Influence of Race on Household Residential Utility

Residential location choice models are an important tool employed by urban geographers, planners, and transportation engineers for understanding household residential location behavior and for predicting future residential location activity. Racial segregation and residential racial preferences have been studied extensively using a variety of analysis techniques in social science research, but racial preferences have generally not been adequately incorporated into residential location choice models. This research develops residential location choice model specifications with a variety of alternative methods of addressing racial preferences in residential location decisions. The research tests whether social class, family structure, and in-group racial preferences are sufficient to explain household sensitivity to neighborhood racial composition. The importance of the interaction between the proportion of in-group race neighbors and other-race neighbors is also evaluated. Models for the San Francisco Bay metropolitan area are estimated and evidence of significant avoidance behavior by households of all races is found. The results suggest that social class differences, family structure differences, and in-group racial preferences alone are not sufficient to explain household residential racial preference and that households of all races practice racial avoidance behavior. Particularly pronounced avoidance of black neighbors by Asian households, Hispanic neighbors by black households, and Asian neighbors by white households are found. Evidence of a decrease in household racial avoidance intensity in neighborhoods with large numbers of own-race neighbors is also found.