Patterns of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Change in Multiethnic Metros, 1970-2010

Michael D. M. Bader, American University
Siri Warkentien, Johns Hopkins University

Racial residential segregation persists in most American metropolitan areas even as evidence suggests that the primary model to explain neighborhood racial and ethnic change – the invasion/succession model – no longer applies. We show how contemporary evidence of residential behaviors contracts assumptions of the invasion/succession model and demonstrate how this contemporary evidence would suggest a much slower pace of change. We examine how well models apply to empirical patterns of neighborhood racial and ethnic change, identified using growth mixture models, from 1970 to 2010 in the metropolitan areas surrounding the four largest U.S. cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. We investigate the distribution of types of neighborhood/racial ethnic change over the four metropolitan areas, map the ecological context of trajectories, and model the neighborhood characteristics associated with different types of change.