For a good chunk of the 20th century, residential segregation by race was a fact of life in America. Today, that’s still the case in many cities around the country. While residential segregation has, on average, declined, in many parts of the United States it remains stubbornly high.
Researchers who study segregation typically focus on a few possible explanations for the persistence of segregation in America—the economic barriers faced by minorities, for example, or housing market discrimination. But in a new book, Cycle of Segregation, out this week, researchers Maria Krysanand Kyle Crowder suggest a new perspective, which they refer to as the social structural sorting perspective. Or, in layman’s terms: The many ways in which an individual’s daily life—their social networks, the neighborhoods they live and work in and travel through, etc.—might serve to perpetuate segregation.
“All of these daily processes that are baked into our social lives really shape the way that we perceive our residential choices,” Crowder told me recently. “And because our social networks and our daily activities and our residential experiences are all racially circumscribed—they differ by race—members of different racial and ethnic groups are facing, or perceiving, different kinds of residential options.”
[For more on this story by DWYER GUNN, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...-segregation/550841/]
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