Justice
The Striking Decline in African-American Household Mobility
Over the course of the last century, black Americans went from being one of the groups most likely to move to one of the least.
As we've learned since the most recent economic crisis, the inability of Americans to pick up and move for new jobs or new housing often comes hand in hand with an inability to climb up the socio-economic ladder. Now new research finds that even before the recession, black households in the U.S. experienced a stark slowdown in their mobility.
The study, by my NYU colleague and sociologist Patrick Sharkey and published this month in the journal Demography, provides a detailed examination of the migration patterns of black households compared to their white counterparts across nearly a century.