Race, Residence, and Violent Crime: A Structure of Inequality

This is the published version

Segregation, Racial Structure, and Neighborhood Violent Crime

Drawing on structural racism and urban disadvantage approaches, this article posits a broad influence of citywide racial residential segregation on levels of violent crime across all urban neighborhoods regardless of their racial/ethnic composition. Multilevel models based on data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for 7,622 neighborhoods in 79 cities throughout the United States reveal that segregation is positively associated with violent crime for white and various types of nonwhite neighborhoods. Nonetheless, there is a lack of parity in violence across these types of communities reflecting the larger racialized social system in which whites are able to use their privileged position to reside in the most advantaged neighborhoods, while African-Americans and Latinos live in the most disadvantaged urban communities and therefore bear the brunt of urban criminal violence

Socioeconomic Segregation of Activity Spaces in Urban Neighborhoods: Does Shared Residence Mean Shared Routines?

Residential segregation by income and education is increasing alongside slowly declining black-white segregation. Segregation in urban neighborhood residents’ nonhome activity spaces has not been explored. How integrated are the daily routines of people who live in the same neighborhood? Are people with different socioeconomic backgrounds that live near one another less likely to share routine activity locations than those of similar education or income? Do these patterns vary across the socioeconomic continuum or by neighborhood structure? The analyses draw on unique data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey that identify the location where residents engage in routine activities. Using multilevel p2 (network) models, we analyze pairs of households in the same neighborhood and examine whether the dyad combinations across three levels of SES conduct routine activities in the same location, and whether neighbor socioeconomic similarity in the co-location of routine activities is dependent on the level of neighborhood socioeconomic inequality and trust. Results indicate that, on average, increasing SES diminishes the likelihood of sharing activity locations with any SES group. This pattern is most pronounced in neighborhoods characterized by high levels of socioeconomic inequality. Neighborhood trust explains a nontrivial proportion of the inequality effect on the extent of routine activity sorting by SES. Thus stark, visible neighborhood-level inequality by SES may lead to enhanced effects of distrust on the willingness to share routines across class