Ethnic Segregation

Causes of Ethnic Segregation

There are several causes of ethnic residential segregation: housing discrimination, socioeconomic [Page 1023]differences between ethnic groups, ethnic group preferences, and forced ethnic confinement. Housing discrimination, in both public and private sectors, has been proposed to cause ethnically segregated living spaces in American cities. In the past, the U.S. federal government attached provisions to publicly offered home loans that restricted the housing options of various groups of people. Local governments, via their zoning laws, tended to exclude certain ethnic groups from residing in the suburbs. In the private sector (i.e., banks, realtors), limitations to housing for particular ethnic groups were facilitated by redlining and blockbusting. Such formal restrictions are now illegal, but informal practices of housing discrimination may still exist today.

Another prospective cause for ethnic residential segregation deals with differences in socioeconomic status (SES). The basis of the SES argument is that residential segregation is related to class differences rather than to ethnic differences. Here, class issues underlie housing outcomes in determining where people live in a city. If economics were the only factor in determining where people choose to live, then the poor would live in the areas with older housing and the rich in the areas with newer housing, or in the inner city and the suburbs, respectively.

Ethnic group preferences for living in segregated areas are another hypothesized cause of residential segregation. Under this interpretation, ethnic groups differ in the type of neighborhoods they perceive as desirable. Ethnic residential segregation may signify social solidarity, if ethnic members choose to live near each other, or social avoidance, if people prefer not to live near a certain ethnic group. Self-segregation can be a method of creating defensible spaces that maintain “peace” between opposing groups, as the example of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland, indicates. The last prospective cause of ethnic segregation deals with the forced confinement of an ethnic group to a particular area. The first “ghetto” in Venice, Italy, was created for Jews by forcing them into a neighborhood that was separate from the residential areas of other Venetians. In terms of regional ethnic segregation, Native Americans and many Japanese Americans during World War II were relocated and residentially separated from other Americans.

Measuring Ethnic Segregation

Determining the levels of residential segregation is important in monitoring whether cities are becoming more or less segregated over time. There are several segregation indexes that have been disputed over by social scientists, but the most used ethnic segregation index is the dissimilarity index (DI). The DI measures the differential distribution between two population groups in an area and can be calculated using the following

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