NEW STUDY FINDS LOW-INCOME HISPANIC RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION NOT HELPED BY VOUCHER PROGRAM SINCE THE 1960s
This project analyzes the geographic mobility and residential segregation of Hispanic households in U.S. urban areas since the 1960s. The study - "Residential Mobility and Hispanic Segregation: Spatial Assimilation and the Concentration of Poverty, 1960–2014 by Yana Kucheva of the City College of New York - has just been published in HUD's CityScape journal (Volume 23, No. 2) dated 2021 and entitled "The Hispanic Housing Experience in the United States."
The purpose was to examine changes over time in the determinants of mobility of households across neighborhoods and simulate segregation levels for the Hispanic population given different outcomes of household residential mobility.
The findings were that residential mobility patterns for the Hispanic population interact with existing patterns of segregation by both race/ethnicity and income to reproduce and deepen segregation, especially for low-income Hispanic households.
Policy Implications
This study’s findings indicate that the Housing Choice Voucher program, which tries to decrease the concentration of poverty through the provision of expanded housing options, will not reach its goals if the specific factors pushing Hispanic and African-American low-income households into much poorer neighborhoods than White households are overcome.
Methodology
The study used a set of discrete choice models of neighborhood mobility along multiple dimensions and use the predictions of the discrete choice models to explicitly connect household level moves to aggregate patterns of residential segregation by both race/ethnicity and income. The sources of data were geocoded decennial census and American Community Survey data for the period between 1960 and 2014.
