The residential segregation of occupational groups in central cities and suburbs

Abstract

The impression of journalists and social critics in the 1950’s that post-war suburbia was uniformly middle-class has been generally rejected by social scientists, but there is a persisting belief in a high degree of residential segregation by social level in suburbia and in a high degree of socio-economic homogeneity within suburban neighborhoods. A comparison of eight central cities with their suburban zones in 1950 and in 1960 revealed, for both dates, (a) small differences in occupational distributions between the central cities and the suburban zones and (b) generally higher Index of Residential Dissimilarity values for pairs of occupational groups in the central cities. These findings indicate that suburban neighborhoods, at least in the eight suburban zones studied, were little, if any, more occupationally homogeneous than the central city neighborhoods. This suggests that the belief in homogeneous suburban neighborhoods should be added to the growing list of discredited “myths of suburbia. ”

Residential Segregation by Occupation and Race in Ten Urbanized Areas, 1950-1970

“…The relocation of many businesses and manufacturing concerns outside the central cities during the 1960s was accompanied by the residential relocation of many white blue-collar workers. It is possible that the degree of segregation between white blue-collar workers and whites in the higher occupational categories was smaller in the suburbs than in the central cities (Fine et al, 1971). In addition, it is likely that the relocation of blue-collar workers outside the central cities lessened occupational residential segregation among whites on the basis of central city vs. suburban residential location.…”

Nighttime and Daytime Populations of Large American Suburbs

“…These features of other communities are more difficult to operationalize with a national sample of suburbs. (Guest, 1972;Fine, Glenn, and Monts, 1971) on the social and demographic characteristics of suburban residential populations suggests that suburbs vary greatly in their social status and family composition. Most suburban communities in the United States are overwhelmingly white in racial composition, but there are a number of predominantly black suburbs (Hermalin and Farley, 1973).…”