Realizing Racial and Ethnic Neighborhood Preferences? Exploring the Mismatches Between What People Want, Where They Search, and Where They Live.

The housing search process is an overlooked mechanism in the scholarly research that seeks to understand the causes of persistent racial residential segregation in the United States. Past research has explored in detail the preferences people hold in terms of the racial and ethnic composition of their neighborhoods, and more recently some have also examined the correspondence between racial and ethnic neighborhood preferences and current neighborhood racial/ethnic composition. But an intermediate stage-the racial/ethnic composition of where people search-has not been investigated. We analyze a subsample (n = 382) from the 2004-2005 Chicago Area Study to demonstrate the value of systematically studying the matches-or mismatches-between preferences, search locations, and neighborhood outcomes. We find that for whites, not only their current neighborhoods but also the neighborhoods in which they search for housing have larger percentages of whites than they say they prefer. In contrast, blacks-and to a lesser extent Latinos-search in neighborhoods that correspond to their preferences, but reside in neighborhoods with a larger percentage own group. Logistic regression analyses reveal that mismatches are associated with both a lack of information and inadequate finances, but also may be due to socially desirable responding for whites in particular. Our results provide suggestive evidence of the importance of unpacking the search process more generally and draw attention to what are likely to be productive new future data collection efforts as well as an area potentially ripe for policy interventions.

Positive or negative ethnic encounters in urban neighbourhoods? A photo experiment on the net impact of ethnicity and neighbourhood context on attitudes towards minority and majority residents.

Using data from a new factorial survey experiment, we study the mechanisms that drive negative interethnic attitudes in urban neighbourhood encounters. Specifically, we examine the extent to which the general impression made by a resident depends on the ethnicity of that resident and on the aspects of the neighbourhood environment. Majority and minority respondents in the Netherlands judged pictures and descriptions of fictitious neighbourhood residents, in which the ethnicity of the resident varied independently of other resident characteristics (i.e., work status, religion and problem behaviour) and the neighbourhood environment (i.e., physical disorder and ethnic and socioeconomic composition). We show that outcomes depend largely on the ethnicity of the respondent who experiences the encounters. For majority respondents, we find a main net effect of resident ethnicity: native Dutch are less positive about Surinamese residents. Furthermore, we find some support for the normative fit hypothesis that states that minority respondents are less positively evaluated in stereotype-consistent neighbourhood environments: native Dutch are less positive about Moroccan residents encountered in low-status neighbourhoods.