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.
The data, drawn from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PISD,) provides information on where families lived based on interviews with over 4,500 households between 1968 and 2007, which enables Sharkey to trace mobility across four generations of families. The focal cohort for the study is composed of people born between 1952 and 1982. Generation 1 is their grandparents; Generation 2 is their parents; Generation 3 is the focal cohort as children; and Generation 4 is this focal cohort as adults.
[For more of this story, written by Richard Florida, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...old-mobility/384850/]
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