The Mark of Segregation: Redlining’s Impact on the Relationship Between Racial Diversity and Social Capital

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Housing Policy

Abstract

Research finds that ethnoracial diversity is associated with lower levels of trust at the neighborhood level. In this paper, we examine how historical practices of place-based exclusion like redlining may have left a lasting imprint on the local social infrastructure. Such “spatial marking” may influence the contemporary interracial dynamics of neighborhoods through institutional processes that assign enduring value to a place. Using spatial analysis, we test whether historical processes captured at the zip-code level by twentieth-century redlining designations have lingering effects, visible in their moderating influence on the present-day association between ethnoracial diversity and social capital. We combine a novel dataset of geocoded redlining maps and contemporary street networks with U.S. Census demographic data and multiple measures of prosociality from the Social Capital Atlas and Meetup.com data. Our outcome measures include economic connectedness, the extent to which people of different socioeconomic status categories are friends with each other (measured using Facebook data), and event organizing, the number of Meetup events per capita in that locality. We find that negative spatial marking moderates the association between diversity and many prosocial outcomes. For instance, as historical D-grading increases in a place, racial diversity does not have as large a role in reducing low-to-high economic connectedness (the extent to which people with low SES are friends with people of high SES). This moderating association suggests that diversity’s negative association with social capital is more consequential in places with less negative spatial marking, perhaps due to the distinct institutional and cultural arrangements in historically advantaged neighborhoods. Meanwhile, as historical D-grading increases in a place, racial diversity has a greater role in raising levels of high-to-high economic connectedness (the extent to which people with high SES are friends with people of high SES), possibly indicating gentrification processes at work.

Authors

• Victor Tan Chen, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Giemyung Lee, George Mason University

• Myeong Lee, George Mason University

• Alex Mikulas, University of Colorado Boulder

• Sara Peters, University of Wisconsin-Madison