Bringing Black Neighbors Back into the Neighborhood Context in the Study of Whites' Mobility

Samantha Friedman, George Washington University

It has been argued that black neighbors are critical in shaping whites' mobility. Little research, however, has directly tested the white flight hypothesis using individual- and neighbor-level data. This paper examines this issue using non-publicly-available data from the neighbor cluster sample collected within the 1985, 1989, and 1993 panels of the American Housing Survey. The neighbor sample consists of 680 housing units and their 10 neighboring housing units. These data are well suited to examine white flight because they are longitudinal and the race of whites' actual neighbors is available. Geographic identifiers for the housing units are also available, allowing census-tract level data to be appended. Hierarchical nonlinear modeling is used to assess the impact that black neighbors have on whites' mobility, controlling for tract-level racial composition and changes in such composition, individual-, and metropolitan-level characteristics.