This chapter aims at better understanding the cause and consequences of neighborhood segregation by class and race by developing a cumulative causation model. It has been conventional to view residential segregation by economic class and segregation by race or ethnicity as separate features of neighborhoods in America. Though both have evolved in distinctive ways, this chapter demonstrates that these aspects of neighborhoods are fundamentally linked. This is because they share several common proximate causes, influence each other directly, and are both key nodes in a complex web of mutually reinforcing causal links. This chapter's cumulative causation model of class and race segregation represents in the most powerful way the central theme of this book: we make our neighborhoods and then they make us. This holistic portrayal has a clear empirical implication: metropolitan areas that exhibit more class segregation should also exhibit more racial segregation, a result that has been borne out by recent empirical work.
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