Tag Archives | Housing

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Increasing Spanish fluency in the United States likely shapes ethnoracial group boundaries and inequality. We study a key site for group boundary negotiations—the housing market—where Spanish usage may represent a key source of information exchange between landlords and prospective renters. Specifically, we examine the use of Spanish in advertisements for online rental housing and its effect on White, Black, and Latinx Americans’ residential preferences. Using a corpus of millions of Craigslist rental listings, we show that Spanish listings are concentrated in majority-Latinx neighborhoods with greater proportions of immigrant and Spanish-speaking residents. Furthermore, units that are advertised in Spanish tend be lower priced relative to non-Spanish ads in the same neighborhood. We then use a survey experiment to demonstrate that Spanish usage decreases White, Black, and non-Spanish-speaking Latinx Americans’ interest in a housing unit and surrounding neighborhood, whereas Spanish-speaking Latinx respondents are less affected. We discuss these findings in light of past work on neighborhood demographic preferences, segregation, and recent theorizing on within-category inequality.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ariela Schachter: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: ariela@wustl.edu

John Kuk: Department of Political Science, Michigan State University
E-mail: jskuk@msu.edu

Max Besbris: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: besbris@wisc.edu

Garrett Pekarek: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: g.e.pekarek@wustl.edu

Acknowledgements: For their generous and thoughtful engagement with previous drafts, we gratefully acknowledge René Flores and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn. We thank Maddy Molina and Leslye Quintanilla for their support as research assistants. This work has been supported by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University and is based on work supported by National Science Foundation (grants 1947591 and 1947598).

Citation: Schachter, Ariela, John Kuk, Max Besbris, and Garrett Pekarek. 2023. “Inclusive but Not Integrative: Ethnoracial Boundaries and the Use of Spanish in the Market for Rental Housing.” Sociological Science 10: 585-612.
Received: March 6, 2023
Accepted: March 22, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v10.a21

Building Inequality: Housing Segregation and Income Segregation

By Parker Webservices on August 7, 2019 in Articles

Ann Owens

Sociological Science, August 7, 2019
10.15195/v6.a19

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This article foregrounds housing in the study of residential segregation. The spatial configuration of housing determines the housing opportunities in each neighborhood, the backdrop against which households’ resources, preferences, and constraints play out. I use census and American Community Survey data to provide the first evidence of the extent of housing segregation by type and by cost at multiple geographic scales in large metropolitan areas in the United States from 1990 to 2014. Segregation between single- and multifamily homes and renter- and owner-occupied homes increased in most metropolitan areas, whereas segregation by cost declined. Housing segregation varies among metropolitan areas, across geographic scales, and over time, with consequences for income segregation. Income segregation is markedly higher when and where housing segregation is greater. As long as housing opportunities remain segregated, residential segregation will change little, with urgent implications for urban and housing policy makers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Ann Owens: Department of Sociology, University of Southern California
E-mail: annowens@usc.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a USC Lusk Center for Real Estate faculty research grant. Comments and suggestions from the 2019 Population Association of America Annual Meeting and from reviewers improved this article. All conclusions and errors are attributable to the author.

Citation: Owens, Ann. 2019. “Building Inequality: Housing Segregation and Income Segregation.” Sociological Science 6: 497-525.
Received: May 29, 2019
Accepted: June 23, 2019
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a19

Buying In: Positional Competition, Schools, Income Inequality, and Housing Consumption

By Parker Webservices on May 22, 2019 in Articles

Adam Goldstein, Orestes P. Hastings

Sociological Science, May 22, 2019
10.15195/v6.a16

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Social scientists have suggested that a key sociobehavioral consequence of rising inequality is intensifying market competition for advantageous positions in the opportunity structure, such as residences that afford access to high-quality public schools. We assess empirical implications of inequality-fueled positional competition theories (PCTs) by analyzing the relationships between metropolitan income inequality, households’ efforts to secure residential positions in desirable school districts, and housing consumption behavior. We assemble a unique data set, which contains longitudinal information on household finances, residences, and geographic locations from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics; information on the quality of the school attendance areas in which these households reside; and information about the local real estate market. We find that greater inequality is associated with steeper housing price premia for residences in desirable areas, more pronounced social class sorting on school quality when relocating, and greater salience of schools relative to other housing amenities in families’ housing expenditure functions. Families in high-inequality regions exhibit modestly greater willingness to pay more (relative to their own incomes) for a given improvement in school desirability. The analysis brings important empirical nuance to oft-invoked but untested theories about positional competition as a mechanism by which inequality affects behaviors, consumption, and markets.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Adam Goldstein: Departments of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University
E-mail: amg5@princeton.edu

Orestes P. Hastings: Department of Sociology, Colorado State University
E-mail: Pat.Hastings@colostate.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors are grateful for helpful suggestions from Marianne Bertrand, Neil Fligstein, Kevin McKee, Ann Owens, Peter Rich, participants at the Tobin Project Conference on Inequality and Decision Making, and the editors of Sociological Science. This research was partially supported by funding from the Tobin Project. The first author was also supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Collection of the PSID data used in this study was partly supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 HD069609 and R01 AG040213) and the National Science Foundation (awards SES 1157698 and 1623684).

Citation: Goldstein, Adam, and Orestes P. Hastings. 2019. “Buying In: Positional Competition, Schools, Income Inequality, and Housing Consumption.” Sociological Science 6: 416-445.
Received: September 12, 2018
Accepted: March 22, 2019
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v6.a16

The Social Life of Mortgage Delinquency and Default

By Parker Webservices on July 26, 2018 in Articles

Brian J. McCabe

Sociological Science, July 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a21

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Although falling behind on a mortgage loan has significant personal consequences, we know little about whether the experience of delinquency or default influences the housing market behavior of other people in the defaulter’s social networks. In this article, I ask how exposure to mortgage default through social networks affects perceptions of the housing market, judgments about the strategic default behavior of other households, and expectations for homeownership. Although individuals purposively draw on information from their social networks to aid in their housing search, theories of social influence have yet to be applied to the negative experience of mortgage delinquency or default. Drawing on the National Housing Survey, I find that individuals exposed to mortgage strain through their social networks express more negative expectations for the housing market and hold more permissive attitudes about strategic default. Homeowners reporting network exposure to mortgage strain are more likely to prefer rental housing when they next move. These results are strongest when individuals are connected to someone who has fallen behind on a mortgage payment in the previous three months.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brian J. McCabe: Department of Sociology, Georgetown University
E-mail: mccabeb@georgetown.edu

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.