Assisted Housing, Segregation, and Intergenerational Income Persistence: Exploring the Geography of Unequal Opportunity

• In Event: 251 - Regular Session. The Geography of Social Mobility: Sociological Perspectives

Abstract

Identifying barriers to upward income mobility across generations is critical to understanding stratification and opportunity in the US. New subnational estimates of intergenerational income mobility permit investigation of these barriers at the local level. Local policy choices, in the form of government assistance, might promote or hamper economic mobility. We examine whether the segregation of government assisted housing in the area where an individual grows up predicts his income mobility prospects using HUD and IRS data. Results indicate that individuals from places characterized by highly geographically concentrated assisted housing experience relatively low income mobility rates. This relationship, robust to geographic fixed effects and extensive local covariates, indicates that children from low-income families are more likely to remain low income as young adults if they grow up in areas where assisted housing is especially segregated. Moreover, the association between assisted housing prevalence and mobility only holds in areas where assisted housing is also segregated and where segregation by poverty and race is high. In fact, where poverty segregation is low, results suggest that greater assisted housing prevalence may boost upward income mobility. Assisted housing's relationship with income mobility is both moderated and mediated by characteristics of the local environment. Depending on the extent of economic and racial segregation, assisted housing may either harm or help low-income children's prospects for upward mobility. Local policies interact with local contexts to predict intergenerational income persistence.

Authors

• Deirdre Bloome, University of Michigan

• Ann Owens, University of Southern California