cognitive function was measured at year 25 of the study, using the Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST), Stroop color test (reverse coded), and Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test. To facilitate comparison of estimates, z scores were calculated for all cognitive tests.

Results

A total of 1568 black participants with available cognition data were included in the analysis. At baseline, participants had a mean (SD) age of 25 (4) years and consisted of 936 women (59.7%). Greater cumulative exposure to segregated neighborhoods was associated with a worse DSST z score (for high segregation, β = -0.37 [95% CI, -0.61 to -0.13]; for medium segregation, β = -0.25 [95% CI, -0.51 to 0.0002]) relative to exposure to low segregation.

Conclusions and Relevance

In this cohort study, exposure to residential segregation throughout young adulthood was associated with worse processing speed among black participants as early as in midlife. This association may potentially explain black-white disparities in dementia risk at older age.

Adolescents' relative position in school and educational attainment: The mediating role of educational expectations

This study examines whether and how adolescents' relative deprivation in school is associated with their years of education by incorporating the social comparison perspective into the Wisconsin status attainment model. Using Waves 1, 2, and 4 of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), this study finds that adolescents who are positioned at the bottom of the economic hierarchy in school are likely to have up to one less year of education, compared to their counterparts positioned at the top of the hierarchy, when holding other variables constant. Also, by using causal mediation analyses, I find that educational expectations account for more than 20% of the relationship between adolescents' relative deprivation and educational attainment. The sensitivity analyses are conducted to examine how robust the main findings are to the violation of the assumption used in this study. These results provide evidence showing that adolescents' educational outcomes do not only depend on their material resources but also on their relative standing in the economic hierarchy.

Skill-Based Contextual Sorting: How Parental Cognition and Residential Mobility Produce Unequal Environments for Children

Highly skilled parents deploy distinct strategies to cultivate their children’s development, but little is known about how parental cognitive skills interact with metropolitan opportunity structures and residential mobility to shape a major domain of inequality in children’s lives: the neighborhood. We integrate multiple literatures to develop hypotheses on parental skill-based sorting by neighborhood socioeconomic status and public school test scores, which we test using an original follow-up of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey. These data include more than a decade’s worth of residential histories for households with children that are linked to census, geographic information system, and educational administrative data. We construct discrete-choice models of neighborhood selection that account for heterogeneity among household types, incorporate the unique spatial structure of Los Angeles County, and include a wide range of neighborhood factors. The results show that parents’ cognitive skills interact with neighborhood socioeconomic status to predict residential selection after accounting for, and confirming, the expected influences of race, income, education, housing market conditions, and spatial proximity. Among parents in the upper/upper-middle class, cognitive skills predict sorting on average public school test scores rather than neighborhood socioeconomic status. Overall, we reveal skill-based contextual sorting as an overlooked driver of urban stratification.

Is geography destiny? Disrupting the relationship between segregation and neighbohrood outcomes

Considerable research has shown that, in the cross-section, segregation is associated with detrimental neighborhood outcomes for blacks and improved neighborhood outcomes for whites. However, it is unclear whether early-life experiences of segregation shape later-life neighborhood outcomes, whether this association persists for those who migrate out of the metropolitan areas in which they grew up, and how these relationships differ for blacks and whites. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1979 to 2013, we find that the level of segregation experienced during adolescence is associated with significantly worse neighborhood outcomes in adulthood for blacks. However, migrating out of the metropolitan area an individual grew up in substantially moderates these relationships. In contrast, adolescent segregation is associated with improved, or not significantly different, neighborhood outcomes in adulthood for whites. These findings have important implications for theorizing about the mechanisms linking segregation and neighborhood outcomes and for considering potential means of assuaging racial disparities in harmful neighborhood exposures.