The role of metropolitan opportunity structures for understanding variation in the rate of Black household affluence

Abstract

This study explores Black household affluence at the metropolitan scale and suggests that metropolitan-level opportunity structures shaped rates of Black affluence for the 100 largest American metropolitan areas in 2000. I hypothesize that affluent black households favored metropolitan areas of opportunity, those places characterized by having (1) economic opportunities, (2) favorable Black–White relational standing, (3) metropolitan diversity and residential opportunities, and (4) their location in the South, which serves as a Black homeplace. Results fail to suggest evidence regarding the role of the ‘new South’ for understanding metropolitan-level rates of Black affluence. More generally, findings from this study challenge our understanding of socioeconomic stratification by investigating diversity within America’s Black community.

Keywords:

• black household affluence
• diversity
• economic restructuring
• suburbanization
• black migration
• US South

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank George Galster, Elvin Wyly, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback for improving this paper. Any errors are my responsibility alone.

Notes

1. That is, the proportion of all Blacks living in high-poverty neighborhoods, regardless of income.

2. The sample FMR is the average of each metropolitan area’s FMR weighted by each area’s total number of all households.

3. The omitted employment sectors are: (1) agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining, (2) wholesale trade, (3) transportation and warehousing, and utilities, (4) information, (5) finance, insurance, real estate, and rental and leasing, (6) professional, scientific, management, administrative, and waste management services, (7) educational, health, and social service, (8) arts, entertainment, recreation, accommodation, and food service, (9) other services (except public administration), and (10) construction.

4. Black and White higher education is the percent of Blacks (or Whites), 25+ years of age, having at least a bachelor’s degree.

5. Taken from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Black Elected Officials Reports (Bositis, 1999, 2000, 2002)

6. I combined percent foreign-born and the metropolitan-level racial entropy index into one combined general metropolitan-level diversity construct for the regression analysis due to multicollinearity issues.

7. Defined as the percent of all Blacks, regardless of income, living in high-poverty neighborhoods (Jargowsky, 1997).

8. The equation for the Dissimilarity Index is: where: B = the metropolitan Black population; B_i = the Black population of tract i; W = the metropolitan White population; W_i = the White population of tract i. The index ranges from 0 (no segregation) to 100 (complete segregation).

9. Retrieved 2008 via the website (http://mumford.albany.edu/census/data.html).

10. The equation for the Entropy Index is : where: k indexes racial groups, j metropolitan areas, and t the total metropolitan population of all racial groups. A scaling constant s limits the value of the metropolitan-level diversity index (Ej) from 0 (no diversity) to 1 (maximum diversity). The index uses six mutually exclusive racial groups (non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Asian, non-Hispanic American Indian, non-Hispanic other race, and Hispanic).

11. The Black–White education ratio may also be endogenous with Black affluence. Unfortunately, I was not able to find an instrumental variable for the education ratio. I would suggest, however, that the risk of endogeneity is lessened as much extant literature has explored the theoretical and empirical link between education affecting income outcomes (or poverty).

12. Also known as log-odds; it is simply the log of the odds. Logit Black affluence rate = ln((Black affluence rate/(100 - Black affluence rate)).

13. The first stage of the 2SLS estimates the predicted values of the troublesome dissimilarity index using the instruments and the remaining of the exogenous independent variables from the general model. The second stage substitutes the predicted values for the dissimilarity index and uses the remaining exogenous independent variables to predict the Black affluence rate.

14. This is verified through ANOVA and post hoc tests.

15. As compared to historical notions of the ghetto, I use this term as defined by Jargowsky (1997), wherein a Black ghetto is poor and Black.

16. Of course, jobs in the manufacturing sector may be both blue- and white-collar that pay well or poorly.