Tipping

Modifications and Other Applications

Grodzins was concerned primarily with white and African American residents, the two major racial groups in Chicago when he was forming this theory. Leah Platt Boustan cites evidence that it is specifically the presence of African American neighbors, rather than minority neighbors in general, that influenced white Americans’ evaluation of a home's desirability, because the presence of Asian or Hispanic neighbors had no influence on this judgment. However, there are a few examples of the application of the tipping point hypothesis beyond the African American/white dichotomy.

One is a 1974 decision in Otero v. New York City Housing Authority, in which a court of appeals ruled that the New York City Housing Authority could refuse to rent an apartment in a new housing project to a nonwhite person (not [Page 2073]just an African American) in order to preserve the racial balance of the neighborhood. In a different case, in 1976, Hasidic residents of the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York City argued that a new public housing project, expected to house about 75 percent Puerto Rican residents and 25 percent white residents, would destroy their neighborhood by causing white fight; they cited a tipping point of 30 percent minority residents as having been proven to cause departure of white residents.

Malcolm Gladwell, speaking at a 2008 conference, has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written four books and expanded on the tipping point hypothesis.

The tipping point hypothesis was originally formulated to explain residential segregation, but it has also been applied to other fields, including education and business. For instance, Gregorio Caetano and Vikram Maheshri studied school segregation in Los Angeles from 2001 to 2006 and concluded that 54 percent of the schools had a tipping point that was between 25 and 75 percent minority. The hypothesis has also been broadened, for example, by Malcolm Gladwell, to explain rapid change that may come about as the result of a relatively minor change in conditions if an organization, neighborhood, business, or other entity is at the tipping point.

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