Regional Differences in Affluent Black and Affluent White Residential Outcomes

The South has arguably served as the cultural hearth of the African-American community during most the nation's history. However, a well-documented exodus of African-Americans occurred during the first half of the twentieth century as black people left the South for other parts of the nation in search of better economic opportunities and to escape the region's oppressive Jim Crow laws, which forced them into a second-class status via a system of separate but (un)equal laws (Tolnay 2003). This migration was so great that by the middle of the twentieth century, more blacks lived outside the South than within the region (McHugh 1987). Major economic, social, and cultural shifts occurred in the South during the waning decades of the twentieth century (McHugh 1987; Cromartie and Stack 1989). By the 1970s, the flood of blacks out of the region slowed and in-migration of blacks outpaced out-migration for the first time (L. Hunt, M. Hunt, and Falk 2008). A "new South" was rising, one that attracted both black and nonblack migrants alike to take advantage of new opportunities in telecommunications, manufacturing, and education (Hartshorn 1997; Pandit 1997). The new South attracted a certain segment of the African-Americans community, one with disproportionately greater social and economic capital than the resident black community (Adelman, Morett, and Tolnay 2000; Falk, L. Hunt, and M. Hunt 2004; Frey 2004; L. Hunt, M. Hunt, and Falk 2008). The Atlanta metropolitan region, for example, became known as the Mecca for the black middle class (Gates 2004) and became a leading producer of "black" popular culture (Severson 2011). For others in the black community, moving to the South represented the desire to return home, to a place where they felt a strong cultural connection to the region and the history of their people (Cromartie and Stack 1989; Gates 2004; Brown and Cromartie 2006; M. Hunt, L. Hunt, and Falk 2012). Considering these changes, we were interested in exploring how the South has "lived up" to expectations. We do this by examining the residential geography of affluent African-Americans--those members of the black community arguably having the greatest social and economic means to negotiate the residential housing market. We explored the intersection of race and class by comparing the residential outcomes of affluent black households to those of their white economic peers. Specifically, we seek to answer the following questions: How segregated are affluent black and affluent white households from one another? How does the neighborhood quality of affluent black households compare to that of affluent white households? How has segregation and neighborhood quality changed for both groups over the study period? What regional patterns exist in the segregation and neighborhood-quality outcomes of affluent black households, especially concerning the South? We try to answer these questions by comparing the residential outcomes of affluent black and affluent white households over a twenty-five-year period for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. For the purposes of this paper, we identify affluent households as those households reporting a yearly income of two or more times their respective metropolitan median household income. We begin by briefly summarizing the relevant literature to situate our research project within the broader context of residential segregation and neighborhood attainment. In the data and methodology section, we discuss the challenges and limitations of existing measures of affluence before presenting a more conservative alternative that accounts for metropolitan differences. We also discuss measures of segregation and neighborhood quality, then present a standardized Neighborhood Quality Index (NQI) to facilitate comparative analysis. In the remaining sections, we discuss our findings and conclusions. RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION AND NEIGHBORHOOD ATTAINMENT Residential segregation between blacks and whites grew substantially during much of the twentieth century as African-Americans left the South for other parts of the country (Massey and Denton 1993). …