"Narrow and filthy alleys of the city"?: The residential settlement patterns of black southern migrants to the north

Considerable effort has been devoted to understanding the social, economic, and cultural forces that produced the Great Migration and to describing th e success of southern African American migrants upon their arrival in the N orth. In contrast relatively little research has examined the settlement pa ttems of southern migrants. This article uses the 1970 Neighborhood Charact eristics;Public Use Microdata Sample to determine whether migrants were mor e likely than northern-born blacks to reside in neighborhoods that (1) were more highly segregated (2) had more families living in poverty, and (3) we re characterized by higher levels of family instability. The results reveal that, on average, recent migrants from the South resided in the "best" nei ghborhoods, that past migrants were located in the "worst" neighborhoods, a nd that northern-born blacks fell between the two migrant groups. Recent mi grants also received the greatest locational returns to human capital chara cteristics such as education and employment.