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Life-Course Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and Migration Between Poor and Non-poor Neighborhoods

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Abstract

Drawing on the life-course perspective, this study examines the effect of residential histories spent living in poor neighborhoods on the contemporaneous likelihood of moving between poor and non-poor neighborhoods. We use individual-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2013 in conjunction with neighborhood-level data derived from four U.S. censuses. Results from logistic regression analyses show that a longer residential history spent in poor neighborhoods both reduces the likelihood of moving from a poor to a non-poor neighborhood and increases the likelihood of moving from a non-poor to a poor neighborhood. A decomposition analysis reveals that a sizeable portion of the racial differences in the likelihood of moving between poor and non-poor neighborhoods is attributable to differences between blacks and whites in the duration of time they have spent living in a poor neighborhood. Our study highlights the salient role of residential histories in perpetuating racial inequality in neighborhood poverty over the life course and across generations.

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Notes

  1. In additional analyses, we further restricted the sample to persons who began and ended the interval in the same metropolitan areas. The results using this restricted sample were similar to the ones we report.

  2. An exception is that for new and split-off households, we measure time-varying covariates at the end of the mobility interval.

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Funding

The funding was provided by National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. SES‐1258677, SES‐1258758) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant Nos. R24 HD042828, R24 HD044943)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Demography, 501 W. César E. Chávez Blvd, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, 78207, USA

    Ying Huang

  2. Department of Sociology, Center for Social and Demographic Analysis, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Scott J. South

  3. Department of Sociology, Georgia State University, 1063 Langdale Hall, Box 5020, Atlanta, GA, 30302, USA

    Amy Spring

  4. Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Kyle Crowder

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Huang, Y., South, S.J., Spring, A. et al. Life-Course Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and Migration Between Poor and Non-poor Neighborhoods. Popul Res Policy Rev 40, 401–429 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-020-09580-0

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