HOUSING DISCRIMINATION AND RESIDENTIAL-MOBILITY - IMPACTS FOR BLACKS AND WHITES

We merge metropolitan-level measures of racial discrimination in housi ng markets derived from two national housing audit studies, along with tract-level 1980 census data, with the 1979-1985 waves of the Panel S tudy of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of housing discriminatio n on patterns of residential mobility between neighborhoods of varying racial composition. We find no evidence that housing discrimination i n the metropolitan area impedes African Americans' mobility into white r neighborhoods. Contrary to expectations, in multivariate analyses ba sed on black movers, the level of housing discrimination is positively associated with the percentage of the population that is white in the tract of destination. Housing discrimination against African American s is positively associated with the rate at which mobile white househo lds move into whiter census tracts. These findings imply that eliminat ing racial discrimination by real estate and rental agents will fail t o increase black residential mobility into racially-mixed and predomin antly white neighborhoods. For both black and white households, life-c ycle factors, such as age, children, and home ownership, impede mobili ty out of the current neighborhood. Conditional upon moving, socioecon omic resources, such as education and income, facilitate mobility into whiter neighborhoods.