Changing Residential Preferences across Income, Education, and Age Findings from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

Residential preferences and their role in creating and maintaining residential segregation are a subject of intense interest in ongoing debates about race and residential sorting in U. S. metropolitan areas and are central in work based on the Schelling tolerance models of residential selection. This study examines how residential preferences change across income, education, and age and provides new information on how race and socioeconomic status interact to create patterns of preference in particular locations. In general, African-Americans with increasing income show a distinct shift to greater willingness to live in integrated settings but also a distinct shift to own-race selections with second choices for neighborhood composition. Whites' unwillingness to move to African-American neighborhoods of more than 50% other race exacerbates the tendency to separate. Socioeconomic status plays a similar role for other ethnic groups. These findings parallel those from agent-based modeling about the low probability of achieving substantial mixing of racial and ethnic groups.