Birds of a Feather: Social Bases of Neighborhood Formation in Newark, New Jersey, 1880

Abstract

This study examines the bases of residential segregation in a late nineteenth century American city, recognizing the strong tendency toward homophily within neighborhoods. Our primary question is how ethnicity, social class, nativity, and family composition affect where people live. Segregation is usually studied one dimension at a time, but these social differences are interrelated, and thus a multivariate approach is needed to understand their effects. We find that ethnicity is the main basis of local residential sorting, while occupational standing and, to a lesser degree, family life cycle and nativity also are significant. A second concern is the geographic scale of neighborhoods: in this study, the geographic area within which the characteristics of potential neighbors matter in locational outcomes of individuals. Studies of segregation typically use a single spatial scale, often one determined by the availability of administrative data. We take advantage of a unique data set containing the address and georeferenced location of every resident. We conclude that it is the most local scale that offers the best prediction of people’s similarity to their neighbors. Adding information at larger scales minimally improves prediction of the person’s location. The 1880 neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey, were formed as individuals located themselves among similar neighbors on a single street segment.

Neighborhood formation in St. Louis, 1930

“…In initial analyses (shown in online Supplement Tables 1 to 3), we combined all racial/ethnic groups and limited the sample size to a 10% random sample of households (resulting in 16,246 households and 5257 street segments on which those individuals lived). Such sampling is established practice (Logan and Shin, 2016; McFadden, 1978). However, for the group-specific analyses that we present here, we included the full set of households (162,461 households on 7584 street segments).…”

“…The first of these is the street segment —the portion of a street bounded by two intersecting streets. The second is the segment group , a concept previously utilized by Logan and Shin (2016), consisting of a segment and all segments that the segment touches. The third is the extended segment group , consisting of the segments touching any line or vertex of the segment group.…”

“…He finds that both race and income significantly predict the likelihood of moving into a tract with higher shares of black residents (a strong positive effect of being black and negative effect of higher income) and higher average income (a strong negative effect of being black and positive effect of higher income). A more intensive analysis has been reported for one city using historical census data, Newark, NJ in 1880 (Logan and Shin, 2016). Comparing results at two different spatial scales, these authors showed first that model results were stronger at the scale of street segments than at a larger scale.…”

The Ethnic Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940

“…7 White et al (1994) use the 1 in 250 sample from the 1910 Census to explore whether sampled households on either side of the immigrant were foreign or native born, under the assumption that individuals 250 people apart was a good proxy for a neighbor. Our study improves on White et al (1994) by filling in this 250-person gap with the full-count data; furthermore, we use full-count data from multiple censuses to estimate the trend in segregation over time, as opposed to White et al's (1994White et al's ( ) snapshot of 1910 More recently, the work of John Logan and various co-authors have continued this detailed work of mapping addresses, but so far this primarily involves the 1880 census (e.g., Logan and Shin, 2016;Logan and Martinez, 2018;Spielman and Logan, 2013).…”

Spatial scale and measuring segregation: illustrated by the formation of Chicago’s ghetto

“…A major programme aimed at filling that lacuna is the recent work of Logan and his colleagues (Logan et al 2015a(Logan et al , 2015b on the emergence of Black Ghettos in American cities, building on earlier studies there (Duncan and Duncan, 1957;Taeuber and Taeuber, 1972;Philpott, 1978: see also Kusmer, 1978, andShin, 2016). Their research asks 'When did northern Blacks become highly segregated …?'…”