Inequality of Residential Opportunity

Prior neighborhood crime research has sought to explain differences in crime between black and white communities using such criminological theories as social disorganization and concentrated disadvantage. While supportive in their findings, these perspectives did not explain the entirety of neighborhood crime differences. The current study attempts to add to this literature by integrating concepts from the larger urban sociological tradition from which criminology grew out of, such as spatial assimilation and place stratification. Research in this tradition has found that African Americans have not been able to translate higher levels of income into more desirable communities, including those with low crime rates, due to a dual housing market steering them away from the best residential areas in a city. By including city level measures that could either eliminate or dampen the efforts of these channeling processes, the hierarchical linear models used found support for variations in place stratification across urban and suburban areas. However, convergence in crime levels for white and black communities was dependent on the social class of the community and crime type.