Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis REVIEW Second Quarter 2014 147 Representative Neighborhoods of the United States

• Main Author: Alejandro Badel
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fernandez; St. Louis; Iceland
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.684.1381

R acial segregation is a striking trait of U.S. cities. Iceland, Weinberg, and Steinmetz(2002) report that 64 percent of the black population would have needed to changeresidence for all U.S. neighborhoods to become fully integrated in the year 2000. Income differences across neighborhoods have also been well documented. Wheeler and La Jeunesse (2007) report that between-neighborhood inequality in 2000 represented around 20 percent of overall annual household income inequality in Census data. The variation in housing prices across neighborhoods has also been the focus of a large literature.1 This article attempts to summarize the landscape of U.S. cities using a small number of representative neighborhoods. The motivation for this effort is twofold. On the one hand, a clear and concise characterization of the American urban landscape may be useful in the con-struction of theories involving neighborhood formation. On the other hand, a simple repre-sentation can be used to impose empirical discipline on quantitative models with a small number of locations. These types of models are important since they can address complex dynamic issues such as the interaction between neighborhood formation and human capital accumulation without becoming computationally infeasible (see, for example, Fernandez and Many metropolitan areas in the United States display substantial racial segregation and substantial variation in incomes and house prices across neighborhoods. To what extent can this variation be sum-