Study of Class Segregation Finds Poor and Especially Rich Americans are Isolated in Their Daily Activities

 

"Rubbing shoulders: Class segregation in daily activities," by Maxim Massenkoff & Nathan Wilmers, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 244, 2025, 105335, ISSN 0047-2727, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105335. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272725000337). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105335.

It was found:

• Poor and especially rich Americans are isolated in their daily activities.
• Distance from home explains one-third of class segregation in activities.
• Casual restaurant chains like Olive Garden foster more class mixing than civic spaces.
• Cross-class encounters strongly predict Facebook friendships across economic lines.

The authors used location data to study cross-class encounters. Low-income and especially high-income individuals are socially isolated: they are more likely than other income groups to encounter people from their own class. Counterfactual exercises suggest this is explained largely by residential segregation and firms. Among firms, casual restaurants make the largest positive contribution to cross-class encounters through both scale and their diversity of visitors. Dollar stores and libraries isolate visitors. Our local measure of encounters is strongly associated with cross-class Facebook friendships, which have been previously shown to correlate with intergenerational mobility.

Growing research has shown that places rub off on you (Wilson, 2012, Sampson, 2012). When children move to better neighborhoods at a young age, their adult outcomes improve (Chetty et al., 2016, Chetty and Hendren, 2018), and children growing up in the presence of inventors are more likely to innovate in that area (Bell et al., 2019). The sources of these exposure effects are unclear, but one possibility is that areas that boost mobility have more opportunities for interaction, friendship, and mentorship across class lines (Chetty et al., 2022a).

This article measures opportunities for such cross-class interactions, providing the first national estimates of economic segregation in activities. It is done using intuitive metrics and geolocation data from SafeGraph, which allows for granular income proxies based on the small neighborhoods where people live. A neighborhood’s exposure to others is defined by the other people in the stores, restaurants, shops, parks, and libraries that its residents frequent.

How much do Americans of different income levels mix with one another? Who is exposed to a broad cross-section of income levels, and who is disproportionately exposed to others like themselves? It was found that the most isolated Americans are not the poor, but the rich. Households from the top 20% of neighborhoods by income are twice as likely to encounter other high-income people as would be expected by chance. The bottom 20% of neighborhoods is also isolated, but at about half the rate. Middle-income residents in the US are exposed to a more representative assortment of people. The cross-class encounters that we register in our data are also highly correlated with a measure of cross-class friendships constructed using Facebook data (Chetty et al., 2022a).

How much isolation is due to high- and low-income households frequenting different industries from others (high-end dining rather than fast food) or staying local at residentially segregated neighborhoods? In a counterfactual reweighting exercise (DiNardo et al., 1995), we find that there is only a small role for industry. High-income residents frequent different types of places - e.g., museums instead of libraries and full-service restaurants as opposed to fast food - but equating industry shares across classes would barely shift levels of isolation. On the other hand, people are most isolated when they are closest to home, and the tendency to stay close can account for around one third of the isolation we observe. This suggests that activity segregation partially reflects residential segregation. But even adjusting for distance from home, the majority of activity segregation persists.

The article next examines which specific firms contribute to socio-economic mixing and which exacerbate segregation. Some very poor-serving national chains, like discount general merchandise stores, contribute to segregation. But, consistent with the importance of distance in the reweighting analysis, so do chains that have many local branches: while residents from all income quintiles shop at CVS (the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.), they shop at CVS stores in their own neighborhoods.

In contrast to these market segmented or highly local businesses, some chains contribute substantially to socio-economic mixing. Specifically, low-price full-service restaurants are frequented by a diverse range of residents: the rich and poor rub shoulders at Olive Garden and Applebee’s. Indeed, the most socio-economically diverse places in America are not public institutions, like schools and parks, but affordable, chain restaurants.

This study expands on recent literature that uses data from mobile phones, social networks, and financial transactions to examine economic segregation (reviewed in Appendix F), providing the first national estimates of experienced class segregation in daily activities. We focus on an intuitive measure of isolation: the share of encounters with one’s own group members, and provide the first decomposition quantifying sources of social isolation for the rich and poor. Finally, we investigate the types of locations that harbor economic integration, even down to the brand level, offering a unique level of granularity for measuring the role of specific brands in hosting economic integration.

It was found that the core concept is exposure: the chance of encountering someone in a certain group, conditional on membership in a certain group. An encounter is when someone is at a place at the same time as someone else (Athey et al., 2021). A place is typically a business establishment, but also includes entities like parks and schools. Exposure was based on the monthly aggregate visits. The high income group has a relatively lower share of visits to essential retail and a relatively higher share of visits to entertainment and full service dining.

Given the importance of national chains and firms to the isolation of high- and low-income neighborhood residents, the specific industries and chains that contribute to and offset isolation are identified. Our establishment-level data allows us to track particular chains and provides the first assessment of particular companies’ contribution to socio-economic mixing.

Class segregation appears not just where people live (Reardon and Bischoff, 2011) and work (Song et al., 2019), but also in the public and commercial places where people spend time and money. This paper establishes that residents of low- and especially high-income neighborhoods are exposed disproportionately to others like themselves.

(Image by storyset on Freepik.com.)

Plaque Honoring Housing Segregation Leader William L. Marbury Removed from Bolton Hill and Decommissioned by Baltimore

Baltimore's Board of Estimates has decommissioned and removed a raised plaque honoring a segregationist from public property in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city. The William L. Marbury Plaque was placed in the late 1930s at the south end of a wide median strip in the 1700 block of Park Avenue near the intersection of Park Avenue and Wilson Street by the Mt. Royal Garden Club, a predecessor of today’s Bolton Hill Garden Club where it remained for almost 90 years. It was installed to honor an attorney who lived in Bolton Hill in the early 1900s. After the November 2024 removal, there remains a hole in the ground Its removal from public property is consistent with the community’s wishes and the plaque has been given to the Marbury family, which was “willing and anxious” to receive it.The plaque was been removed in November 2024 from city-owned land in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. The inscription on the plaque read: "William L. Marbury, Dec. 26, 1859   Oct. 26, 1935, Planted by Mt. Royal Garden Club."

He served as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland during the Grover Cleveland administration or as president of Maryland State Bar Association in 1910. He ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate in 1913. The firm where he and his son worked for many years, then known as Marbury Miller and Evans, merged in 1952 with Piper, Watkins, Avirett & Egerton to create Piper & Marbury, now part of DLA Piper.

William Luke Marbury Sr. was also a segregationist - the founder in 1910 of the Mount Royal Protective Association, whose mission was “to halt African Americans from renting or purchasing property in the Mount Royal District, which included present-day Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill.” Marbury had a record of promoting residential segregation.

“Marbury is credited with being the architect of redlining laws in Baltimore,” neighborhood resident and a past president of the Bolton Hill Community Association David Nyweide wrote in the December issue of The Bolton Hill Bulletin. “He actively tried to disenfranchise voters in Maryland with dark skin, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the U. S. Supreme Court that the State of Maryland could legally strip their voting rights because Maryland never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. He himself was a descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison about a century earlier, the case which famously established the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state laws and acts of Congress that contravene the Constitution.”

Historians also note that Marbury came from a family of plantation-owners in Southern Maryland who held slaves before moving to Baltimore in the 1870s. “Marbury helped draft several state bills designed to disenfranchise Black Marylanders’ voting rights from the late 1890s to 1911,” a 2020 report by the Bolton Hill committee. about Marbury. said. “As he told the Baltimore Sun in January 1910, ‘it is an anomalous condition that an inferior race should share the government with the superior one.’ “

By 1910, “Marbury had also become an advisor to members of the Baltimore City Council who were promoting residential segregation, and he help them draft a series of residential segregation laws between 1910 and 1917, among the earliest such urban statues in the country,” the report stated. “When they proved so conservative as to fail to pass constitutional muster in the Supreme Court, Marbury favored enforcement tools in the form of restrictive covenants and the Mount Royal Protective Association, which was founded with the explicit purpose to stop Black people from renting or purchasing homes in Bolton Hill.” In 1910, Baltimore was the first U.S. city to pass a residential segregation ordinance.

Marbury “did not…simply hold beliefs about racial segregation that were not uncommon for other white people of his time,” the committee stated in its report. “[H]e was instead a locally prominent white man who actively shaped the world of Jim Crow during the early twentieth century” and the plaque “memorializes a former resident of Bolton Hill who would not be honored today for his public, proactive efforts to disenfranchise Black people and inhibit them from living in the neighborhood.” Because of “the unverified reasons for the plaque’s placement but unequivocal knowledge of the revolting public reputation of the man honored by the plaque, the committee recommends removal,” the committee concluded, adding a suggestion that the plaque be given to “a Marbury descendant.” The garden club’s executive committee agreed with the recommendation to remove the plaque. The committee “considers the plaque to no longer represent the values of the garden club and the Bolton Hill neighborhood as it is a painful reminder to many of exclusionary and discriminatory times.”

Nyweide said in his article that there was some debate within the community about removing the plaque. “Reasonable, dissenting voices to removing the plaque were concerned that it would erase the odious history it signified, where dispensing with it would be a convenient means of ignoring the history of segregation in Bolton Hill,” he wrote. “Yet, that history remains despite the absence of the plaque on the Park Avenue median, and the public historic markers committee’s work was a means of drawing attention to it. As the committee concluded, the plaque was placed to honor a man whose legacy would not be honored with such a plaque today by the Bolton Hill Garden Club nor by the Bolton Hill Community Association. His former residence does not bear a Blue Plaque [marking the homes of noteworthy Bolton Hill residents who have died.] The Marbury plaque’s placement amid a grassy median on Park Avenue had become as incongruous as the man himself would be today.”

“To his descendants, the Marbury plaque is a familial artifact,” he wrote. “They had no say in inheriting the racist legacy of their forebearer, just as today’s residents of Bolton Hill did not live in the neighborhood of Marbury’s day. The Marbury plaque remains, just not where it was originally planted.”

Read the January 8, 2025 Baltimore FishBowl article.

After Neo-Nazis Targeted a Majority-Black Town. Locals Launched an Armed Watch

 

On February 7th, a U haul van full of neo-Nazis gathered in the predominantly Black Cincinnati suburb of Lincoln Heights, which boasts a modest population of 3,144 people. They wore masks and carried guns as they called residents racist slurs. The group of white supremacists also waved flags with red swastikas on a highway overpass. The town originated as a self-governing Black community for laborers blocked from Cincinnati and surrounding towns because of their race, and is the oldest north of the Mason-Dixon Line, it proclaims on its website. The neo-Nazis also marched that same day in Evendale, a nearby village. 

Two weeks after that disturbing incident, someone - presumably another white supremacist - spread racist pamphlets from the Ku Klux Klan all over Lincoln Heights. Disappointed by local law enforcement officials who did not spring into action to protect them, Black residents have now taken things into their own hands.

Lincoln Heights' police department was disbanded in 2014; the area is served by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Following the February 7th demonstration, residents - alongside Hamilton County Commissioner Alicia Reece - questioned why police made no arrests or citations after the neo-Nazis intimidated residents and threatened racist violence. Evendale police also released body-camera footage showing officers being cordial with the masked group. 

As a result, the Lincoln Heights Safety and Watch Program was formed. Black men now are carrying rifles to guard the roads that lead directly into Lincoln Heights, questioning anyone trying to enter. Ohio is an open-carry state and folks are taking advantage of that, according to spokesperson Daronce Daniels, a spokesman for Program, which coordinates the guards who serves as guards for Lincoln Heights. The program directs members to report suspicious activity to the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office.“ An American individual protecting his homeland with a firearm - I thought that was the most American thing that we [could] do,” he said.

The Hamilton County prosecuting attorney’s office is reviewing the neo-Nazi rally to determine if it will make criminal charges but said it would take time to complete a thorough assessment given the volume of evidence.

Daniels said the Lincoln Heights guards will continue patrolling their village for the foreseeable future. They feel they are still under threat. 

The Village of Lincoln Heights and members of the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church have initiated a public boycott of Evendale after their frustration with the Evendale Police Department (EPD) and Evendale leaders regarding the neo-Nazi demonstration that occurred February 7th. The Rev. Dr. Julian Cook, pastor of the Lincoln Heights Missionary Baptist Church, said at a February. 24  press conference at the church that no arrests or citations have been made by the EPD in connection with the incident. However, he expressed appreciation for  Evendale officials’ decision to hire a third-party team to evaluate their handling of the demonstration.

Read the February 27, 2025 Washington Post article.

Read the February 25, 2025 NBC News article.

Read the February 27, 2025 Cincinnati Herald article.

New Study Finds Redlining Continues in 2024

A new study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), entitled Decades of Disinvestment: Historic Redlining and Mortgage Lending Since 1981 (May 2024), has found that lenders "continue to reinforce patterns of structural racism in formerly redlined neighborhoods, regardless of local market dynamics. Fifty-five years after Congress outlawed using discriminatory maps to guide mortgage lending, race-based exclusion from homeownership is still a de facto reality."

To enable policymakers and analysts to definitively and precisely connect present-day conditions to past structural discrimination, the NCRC developed a new HMDA Longitudinal Dataset (HLD). It was created to utilize in this report and correct data deficiencies that have blocked our complete understanding of redlining for decades.

The NCRC urges because of these findings the need to implement and firmly enforce better-designed policy measures aimed at mitigating the impact of redlining and addressing residential segregation. Recent improvements to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), and the long-awaited Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rules - yet to be finalized by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) - are important steps to combat the impact of redlining and lessen residential segregation in communities. However, they may not be sufficient, given the stickiness of redlining’s legacy over the half century since the Fair Housing Act (FHA) became law.

Read the May 2024 NCRC Report

Read about NCRC's new HMDA tool