Neighbors’ Income Distribution: Economic Segregation and Mixing in US Urban Neighborhoods

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale much smaller than the census tract (a representative sample of households or ‘kernels’ and their ten closest neighbors). Joint and conditional distributions portray neighbors’ characteristics conditional on the kernel’s housing tenure, race and income. The paper documents both significant income mixing in the majority of US urban micro neighborhoods and the extent of income mixing within neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.