Root causes of demographic inversions

Hmmm. Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point by William Easterly

The abstract is:

The Schelling model of a “tipping point” in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of “tipping” explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the US from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more “white flight” out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods

The fact that neighborhoods can dramatically change their ethnic makeup in relatively short spans of time is long established. In this paper, which looks at 1970-2000, nearly 10% of urban neighborhoods switched from majority white to majority non-white. As an aside, I have never seen a comparable study that looks at the reverse phenomenon which we usually refer to as gentrification, i.e. where urban neighborhoods switch from majority non-white to majority white. The absence of academic papers on that aspect of gentrification is interesting because it implies an odd asymmetry; it is bad when whites leave and it is bad when they return. But that is more an ideological issue than an epistemological one.

I found this paper interesting in that it tests a longstanding assumption that has never been rigorously tested before and finds the data inconsistent with the model forecasts. As always, why did we accept the model as true for so long without actually testing it? This is not to say that Easterly's research is the final word. Rather, why did it take fifty years to even question whether the model was true?

Easterly covers all the technical details. We know already that it takes only small levels of positive affiliation (by race or class or religion or other attribute) to tip neighborhood majorities strongly one way or the other and that negative affiliation doesn't even need to be a factor for high degrees of segregation to occur.

What Easterly's work begins to get at is something I have often wondered about in earlier such studies. In general, the hypothesis has been something along the lines of "what percentage of neighbors need to be non-white before the neighborhood experiences white flight and switch to majority non-white?" My question is about whether we are framing this correctly in the first place. What are the reasons people elect to leave a neighborhood and does racial constitution play an independent role among the reasons for leaving?

We look at neighborhood racial inversion from a very constricted perspective, framed as why whites dislike blacks. That frame has a very large range of assumptions that should be tested. We are assuming the answer into place. The question, I believe, isn't "Why do whites flee from blacks" as most commonly assumed. I think the question is instead, "why do neighborhood demographic inversions occur?" With gentrification, the inversion of a neighborhood from majority black to majority white, we don't make the assumption that blacks are fleeing whites and we don't try and figure out what the tipping point is in terms of how many whites there can be before blacks start fleeing. Posing it in that way exposes the biased assumptions in our current thinking. We know that gentrification is an economic phenomenon, not a racial one. So why might not other inversions have different root causes than racial aversion as well?

What we really want to know are the root causes of demographic inversions, not assume the answer into place. Even Easterly's paper is caught in the current paradigm of looking only at white to black inversions. I would argue that we ought to be looking at all ethnic/racial inversions - white to black, black to white, black to Hispanic, white to Asian, etc. And we shouldn't be looking only at race but at all observable affiliative patterns; why do some neighborhoods switch from rich to poor, from native born to immigrant, from immigrant to native born, from older to younger. There are some pretty obvious answers to some of these as well as some less obvious ones as well. By assuming whites are racist and will always leave a neighborhood when there are more than X% black, we miss what is really going on, coarsen our discourse and handicap our capacity to craft beneficial policies.

The reason I have wondered this is based on the specific examples of particular neighborhood inversions. Take my city for a contemporary example. Sure, there were numerous neighborhoods that switched from white to black back in the sixties and seventies. But a good number of those are now switching back to white in the 2010s. In the meantime, in the 1990s and 2000s, numerous black neighborhoods became Hispanic neighborhoods. In the 1980s, one historically Jewish neighborhood, in the space of ten years, went from majority Jewish to overwhelmingly gentile. There is a lot of demographic flux going on all the time and with relative rapidity. But why is it happening and does racial affiliation/animus have much to do with it? How many of these changes might be driven by contextual economic and other factors?

For example, the neighborhood changes in the 1950s and 1960s occurred at a time of rural migration to the cities (black and white but probably disproportionately black). At the same time, with post-war prosperity, many urban whites now could afford cars in a way that they had not been able to before and therefore suburban living became a real option. Were urban whites moving to the suburbs because that is where they could now afford to live, with cheaper cars and improved transportation infrastructure, and that simply coincided with rural black migration into cities? Closely related to that, was neighborhood racial inversion more a function of economic opportunities (whites moving to the faster growing suburbs) than of race? Did rapid inversions occur more because of signalling than because of race per se?

In other words, there are a host of alternative reasons for neighborhood demographic inversions and it is unclear to me to what degree and how often race played a factor independent of and greater than alternative explanations. I am trying to get at an explanation that encompasses what we have seen in the past twenty years in my city. It does not appear to me that blacks are fleeing neighborhoods where Hispanics are becoming more common, nor does it appear that Hispanics are seeking to live where there is a majority of African-Americans. I am skeptical that gentiles were simply eager to live among Jews and Jews wanted to get away from that incursion. It appears to me that there are many more demographic inversions occurring than we acknowledge and that those inversions occur for a wide range of reasons, mostly economic. Racial animus might be, and in some instances likely is, in the mix, but I think the root causes are different than are usually acknowledged.

Easterly's work doesn't answer those questions but does provide evidence to support that those might be the more pertinent questions.