Which families gain access to neighborhood and school contexts most conducive to their children's development? Race and class continue to play central roles given the durability of residential and educational segregation. However, the context of urban inequality is changing in ways that might amplify new drivers of neighborhood and school sorting. The ascendance of choice-based urban policies and the saturation of housing markets with digital information may enable parents who more frequently and deftly process large amounts of complex data to have a leg up in accessing high-status neighborhoods and schools.

Jared N. Schachner and Robert J. Sampson tested this possibility as part of an NSF-funded doctoral dissertation research project entitled, "Structural and Skill-Based Sorting into Neighborhoods and Schools." They used a unique dataset tracking over a decade's worth of residential histories for a sample of families in Los Angeles County. Results suggest that even after confirming the important roles of race and class, parents' cognitive skills independently predicted which families ended up in the most affluent and educated neighborhoods.

This research builds on a large body of work showing that despite the enactment of policies aimed at reducing racial discrimination in the housing market, racial segregation in America's metropolitan areas remains stubbornly high, and income segregation may be increasing, especially among households with children. While studies have tended to focus on institutional and preference-based discrimination to explain these patterns, they have overlooked other potential factors shaping residential sorting, like cognitive skills, especially in a context of increasingly complex and data-saturated housing markets and school enrollment processes. To clarify, cognition here refers to acquired knowledge reflecting a variety of social and environmental conditions, not to genetically transmitted, immutable ability (e.g., IQ).

Sampson and Schachner hypothesized the information explosion saturating urban housing markets and transforming how Americans navigate them may intensify highly-skilled parents' preferences for neighborhoods they perceive as conducive to their children's success. The benefits of affluent neighborhoods are more tangible than ever, with popular websites like NeighborhoodScout, Zillow, and Redfin offering constantly proliferating quantitative measures of neighborhood quality (e.g., school quality, crime, housing value appreciation).

Highly-skilled parents may not only be more likely to seek out and employ this information in decision-making, but may be more likely to secure first-mover advantages in accessing units in high-status neighborhoods. Just as real estate agents and landlords have long engaged in race- and class-based steering, these important gatekeepers may reward people with perceived market knowledge and deft communication skills by prioritizing them when desirable dwellings in highly-coveted neighborhoods emerge.

To test these possibilities, they developed a fine-grained residential selection model based on an original follow-up of the Los Angeles Family Neighborhood Survey, which provided residential histories for ~250 families from 2001-2012. They linked these histories to census, geospatial, and educational administrative data and developed a discrete-choice model that tests whether parents who score more highly on a reading comprehension test (as a measure of cognitive skills) were disproportionately likely to reside within neighborhoods containing more highly-educated and affluent residents.

As predicted, parents with higher cognitive skill scores were more likely to sort their families into the most advantaged neighborhoods even after accounting for the unique spatial structure of Los Angeles County and confirming the expected effects of race, income, housing market conditions, and spatial proximity on residential selection.

One could counter that highly-skilled parents with economic resources are selecting neighborhoods not on the basis of residents' income and education but instead on the basis of perceived school quality. Indeed, among middle/upper-middle class families, parental skills predict selecting neighborhoods with higher-scoring local public schools specifically, rather than those with more affluent residents generally. Supplementary analyses show that within this middle/upper-middle class group, more highly-skilled parents are more likely to report neighborhood school quality as a driver of residential mobility.

The researchers conclude that parental cognitive skills may be an emerging axis along which intergenerational inequality is unfolding. If parents' skills confer an edge in accessing developmentally-enriching contexts for children, then contemporary residential markets may fuel inequality through this rarely-considered channel. Sociologists, economists, and urban planners should examine these possibilities further and test whether skill-based gaps in neighborhood conditions are specific to megacities like Los Angeles with formidable informational asymmetries or more generalizable to a wide variety of places.

If such research confirms that skills shape residential sorting, then policymakers may need to revisit the longstanding assumption that choice-based policies (e.g., school/housing vouchers) will effectively reduce inequality. Government authorities will need to mitigate information gaps advantaging highly-skilled parents in residential and educational selection processes.

This project contributed to Schachner's completed dissertation at Harvard and led to a publication in Demography entitled "Skill-Based Contextual Sorting: How Parental Cognition and Residential Mobility Produce Unequal Environments for Children," and presentations at the University of Chicago, Brown University, Occidental College, and the Population Association of America conference.

Last Modified: 10/29/2020
Modified by: Jared N Schachner