Racial and Ethnic Inequality in the Duration of Children’s Exposure to Neighborhood Poverty and Affluence

Despite much scholarly attention to “neighborhood effects” on children, no study to date has measured the cumulative exposure of children to neighborhood poverty and affluence. In this paper I construct multi-state period life tables to estimate racial and ethnic inequality in the amount of time children can expect to live in poor and nonpoor neighborhoods throughout childhood. At rates prevailing in the mid-1990s, Black and Latino children can expect to spend almost 50% of childhood in neighborhoods with poverty rates in excess of 20%. The corresponding figure for White children is about 10%. I find that Black/White differences in childhood exposure to neighborhood poverty are due largely to differences in the probability of being born into a poor neighborhood, as opposed to differences in rates of upward and downward neighborhood mobility during childhood. Finally, cross-period analyses indicate that White children’s share of childhood in the most affluent neighborhood type increased rapidly beginning in the late 1980s and that although Black children’s exposure to nonpoor neighborhoods has increased since the mid-1970s, a substantial fraction of childhood is still spent in the poorest neighborhood type. Sociological inquiry into the effects of neighborhood characteristics on the behavior and life chances of individuals spans nearly the entire history of the discipline (e.g., Riis 1890; Addams 1910; Park and Burgess 1925; Drake and Cayton 1945; Clark 1965). Most recently, William Julius Wilson is credited with rekindling sociologists’ concern with “neighborhood effects” on children (Jencks and Mayer 1990:111; Small and Newman 2001; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002:446). In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson (1987) argues that a combination of urban industrial decline and the migration of middle class Blacks out of inner city neighborhoods in the 1970s resulted in sharp increases in the concentration of poverty in urban Black neighborhoods. According to Wilson, these trends have had catastrophic effects on the capacity of inner city parents to socialize children successfully. In very poor neighborhoods, contends Wilson (1987:57), the chances are overwhelming that children will seldom interact on a sustained basis with people who are employed or with families that have a steady breadwinner. The net effect is that joblessness, as a way of life, takes on a different social meaning; the relationship between schooling and postschool employment takes on a different meaning. The development of cognitive, linguistic, and other educational and job-related skills necessary for the world of work in the mainstream economy is thereby adversely affected... A vicious cycle is perpetuated through the family, through the community, and through the schools. In short, Wilson hypothesizes that children who grow up in poor neighborhoods experience more negative outcomes in school and in the labor market than otherwise equivalent children who grow up in nonpoor neighborhoods. Wilson’s work prompted a flurry (or perhaps more accurately, a blizzard) of inquiry into the effects of neighborhood context on child wellbeing. Among the many outcomes that have been studied recently are school achievement