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Over the past 40 years, assisted housing in the United States has undergone a dramatic geographic deconcentration, with at least one unit of assisted housing now located in most metropolitan neighborhoods. The location of assisted housing shapes where low-income assisted renters live, and it may also affect the residential choices of nonassisted residents. This article examines whether the deconcentration of assisted housing has reduced the segregation of families by income among neighborhoods in metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2005–9. I find that the deconcentration of assisted housing resulted in modest economic residential integration for very low-income families. However, high-income families became even more segregated, as assisted housing was deconcentrated, potentially offsetting the economic integration gains and ensuring that very low-income families are living in neighborhoods with only slightly higher-income neighbors. I conclude by discussing features of housing policies that might promote greater income integration among neighborhoods.

Changes in housing policy have led to the geographic deconcentration of assisted housing, with assisted units now located in more and lower-poverty neighborhoods. Little research examines how the changing location of assisted housing shapes neighborhood poverty rates. I use propensity score matching to estimate how neighborhood poverty rates changed as assisted housing was gained or lost from 1977 to 2008 using a national panel data set. Neighborhood poverty rates increased when neighborhoods gained assisted housing units, with larger impacts when neighborhoods gained many assisted units. Neighborhoods that lost assisted units also became poorer. However, losing assisted units had a negative effect on poverty rates: Poverty rates increased less compared with neighborhoods that did not lose units. Therefore, removing assisted housing from high-poverty neighborhoods slowed, but did not reverse, poverty rate increases. These findings emphasize the durability of neighborhood poverty and inequality even in the face of drastic policy changes.

Neighborhoods are an important source of inequality, and neighborhood change may lead to changing opportunities for residents. Past research on neighborhood upgrading tends to focus on one process: gentrification. I argue that a broader range of types of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent requires examination. This article documents the different types of neighborhoods ascending from 1970 to the present. Using principal components analysis and cluster analysis, I report the prevalence of socioeconomic ascent, based on increases in neighborhood income, rents, house values, and educational and occupational attainment, among five to seven types of neighborhoods in each decade. I also examine population and housing changes that co–occur with ascent to identify processes of ascent beyond gentrification. Overall, findings suggest mixed implications for neighborhood inequality. While white suburban neighborhoods make up the bulk of neighborhoods that ascend in each decade, minority and immigrant neighborhoods become increasingly likely to ascend over time, though displacement may occur.

Robust literatures separately estimate school effects and neighborhood effects on children's educational, economic, health, and other outcomes that measure well-being. A growing body of research acknowledges that both contexts matter and considers neighborhoods and schools jointly. In this review, we synthesize the array of results that emerge from these studies and critique the tendency for researchers to evaluate which matters more, neighborhoods versus schools. We propose a reorientation of this scholarship that incorporates research on neighborhood and school selection and segregation processes. We argue that contextual effects research would be enriched by considering local neighborhood–school structures: the ways that families choose neighborhoods and schools and that neighborhoods and schools mutually and cyclically constitute one another. We conclude with recommendations for bringing neighborhood–school structures to bear on both outcomes-oriented studies of neighborhood and school effects as well as studies of contextual selection and segregation.

This article examines the racial/ethnic population dynamics of ascending neighborhoods—those experiencing socioeconomic growth. Drawing on Census and American Community Survey data from 1990 to 2010, we first explore whether changes in racial/ethnic composition occur alongside ascent. We find that, while most neighborhoods' racial/ethnic composition does not dramatically change during this period, neighborhoods that experienced ascent are much more likely to transition from majority-minority to mixed race or predominantly White than nonascending neighborhoods. Then, we use microdata to analyze whether two potential drivers of ascent, the in-migration of higher-socioeconomic status (SES) households and changes in the fortunes of long-term residents, are racially/ethnically stratified. We argue that the process of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent perpetuates neighborhood racial/ethnic hierarchy. While most Black and Hispanic neighborhoods remain majority-minority, those that ascend are more likely to experience a succession of high-SES White residents replacing minority residents.

Since the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, researchers and policy makers have paid close attention to trends in school segregation. Here we review the evidence regarding trends and consequences of both racial and economic school segregation since Brown. The evidence suggests that the most significant declines in black-white school segregation occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is disagreement about the direction of more recent trends in racial segregation, largely driven by how one defines and measures segregation. Depending on the definition used, segregation has either increased substantially or changed little, although there are important differences in the trends across regions, racial groups, and institutional levels. Limited evidence on school economic segregation makes documenting trends difficult, but students appear to be more segregated by income across schools and districts today than in 1990. We also discuss the role of desegregation litigation, demographic changes, and residential segregation in shaping trends in both racial and economic segregation. We develop a general conceptual model of how and why school segregation might affect students and review the relatively thin body of empirical evidence that explicitly assesses the consequences of school segregation. We conclude with a discussion of aspects of school segregation on which further research is needed.

The number of K–12 students experiencing homelessness is increasing across the country. Schools may serve as sources of support and stability for homeless children, but little is known about the types of schools that homeless students attend or about the communities in which they live. We investigate the context of student homelessness in Los Angeles by analyzing student-level administrative data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and publicly available data on neighborhoods and schools from school years 2008–2009 to 2016–2017. Our findings suggest that homeless students tend to be clustered within lower-achieving schools with higher concentrations of disadvantaged student groups and live in neighborhoods with higher concentrated disadvantage. Despite policy provisions to ensure stability, homeless students have high rates of school and residential mobility in the years they are homeless, and mobile students tend to move to less-disadvantaged schools. We conclude with policy implications to strengthen the implementation of the federal McKinney-Vento Act.