Many of the nation’s racial disparities stem from the simple economic fact that white families make more money than black families on average, a gap that has remained stubbornly large in recent decades.
Yet neither this income gap nor blatant discrimination is the only reason for the disparities. A new study, by three Stanford researchers, highlights another big cause: the neighborhood gap.
Even among white and black families with similar incomes, white families are much more likely to live in good neighborhoods — with high-quality schools, day-care options, parks, playgrounds and transportation options. The study comes to this conclusion by mining census data and uncovering a striking pattern: White (and Asian-American) middle-income families tend to live in middle-income neighborhoods. Black middle-income families tend to live in distinctly lower-income ones.
Most strikingly, the typical middle-income black family lives in a neighborhood with lower incomes than the typical low-income white family.
“I was surprised by the magnitude,” said Sean Reardon, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the paper’s lead author. “I thought comparing people at exactly the same income level would get rid of more of the neighborhood differences than it did.”
© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
