Describing the in-between: How landlords describe Black middle-class neighborhoods

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 6. Inequality in Housing and Neighborhoods

Abstract

Decades after the Fair Housing Act, racial inequality in housing markets persists. A growing body of research on online rental listings finds that there are racialized patterns on the kinds of information available and the ways in which the neighborhoods are described (Besbris et al. 2021; Boeing 2020; Kennedy et al. 2021). Yet this line of literature has focused primarily on racial composition, leaving open the question of how class interacts with race to shape neighborhoods. Existing research suggests that there is a dual gap for the Black middle-class neighborhoods; there has been a growing separation between the Black middle-class from Black low-income neighborhoods (Massey & Eggers 1990; Massey & Fischer 1999), yet Black middle-class residents remain highly segregated from the White middle-class neighborhoods (Pattillo 2005; Sharkey 2014). This paper aims to examine patterns in rental listing language by both race and class, particularly how landlords describe Black middle-class neighborhoods in online rental listings, and whether those descriptions differ systematically from listings in White middle-class and Black low-income neighborhoods. Using a large-scale dataset of Craigslist rental listings across 50 U.S. metropolitan areas (2017–2021), I plan to employ Structural Topic Modeling (STM) to analyze how neighborhood descriptions topically vary by race and class at the block-group level. I also propose to explore more flexible natural language processing approaches to capture subtler linguistic variations across different neighborhood types.

Author

• Olivia Songmee Jin, Stanford University