Rastogi & Curtis: Race and Housing Beyond the City

The Population Research and Policy Review published a special issue entitled The Changing Demography of Rural and Small-Town America in the fall of 2020. Taken together, the articles in this special issue paint a picture of rural America that is dynamic, increasingly diverse, and experiencing greater inequality between and within rural places. This digest post focuses on one article from this special issue - Beyond the City: Exploring the Suburban and Rural Landscapes of Racial Residential Integration Across the United States - but the entire volume is interesting and important.

In Beyond the City, Ankit Rastogi (UPenn, Center for the Study of Ethnicity, Race, and Immigration) and Katherine Curtis (UWisc, Department of Community and Environmental Sociology) examine residential racial integration outcomes across a rural-urban continuum. The authors write against a backdrop of fairly constant racial segregation in metropolitan areas and a wealth of historic studies that have “implicitly assume[d] that urban areas are the sole domain of racial and ethnic diversity.”

Work by other sociologists has increasingly shown, however, that rural places are surprisingly diverse and becoming more so, particularly with trends of new in-migration to rural communities changing rural racial dynamics. This prior work has also highlighted that some rural housing for these new residents does remain highly segregated, perhaps especially for new Latinx residents.

Rastogi and Curtis, however, reveal a different story and emphasize that racially diverse and integrated places also exist across rural landscapes. According to their data, approximately 14% of the most integrated places in the U.S. are in rural areas.

Overall, the authors identify the most stably integrated places in suburbs and find the least racial integration in central cities. Rural places sit somewhere in between. The authors also note that the West, as a region, has the largest number of integrated communities.

Ultimately, Beyond the City demonstrates the advantage of adopting a spatially inclusive approach to this racial demographic work. Beyond the City suggests that further examination of integration in non-urban contexts can further our understanding of the conditions that facilitate residential integration. This may, in turn, support movement towards a more equitable and inclusive society.

This digest benefited from significant contributions from Aurora Kenworthy, UNL Law Student.