The Effects of Segregation

Is housing segregation truly harmful? And if so, why? These are not easy questions to answer convincingly. For decades, most critics of segregation made arguments that echoed Senator Mondale’s: segregation embodied a discriminatory caste system; it concentrated poverty; its harms were self-evident. But a significant federal experiment in the 1990s, in which several thousand low-income families moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods, produced unexpectedly equivocal results. And a good deal of the early work that found segregation harmful relied on correlations and failed to demonstrate clear causal links. Starting in the late 1990s, however, a new generation of work on the