A new study made available today sheds light on the phenomenon of neighborhood segregation. Kyle Crowder, a sociology professor at UNC Chapel Hill, conducted the research along with two others:
"Despite all of the talk about progress towards equal opportunity for everyone in gaining access to neighborhoods, there’s still a lot of evidence that native-born blacks and native-born white householders tend to move away from neighborhoods that have high concentrations of immigrants."
Crowder says people of different races typically leave for different reasons.
"For white folks, the tendency is to move away from neighborhoods that have high concentrations of non-whites. For African-Americans, they’re also likely to leave, but the difference there is it seems to be related to changes in the housing markets. In particular, rents tend to be a little bit higher and you tend to see declines in home ownership."
Crowder says the end result is a fractured and segregated population. And he adds the research shows statistically no change in the tendency of natives to leave their neighborhoods from the earliest data gathered in 1968 and today.
