SEVEN / Neighborhood Segregation by Class and Race

This chapter investigates how neighborhoods, directly and indirectly, shape adults and children in ways that affect their socioeconomic prospects. It first presents a conceptual model showing the relationship between neighborhood context, individual residents' attitudes, behaviors and attributes, and opportunities for social advancement. It next provides a detailed analysis of the theory and evidence related to the issue of the mechanisms through which neighborhood context exerts its impacts on us. Finally, it reviews the evidence arising from the latest, sophisticated statistical evidence that plausibly measures the causal magnitudes of neighborhood effects on a wide variety of individual outcomes contributing to socioeconomic prospects. The clear conclusion is that neighborhoods make us by significantly affecting our individual socioeconomic outcomes. They structure these opportunities both directly and indirectly. They directly affect how our personal attributes will pay off in terms of achieved status and indirectly affect the set of attributes that we embody.