Abstract
Douglas S. Massey on the distribution of disadvantage.
One thing I know, given my nearly 50 years of research on residential segregation, is that America’s system of stratification with respect to race and class is firmly grounded in geographic inequalities. This link between the social and spatial emerged as the nation urbanized and industrialized between 1870 and 1970, and it strengthened as the postindustrial order materialized from 1970 to 2020.
Industrialization brought trolleys, trains, cars, and trucks, and with them came the rising segmentation of urban space based on land use, class, race, and ethnicity. From 1870 to 1930, segregation by income and ethnicity rose, driven by sharp increases in economic inequality wrought by industrialization and by the rapid rural-urban migration and mass immigration it triggered.
After 1900, the great Black migration brought about the steady urbanization of African Americans throughout the nation. Although native Whites of native parentage resisted the entry of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe into their neighborhoods, Black arrivals from the South were met with violence. In the 1920s, that violence ebbed as real estate agents and bankers built racial discrimination into housing and lending markets, a practice that subsequently suffused public policies enacted under the New Deal of the 1930s.
Owing to the Great Depression and World War II, America’s geography of inequality changed little from 1930 to 1950. However, that period witnessed a marked compression of earnings that lowered income inequality from 1950 into the early 1970s. At the same time, federal subsidies enacted during the 1930s (FHA lending) and 1940s (VA lending) fueled a massive wave of suburbanization led by native Whites of native parentage, accompanied by the descendants of formerly excluded Southern and Eastern European immigrants, both of whom fled central cities en masse.
With European immigration truncated by quotas enacted in the early 1920s and curtailed by the Great Depression, the result of this mobility was a steady decline in both class and ethnic segregation from 1950 to 1970. In contrast, with Black migration continuing and African Americans still excluded from housing and lending markets, Black segregation rose, with Whites dominating the suburbs and Blacks concentrating in city neighborhoods destined to decay.
The transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, which began in the early ‘70s, centered on the production of knowledge. The new order featured a shift from analog to digital technologies, the resurrection of international trade, and the resumption of mass immigration. These changes were accompanied by an ideological shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, which emphasized unregulated markets and the private management of production. At the same time, the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s and the cessation of Black migration from the South transformed race relations. In 1968, Congress outlawed racial discrimination in housing markets; in 1974, it banned discrimination in lending markets; and in 1977, it forbade the practice of redlining (the color coding of Black neighborhoods red to render them ineligible for credit and capital investment).
The new regime entailed overlapping waves of deindustrialization, privatization, downsizing, outsourcing, and tax cuts for the wealthy, yielding a sharp rise in economic inequality in which the top 20% of households pulled away from the bottom 80%, and the top 1% pulled away from everyone. Residential segregation and spatial concentrations of poverty and affluence rose. The revival of immigration, meanwhile, greatly expanded the number of Hispanics and Asians, triggering an upsurge in xenophobia.
Although Black segregation and spatial isolation declined in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the declines were limited to a subset of small metropolitan areas with relatively small and affluent Black populations and less restrictive zoning regimes, which after 1970 became a major driver of both class and racial segregation. The segregation of Hispanics and Asians remains moderate relative to that of Blacks, but rapid demographic growth produced a sharp increase in Hispanic spatial isolation.
Rising segregation by income, the persistence of Black segregation, and the growing isolation of Hispanics have contributed to growing concentrations of affluence and poverty throughout the nation. While most attention has focused on the spatial concentration of disadvantage, in this new Gilded Age it is the concentration of advantage that has increased most sharply. Affluent Whites and Asians are increasingly isolated in neighborhoods with other affluent people, especially in the Washington, D.C. metro area. The nation’s political elite is consequently unlikely to interact with middle- and working-class Americans in the neighborhoods where they live. Their odds of meeting a poor person are vanishingly small.