The changing neighborhood contexts of the immigrant metropolis

To understand the impacts of large-scale immigration on neighborhood contex ts, we employ locational-attainment models, in which two characteristics of a neighborhood, its average household income and the majority group's perc entage among its residents, are taken as the dependent variables and a numb er of individual and household characteristics, such as race/ethnicity and household composition, form the vector of independent variables. Models are estimated separately for major racial/ethnic populations - whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos - in five different metropolitan regions of immigrant concentration - Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco. l it the moss section, the findings largely uphold the well-known model of sp atial assimilation, in that socioeconomic status, assimilation level, and s uburban residence are all strongly linked to residence in neighborhoods dis playing greater affluence and with a greater number of non-Hispanic whites. Yet when the results are considered longitudinally, by comparing them with previously estimated models for 1980, the consistency With spatial-assimil ation theory is no longer so striking. The impact of immgration is evident in the changing racial/ethnic composition of the neighborhoods of all group s, but especially for those where Asians and Latinos reside.