“I Live Here”: How Residents of Color Experience Racialized Surveillance and Diversity Ideology in a Liberal Predominantly White Neighborhood

In many liberal predominantly white neighborhoods, white residents view their communities as inclusive yet they also engage in racialized surveillance to monitor individuals they perceive as outsiders. Some of these efforts center on people of color in neighborhood open spaces. We use a diversity ideology framework to analyze this contradiction, paying particular attention to how residents of color experience racialized surveillance of their neighborhood’s publicly accessible parks and swimming pools. This article draws on data from neighborhood documents, neighborhood digital platforms, and interviews with residents of a liberal, affluent, predominantly white community that was expressly designed with public spaces open to non-residents. We find that resident surveillance of neighborhood public spaces is racialized, occurs regularly, and happens in person and on neighborhood online platforms where diversity as liability rhetoric is conveyed using colorblind discourse. These monitoring efforts, which are at times supported by formal measures, impact residents of color to varying degrees. We expand on diversity ideology by identifying digital and in-person racialized surveillance as a key mechanism by which white residents attempt to enforce racialized boundaries and protect whiteness in multiracial spaces and by highlighting how Black and Latinx residents, in particular, navigate these practices.

Lending Capital

This chapter describes how White mortgage bankers relied on segregated interindustry networking with real estate agents to shore up their lending portfolios. In doing so, they helped sustain racially segregated buyer–agent–banker networks and loan opportunities. The chapter also demonstrates how White real estate agents undertook such networking and, in some cases, used the racist market rubric to interpret mortgage bankers of color, whom they excluded from their professional circles. In addition, the chapter describes how mortgage bankers depended on the routine of racialized discretion when they interpreted mortgage borrower and property risk. They gave White borrowers and homes in White neighborhoods the benefit of the doubt, assuming they were the least risky and most valuable. By contrast, they cast shadows of doubt on borrowers of color and homes in neighborhoods of color, interpreting these individuals and areas through the racist market rubric. Racialized discretion has consequences for whether and under what conditions mortgage loans are approved.

Appraising Value

This chapter analyzes how appraisers assess home value. It demonstrates that despite surface changes to appraisal requirements, the logic and methods guiding contemporary appraisers’ work reflected the explicitly racist appraisal logic and methods instituted by the U.S. federal government and the appraisal industry in the early and mid-twentieth century. When using such logic, appraisers assumed that racially uniform, White neighborhoods were the most valuable. They also assumed that White home buyers were the reference point for neighborhood desirability and value. This logic guided their methods, such that they typically chose “comps” from within singular neighborhoods. This chapter also uses quantitative data to show that homes in White Houston neighborhoods were systematically appraised higher than homes in otherwise similar Black and Latinx Houston neighborhoods in 2015. Such inequality is not merely an artifact of explicitly racist historical appraisals; rather, it is actively produced by contemporary appraisers.

“Blacks Can’t Jump”: The Racialization of Transit Police Responses to Fare Evasion

This study demonstrates that racially disparate fare evasion citation outcomes are the product of racialized social systems that allow transit police officers to determine the belongingness of Black riders in systems of mass transit. Using citation data from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, we test the impact of race and place attributes on transit officer decisions to allocate punishment for subway fare evasion using mixed effects logistic regression controlling for individual and contextual predictors. Although rider racial identity alone proves statistically irrelevant, Black riders suspected of fare evasion possess an elevated risk for being fined as opposed to merely being warned at stations located within predominately white neighborhoods and as stations increase in ridership. These findings demonstrate how transit police officer discretion challenges Black belongingness on systems of public transportation. Broader implications of this work include the importance of scholarship linking statistical disparities to organizational intent and integrating diverse voices in policing policy development.

The COVID-19 Pandemic and the Rental Market: Evidence From Craigslist

Past research has demonstrated the racially and spatially uneven impacts of economic shocks and environmental disasters on various markets. In this article, we examine if and how the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the market for rental housing in the 49 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. Using a unique data set of new rental listings gathered from Craigslist and localized measures of the pandemic’s severity we find that, from mid-March to early June, local spread of COVID-19 is followed by reduced median and mean rent. However, this trend is driven by dropping rents for listings in Black, Latino, and diverse neighborhoods. Listings in majority White neighborhoods experience rent increases during this time. Our analyses make multiple contributions. First, we add to the burgeoning literature examining the rental market as a key site of perpetuating sociospatial inequality. Second, we demonstrate the utility of data gathered online for analyzing housing. And third, by reflecting on research that shows how past crises have increased sociospatial inequality and up-to-date work showing the racially and spatially unequal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we discuss some possible mechanisms by which the pandemic may be affecting the market for rental housing as well as implications for long-term trends.

People use both heterogeneity and minority representation to evaluate diversity

The term “diversity,” although widely used, can mean different things. Diversity can refer to heterogeneity, i.e., the distribution of people across groups, or to the representation of specific minority groups. We use a conjoint experiment with a race-balanced, national sample to uncover which properties, heterogeneity or minority representation, Americans use to evaluate the extent of racial diversity a neighborhood and whether this assessment varies by participants’ race. We show that perceived diversity is strongly associated with heterogeneity. This association is stronger for Whites than for Blacks, Latinos, or Asians. In addition, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians view neighborhoods where their own group is largest as more diverse. Whites vary in their tendency to associate diversity with representation, and Whites who report conservative stances on diversity-related policy issues view predominately White neighborhoods as more diverse than predominately Black neighborhoods. People can agree that diversity is desirable while disagreeing on what makes a community diverse.

Racial Disparities in Voting Wait Times: Evidence from Smartphone Data

Equal access to voting is a core feature of democratic government. Using data from hundreds of thousands of smartphone users, we quantify a racial disparity in voting wait times across a nationwide sample of polling places during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Relative to entirely-white neighborhoods, residents of entirely-black neighborhoods waited 29% longer to vote and were 74% more likely to spend more than 30 minutes at their polling place. This disparity holds when comparing predominantly white and black polling places within the same states and counties, and survives numerous robustness and placebo tests. We shed light on the mechanism for these results and discuss how geospatial data can be an effective tool to both measure and monitor these disparities going forward.

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in High-Quality Home Health Use Among Persons With Dementia

Prior research suggests minorities and racially-diverse neighborhoods have decreased access to high-quality hospitals, physicians, and nursing homes. It is not clear how this varies for persons with dementia (PWD) and home health agencies (HHAs). With the Medicare enrollment file, linked to the home health OASIS, the American Community Survey, and Home Health Compare, we examine the influence of individual’s race/ethnicity, as well as the racial/ethnic composition of neighborhoods, on the likelihood of high quality HHA use among PWD in 2016. Minority PWD receiving home health are significantly less likely to use high-quality HHAs than their white counterparts (33% vs 39%, respectively). PWD using HHA in predominantly minority neighborhoods are less likely to use high-quality HHAs compared to PWD in predominantly white neighborhoods (31% vs 40%, respectively). This study is the first to examine racial disparities in the use of HH for PWD. Policy and practice implications will be discussed.

¿Dónde Viven Los Latinos? The Types of Neighborhoods Older Latinos Live in and Their Implications for Diabetes

The spatial distribution of Latinos in U.S. neighborhoods is highly patterned due to a complex set of social, cultural, and economic forces, which leads to the differential distribution of and exposure of resources and opportunities across space. However, less is known about the types of neighborhoods older Latinos live in and how it impacts their health. Using census tracts from the year 2000, we employed a latent class analysis to explore how social and socioeconomic characteristics cluster together to create distinct neighborhood typologies. These typologies were then combined with data from the 2006-2016 Health and Retirement Study (n=3,047). We found that Latinos were more likely to live in predominantly Latino neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status (SES) (40%), multiracial neighborhoods with moderate SES (27%), and predominantly white neighborhoods with moderate SES (15%). Latinos living in predominantly Latino neighborhoods with low SES were more likely to have diabetes than other neighborhood typologies.