Race and Age Structure in the American Neighborhood

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 14. Racial Segregation

Abstract

The United States' population has become steadily less non-Hispanic white, with some demographers predicting a shift to a “majority-minority” society within the next few decades. Although scholars have offered compelling critiques of the assumptions behind these predictions, most recognize that in the present day, the non-Hispanic, white alone population is aging relative to other groups. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the white median age is currently over 10 and 15 years greater than the Black and Hispanic median ages, respectively. How do these population-level age incongruities between racial groups manifest at the neighborhood level, given the recent growth in the number of integrated neighborhoods within a wider context of substantial and durable racial segregation? Using tract-level U.S. Census data from 2000 and 2010, I show that non-Hispanic whites are considerably older than their nonwhite neighbors in the vast majority of integrated tracts. Neighborhoods where whites are younger than their nonwhite neighbors – a phenomenon linked to gentrification in previous literature – are rare and concentrated in a handful of metropolitan areas, notably New York City and San Francisco. Finally, age incongruity is more pronounced in newly integrated tracts than in stably integrated tracts, suggesting that neighborhood racial change has an under-studied age component as well. In sum, these results indicate that in integrated neighborhoods, cross-racial interactions are also likely to be cross-generational. The paper concludes by highlighting potential consequences of this age incongruity for various dimensions of neighborhood life.

Author

• Christina Sonja Nelson, New York University