PATTERNS OF NEIGHBORHOOD RACIAL AND ETHNIC CHANGE IN MULTIETHNIC METROS, 1970-2010 *

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. Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Change Page 3 Racial residential segregation continues to shape opportunities in most American metropolitan areas (Massey and Denton 1993; Collins and Williams 1999; Sampson 2008). In the post-Civil Rights era, there is growing acknowledgement that the pervasive model of neighborhood racial and ethnic change that leads to segregation, “invasion/succession” and white flight, explains very little of the persistent patterns of segregation (Taub, Taylor, and Dunham 1984; Logan and Zhang 2010). In this context, models of neighborhood change emerging in increasingly diverse multiethnic metropolitan areas must be developed in order to understand contemporary patterns of racial and ethnic segregation. Logan and Zhang (2010) make the best argument against the continued usefulness of the invasion/succession model of neighborhood change. They do so by following neighborhood racial and ethnic transitions over three successive decennial censuses, representing two decades of change. Their evidence demonstrates very few neighborhoods transition from being all-white to being all-minority as the invasion/succession model would predict. Instead, they argue that “incremental additions” of minorities to all-white neighborhoods change the composition from all-white to stable, multiethnically integrated “global neighborhoods. ” Despite its improvement, we argue that Logan and Zhang‟s (2010) contribution to understanding how patterns of neighborhood change relate to metropolitan segregation is limited in three ways. First, despite using terms like “incremental addition” and discussing slow patterns of racial and ethnic change, their methods do not actually measure the pace of neighborhood change. This results from the fact that they rely on transition matrices that measure neighborhood change as a categorical change between two stable categories of neighborhood racial and ethnic composition. The processes that they describe are as likely to occur within these broad categories as across them. Second, they fail to systematically hypothesize the potential mechanisms that contribute to different patterns of neighborhood change, a problem we think results because their data limited them to investigating transitions. Third, and by their own admission, they do not consider the ecological context of neighborhood change that could inform how processes emerge to create segregation. Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Change Page 4 In this paper, we build on previous research that argues that researchers should examine the pace of neighborhood racial and ethnic change in the post-Civil Rights era (Bader 2012). This research shows how contemporary evidence of individual processes violates the assumption of the invasion/succession model and justifies using a new method, growth mixture models, for studying patterns of neighborhood racial and ethnic change. This research, however, examines a single metropolitan area that limits the geographic generalizability of its findings. We apply the same model and methods to examine patterns of neighborhood racial and ethnic change in the metropolitan areas surrounding the four largest cities in the United States: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. The variation of both urban development and experiences with multiethnic population growth in these four cities provide ample opportunities to understand metropolitan variation in the paths of neighborhood racial and ethnic change. BACKGROUND The invasion/succession model describes a process where a small number of blacks enter – or “invade” – a neighborhood. Whites attempt to resist this “invasion” and, failing to do so, flee the neighborhood leaving their houses vacant (Duncan and Duncan 1957). Given whites‟ aversion to living among black neighbors, black families move into their vacant houses and further increase the percentage of black residents in the neighborhood and triggering more whites (even those more tolerant than initial movers) to flee. This process leads to the rapid “succession” of neighborhoods from being all-white neighborhoods to all-black (Karl E Taeuber and Alma F Taeuber 1965; Lee and Wood 1990, 1991). Demographic and sociological research finds a substantial amount of evidence in favor of this model through the 1970s. Evidence from recent census, however, challenges the invasion/succession model, most notably Logan and Zhang‟s (2010) analysis incorporating multiple decades of neighborhood racial and ethnic change. Given this evidence, it is worth evaluating the assumptions of the model in order to identify where it falls short and help us develop new models to explain contemporary patterns neighborhood racial and ethnic change. Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Change Page 5 Schelling’s model and assumptions The first assumption of Schelling‟s model is that the world consists entirely of blacks and whites. The growing multiethnic diversity in American metropolitan areas as a result of 1965 immigration reform clearly violates this assumption of the model (Waldinger 1989). This diversity increases the complexity of research because researchers must now account for variations across three or four groups rather than between just two (Zubrinsky and Bobo 1996). Using a very basic categorization of neighborhoods with only a single measure of integration, moving from two groups to three groups increases the number of neighborhood types from three (e.g., all-white, all-black, integrated white-black) to seven (e.g., all-white, all-black, all-Latino, white/black, white/Latino, black/Latino, integrated white/black/Latino). Four groups leads to 15 categories of racial composition. While this diversity violates the technical assumptions of the invasion/succession model, the model could be generalized to include multiple group comparisons. This would be the case if we saw “invasion” where another racial or ethnic group resides by a racial or ethnic group of a neighborhood and a rapid succession to being entirely composed of the latter. In its ideal form, we would see the rapid segregation of the metropolitan area into neighborhoods composed entirely of residents of one racial or ethnic group. Given that transitions occur at a different pace depending on the racial and ethnic group suggests that different factors might contribute to neighborhood change depending on the groups