How Residential Mobility Patterns Perpetuate Segregation

Could young adults at their most experimental phase disrupt the cycle of segregation?

Britton did pull out one promising finding from an otherwise bleak report: Blacks and Hispanics who grew up in integrated neighborhoods later lived as adults in integrated neighborhoods, too, even after moving long-distance. That suggests at least a "bulwark against re-segregation," Britton says. "But," he adds, "it doesn’t point to a lot of reasons for optimism about major declines in residential segregation – particularly between blacks and whites, and even increasingly between Latinos and whites – over the next couple of decades."

There is one other way to interpret these findings: They suggest that fair-housing measures that enable black and Hispanic families to live in more integrated neighborhoods are all the more important because they have such long-term consequences. Those neighborhoods will likely impact not only the minority families living there, but also the types of neighborhoods their children grow up to live in. If there is a bright spot in this research, it is that integration may perpetuate itself in much the same way that segregation does.