Income sorting alone produces significant segregation regardless of racial preferences.

Evidence

Since the time of Homer Hoyt (1939), social scientists have known that highand low-cost dwellings tend to cluster together to form rich and poor neighborhoods, yielding a differential distribution of minority and majority members on the basis of income alone, regardless of racial or ethnic preferences. Socioeconomic differences thus translate directly into some degree of racial or ethnic segregation between groups, but typically these selective processes produce dissimilarity indices that are in the low to moderate range, rarely exceeding 40 and usually remaining below 35. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2423

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s housing-market and ethnic-enclave reading; also to the Milgrom institutions material on social sorting.
• SEED: Angles for a piece on how much observed US segregation is attributable to income sorting versus preference — a natural follow-up to any argument treating segregation as purely racial animus.