Black Migration, Segregation, and the Spatial Concentration of Poverty

This paper analyzes patterns of black and white mobility to determine the causes for the increase in the geographic concentration of black poverty during the 1970s. Using a special tabulation of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics that appended census tract information to individual records, we analyzed the movement of poor and nonpoor people into and out of five different kinds of neighborhoods: white nonpoor, black nonpoor, black poor, black very poor, and areas that were mixed in terms of race and class. We found little support for the view that black poverty concentration rose because middle class blacks were fleeing the poor. Rather, our results suggest that it stemmed from three complementary mechanisms: the selective migration of poor people into poor black neighborhoods, the wholesale abandonment of black and racially mixed areas by middle class whites, and the net movement into poverty of blacks living in segregated areas.