Mobility, Residential Location, and the American Dream: The Intra-Metropolitan Geography of Minority Homeownership: Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C.

This paper explicates the intra-metropolitan geography of minority homeownership. In so doing, the analysis applies individual level Census data from the Washington D.C., Chicago, and Los Angeles metropolitan areas to estimate three-level nested logit models (NMNL) of household mobility, residential location, and homeownership tenure choice. The approach is unique to the literature and recognizes that homeownership attainment among minority and white households may vary importantly owing to their differential mobility and residential location decisions. Model simulation indicates that shocks to income can significantly elevate the homeownership attainment of minority households. However, those same simulations reveal that even in the wake of substantial improvements to the economic status of minorities, their urban settlement and homeownership patterns remain substantially more concentrated than those of whites.