Neighborhood formation in St. Louis, 1930

Abstract

What are the social bases of neighborhood formation in urban areas, and at what spatial scale are they most distinct from other neighborhoods? We address these questions in the case of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1930, where we can take advantage of unique geocoded census microdata on the whole population of the city that identifies who, with what background characteristics, lived where. Our analyses show that homophily by race and ethnicity was by far the strongest factor linking characteristics of persons to the composition of their neighbors. Measures of social class also were quite important, while the person’s nativity and family status were statistically significant but minor predictors. Yet while this hierarchy of social factors held for the population as a whole, their relative importance varied greatly across racial/ethnic groups. Similarity in social class to neighbors was most important for native whites, nativity counted as much or more than class for recently arriving immigrant groups including Russians, Italians, and Poles, and race/ethnicity was by far the key predictor for these groups and blacks. We also found that these patterns of homophily were clearest at the scale of individual street segment and first-order combinations of segments. They were similar but less distinct at a larger spatial scale.

Residential Micro-Segregation and Social Capital in Lima, Peru

“…Micro-segregation scholarship has developed conceptual and methodological tools to study the spatial organization of social groups at low scales, such as the residential tower and the street segment [3,22]. A thread of this line of work stems from analysing sociospatial hierarchies in dense and densifying cities, primarily in Europe and parts of East Asia and Latin America.…”

“…My contributions to the existing research on residential segregation include challenging some long-held assumptions and expanding its methodological toolkit. I build on micro-segregation scholarship to highlight the role of the street level for segregation patterns in the U.S. and Latin America [8,16,[20][21][22][23]. Specifically, I draw on the notion of horizontal micro-segregation to outline the fragmentation of the urban landscape resulting from resident-driven street enclosures within and across neighbourhoods, and throughout the socioeconomic spectrum.…”

“…Systematic work on street-level segregation may involve labour-intensive fieldwork or the manual coding of aerial photographs [15,20]. However, recent scholarship has shown the possibilities of fine-grained geolocated data to uncover overlooked segregation patterns [21][22][23][24]. I follow this line of work, providing a template (and reproducible code) for collecting and analysing spatial data using open software, and combining it with traditional sociodemographic and survey data.…”

Finding the city in sociology: Broadening and deepening the geographic scope of the urban and inequality literatures

“…St. Louis proper, on the west side of the Mississippi, was also an early laboratory for Jim Crow era techniques in segregation, like exclusionary zoning, racially restrictive covenants, and redlining (Gordon, ; Rothstein, ). Racial discrimination therefore figured prominently in early 20th century demographic patterns in St. Louis (Logan, Graziul, & Frey, ) and the city played host to critical court cases, like Shelley v. Kraemer , that brought about these strategies' legal demise (Darden, ).…”

Finding the City in Sociology: Broadening and Deepening the Geographic Scope of the Urban and Inequality Literatures

“…St. Louis proper, on the west side of the Mississippi, was also an early laboratory for Jim Crow era techniques in segregation, like exclusionary zoning, racially restrictive covenants, and redlining (Gordon, 2014;Rothstein, 2017). Racial discrimination therefore figured prominently in early 20 th century demographic patterns in St. Louis (Logan, Graziul, & Frey, 2018) and the city played host to critical court cases, like Shelley v. Kraemer, that brought about these strategies' legal demise (Darden, 1995).…”