Full Citation
Title: The Impact of African American Migration on Housing in New York City Neighborhoods during the Great Depression
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2010
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: The composition of urban areas changed over the 20th century as African Americans migrated en masse from the southern countryside. Nearly all of the quantitative work to date on race and housing has focused on segregation after World War II (see Cutler and Glaeser (1997)). No papers to my knowledge have examined the earlier influence of black migration which has influenced urban migration patterns for nearly a century. I have compiled and digitized a new dataset based on previously classified surveys of neighborhoods by the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1938 that show housing values, ethnic composition, occupational structure, and amenities for over 600 neighborhoods in New York City. I then use the data to investigate how the movement of blacks into neighborhoods influenced housing values in both their neighborhoods and the surrounding area. The analysis is based on a spatial two-stage least squares estimator. The instrument combines information on outflows of black migrants from other states to New York with neighborhood-level data on the birth states of African Americans living in New York City. The strength of this instrument comes from the propensity for people to migrate to areas with pre-existing populations of their peers. While housing values declined throughout much of New York City during the Great Depression, the results indicate little evidence that black movement in a neighborhood led to further declines in housing values. The results also highlight the importance of controlling for spatial dependence between neighborhoods in hedonic models of housing values.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Kollmann, Trevor M.
Publisher: University of Arizona
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Housing and Segregation, Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity
Countries: