Social scientific studies of residential segregation by race have a long history in the United States. The racial and ethnic composition of city neighborhoods has been examined for nearly all decades of the twentieth century (see Duncan and Duncan, Reference Duncan and Duncan1957; Taeuber and Taeuber, Reference Taeuber and Taeuber1969; Lieberson Reference Lieberson1963, Reference Lieberson1980; Massey and Denton, Reference Massey and Denton1987, Reference Massey and Denton1993; Farley and Frey, Reference Farley and Frey1994; Frey and Farley, Reference Frey and Farley1996; Logan Reference Logan, Katz and Lang2003; Logan et al., Reference Logan, Stults and Farley2004; Iceland Reference Iceland2004; Wilkes and Iceland, Reference Wilkes and Iceland2004; among many others). If research following the 2000 census is any indication, new segregation studies will closely follow the release of new census data in 2010. From then on, census tract data, the backbone of segregation studies, will be issued annually, and thus the study of segregation may become a continuous, rather than a once-in-a-decade, project.

Segregation studies have been dominated by an assimilation paradigm and limited by the fact that the most common segregation indices compare two groups. Since non-Hispanic Whites were usually the largest group—the dominant group economically and culturally—segregation studies most often assessed how often people were living with them. In broad terms, the results of racial segregation studies, such as those cited above, have quite consistently revealed, first, that the segregation of African Americans from Whites is higher than that of Hispanics, and that Asian segregation is lower than or equal to Hispanic segregation; second, African American segregation is higher in large metropolitan areas with large Black populations, particularly those industrial areas in the Northeast and Midwest; and last, segregation for African Americans is declining over time, though the declines are largest in smaller places and in those with relatively fewer Blacks. Segregation of Asians and Hispanics has remained about the same or increased slightly as new immigrants arrive and settle near coethnics, at least at first (Logan et al., Reference Logan, Alba and Zhang2002). In reviewing these studies, the impact of the suburbs looms large since they were developed as all-White communities, with the support of federal policies (Jackson Reference Jackson1985) that are still reflected in the population composition of suburbs (Alba et al., Reference Alba, Logan, Stults, Marzan and Zhang1999).

Underlying all this attention to segregation is the concept of integration. Many, if not most, of the scholars studying segregation view integration as a desirable goal, at a minimum because of the access to opportunities that good neighborhoods provide—including better schools, higher housing values, more city services, and greater safety (Briggs Reference Briggs2005; Sampson et al., Reference Sampson, Morenoff and Gannon-Rowley2002). That these good neighborhoods are themselves segregated, home to largely White populations rather than minorities, is not discussed as often. Yet integration is not necessarily the goal of all. It is easy to find evidence that people are tired of thinking about it, a phenomenon known as “race fatigue” for Whites and “integration exhaustion” for Blacks. Sheryll Cashin (Reference Cashin2004) titles her book The Failures of Integration and discusses how Black integration exhaustion, White desire for homogeneity, and racial steering combine with both public policy choices and private institutional practices to support the neighborhood racial landscape. Orlando Patterson, in The Ordeal of Integration (Reference Patterson1998), downplays the meaning of segregation statistics to show progress that has been made, while at the same time discussing the struggles that attempts at integration have required. Others examine the racial bases underlying color blindness on the part of Whites (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2006), how Whites' behavior in private settings often belies their nonracist stance in public settings (Picca and Feagin, Reference Picca and Feagin2007), and conclude that people like to live with others like themselves (Feagin and Sikes, Reference Feagin and Sikes1995). Despite the difficulties, integration remains important, as separate has never been equal in neighborhoods, as Patterson reminds us (Reference Patterson1998, p. 201). Ingrid Gould Ellen (Reference Ellen2000) shows that there are many integrated neighborhoods, more than we often realize.

To this literature on segregation and its variation across time and place, each of the three books discussed in this review makes a unique contribution. They do so by delving into the issues surrounding segregation, the processes maintaining it, and its effects from a neighborhood or structural level. Though the three books are very different from one another, taken together they provide a comprehensive and insightful overview of the current state of race and residence in U.S. cities. Despite covering nearly every aspect of segregation and racial integration in neighborhoods, as well as structural and social barriers to integration, the books hold the reader's attention throughout: detail does not impede readability.

There Goes the Neighborhood, by William Julius Wilson and Richard Taub, is the most accessible for a general audience. Eschewing statistics and multivariate models, the authors talk about issues of race and neighborhood through the lens of four particular neighborhoods in Chicago. The study deliberately chose neighborhoods that were neither very poor nor very rich—all were lower-middle- or working-class communities. Throughout, the researchers seek to apply Albert Hirschman's (Reference Hirschman1970) organizational concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty—originally used for firms and organizations—to neighborhoods. Those who find the situation intolerable leave, but those who think it is possible to change it may exercise voice, influenced in part by their loyalty to the neighborhood. These neighborhoods will be familiar to readers of the work of Wilson's graduate students, who collected most of the data reported here in 1993–1995. The first neighborhood, Beltway, is a mainly White, working-class community. It is experiencing change as Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Blacks, move in. This change troubles them—“When Beltwayites spoke of bringing back the ‘principles and morals’ of an earlier era, they were referring to the period when white neighborhoods were stable and racially homogenous and no one challenged the system of residential segregation” (p. 35). The next neighborhood, Dover, is a mixed-ethnic neighborhood undergoing transition as Hispanics replace non-Hispanic Whites. It tells the story of White ethnics, in this case Poles, facing new neighbors, Mexicans, and longing for the neighborhood as it once was. Such memories are strongly tinged with nostalgia. With the arrival of the newcomers, civic institutions suffer, churches enhance the division, but the schools embrace the diversity. However, the Poles and Mexicans are united in not wanting to live with Blacks.

Archer Park, the third neighborhood, is predominately home to Mexicans, who do not consider non-Hispanic Whites a threat since they outnumber them. But like their counterparts in Dover, they resist Black entry into the neighborhood. Issues revolving around declining services and the fact that the Mexicans view the neighborhood as a “stepping-stone” inhibit neighborhood organizational life. The fourth neighborhood, Groveland, is a stable lower middle-class African American neighborhood which experienced rapid neighborhood racial transition from all White to 83% Black between 1960 and 1970. It is now almost all Black, providing a situation that makes for little racial tension and serves as the foundation for exploring and developing one's identity as a Black. The residents are worried, however, by the influx of poorer Blacks from a nearby area. Though the details differ from neighborhood to neighborhood, taken together these analyses do not paint a very hopeful picture for the future of integration. The stereotypes and prejudices of the neighborhood residents, as well as the underlying fears they use to justify them, are very clearly expressed.

With the title inspired by the theme song from the television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Camille Zubrinsky Charles's Won't You Be My Neighbor? delves into the “why” of racial segregation. It uses data from the Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality (LASUI), conducted in 1992–1994, to link individual attitudes to actual housing behavior. This study was part of a four-city study (the others were Boston, Atlanta, and Detroit), so while the focus of the book is Los Angeles, the author's knowledge of the projects' other sites, data, and findings gives the book a more “national” feel. Los Angeles, though highly segregated, is arguably the nation's most diverse metropolitan area and hence a good setting to examine racial attitudes toward one's neighbors. The book begins with a very good overview of LA's demographic history, followed by an excellent discussion of relevant theoretical perspectives on the dynamics of residential segregation. It contrasts the spatial assimilation model, which appears to hold for non-Hispanic Whites and Asians, to the place stratification model that more accurately describes the experience of Blacks and Hispanics. Particularly important is Charles's explicit consideration of the role of nativity among Asians and Hispanics, which she argues may give new foreign-born immigrants special reasons to prefer segregation, something that is supported in her data.

Taking care to explain that “racially separate neighborhoods are the result of a combination of individual- and institutional-level actions” (p. 46), Charles explores two variants of individual prejudice: traditional (simple hostility toward outgroups) and group position (commitment to a specific or relative status toward another group). The analysis continues with an exploration of the economics of housing, relative costs, and homeownership, as well as the racialization of the housing market, before moving to a detailed analysis of racial attitudes and the interactions between race and class. In an examination of the neighborhood outcomes for poor and affluent members of all groups, her finding is that while both Latinos and Asians reap greater neighborhood-level rewards than do Blacks from higher individual socioeconomic status, Latinos do not see the same neighborhood benefits as Asians see. This relative ranking—White, Asian, Hispanic, and Black—emerges again and again, except where Asians do better than Whites.

The level of detail in this book precludes easy summary, but several findings stand out. First is the importance of prejudice, working through neighborhood racial-composition preferences, as a sense of group position for Whites who are “at once the dominant group socially and economically and a numerical minority in Los Angeles” (p. 181). They are not expressing simple hostility toward another group, but defending their privilege. Next is the finding that the same relative group status can be seen in the preference of other groups for White neighbors, what Charles calls the “double whammy” of White prejudice: Whites' own prejudices affect their own behavior when choosing neighborhoods, and the fear of hostility by Whites negatively affects the desire for integration on the part of the other groups. Last is the finding that even though social class is an important determinant of the residential landscape in our cities, it is patterned along racial lines. Her results very clearly show that race matters over and above characteristics of class in predicting neighborhood preferences.

The third book covered in this review, Privileged Places by Gregory Squires and Charis Kubrin, focuses on the structural components that determine residential segregation and how segregation affects the opportunities neighborhood residents enjoy. Though one chapter of the book uses data from Seattle, the remainder has a national focus, making it the most geographically comprehensive of the three books. Starting from the premise that “the impacts of place and race are not inevitable” (p. 3), the authors link the racial landscape to housing and development policies, and relate the social costs attached to them. The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) mandated that federal depository institutions be responsive to credit needs of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. Based on 2000 Home Mortgage Disclosure (HMDA) data, the findings presented in chapter 2, written with Samantha Friedman, convincingly demonstrate that minorities are more likely to purchase homes in White neighborhoods in places where more loans are made by CRA-covered institutions. The fact that the role of these institutions declined in recent years as nonfederal depository institutions moved into the mortgage-lending business leads to a clear and concise explanation of the current system of housing finance, subprime loans, and predatory lending. And if housing finance discrimination is not sufficient to maintain segregation, the authors provide an excellent overview of discrimination in the insurance industry.

In chapters 5 and 6, Squires and Kubrin discuss the relationships between mortgage money, crime, and recidivism. In Seattle neighborhoods where there is more mortgage money available, the crime rate is lower. Similarly, even after controlling for individual differences, neighborhood characteristics influence recidivism, pointing to the fact that neighborhoods vary in their ability to provide services to ex-offenders. Their careful review of the extant literature leads them to suggest that higher recidivism among Blacks may be in part determined by the more economically disadvantaged communities to which Black ex-offenders return. The services that returning prisoners need—medical care, jobs, housing—are well-known, but they are too often not provided in the neighborhoods to which prisoners are released. The final chapter very persuasively argues that dichotomies such as universal versus race specific, or pro-people versus pro-place, are false and hinder our ability to sever the links between privilege, place, and race. It is one of the best statements on these issues that I have ever encountered.

So what do these three books tell us about the state of integration and segregation? Unfortunately, the location of the neighborhoods in Chicago—one of the nation's most segregated cities—almost inexorably leads There Goes the Neighborhood to the conclusion that neighborhoods will be segregated by race for the foreseeable future. The fact that these neighborhoods are home to at most two groups is symbolic of Chicago's hypersegregated landscape. Multiethnic neighborhoods are not discussed here. The book's strength is reporting the words of real people who live in these neighborhoods and discussions of how they feel about their neighborhood, not just about race. But that is also its weakness: it lacks the detailed measurement of prejudice and stereotyping and how they operate to structure residential preferences that is found in Won't You Be My Neighbor? It also suffers from a very individualistic perspective. Applying Hirschman's (Reference Hirschman1970) concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty directs attention solely to the actions of neighborhood residents, ignoring the structural factors outside an individual or a single neighborhood's control. Won't You Be My Neighbor? and Privileged Places both offer more hope for integration.

All of the books emphasize policy and the question, What can be done to help neighborhoods become more integrated? The most effective in this regard is Privileged Places, as it is truly written from a policy perspective and asks specific policy-relevant questions at the beginning and at the end of each chapter. The final chapter is masterful in how it lays out the many false policy choices that plague all too many discussions of strategies intended to combat segregation or promote integration. The authors are very hopeful, pointing out that policy decisions made every day influence the quality of life of people and communities. And decisions made based on race will also affect those based on place, and vice versa. Knowing which policy is best is only part of what is needed. The political will to encourage people to act in ways that change the distribution of privilege is equally essential.

Overall, two of the books explore the whys and wherefores of integration in an attempt to understand why more neighborhoods are not integrated and what individual and structural forces keep neighborhoods segregated. The third looks at actual neighborhoods and uses interviews with their residents to explain why they are segregated or transitioning racially. These different perspectives are important, as they provide different insights into a very difficult problem: segregation. Personally, I find it somewhat disappointing that the most accessible of these books for a general audience is the least positive toward integration, a goal I support. It suggests that neighborhoods, at least in Chicago, are likely to remain highly segregated for the foreseeable future. At the same time, the other two books are likely to have more appeal to scholars and could thus be more influential in advancing our knowledge and research in this important area.

In closing, let me say that I think that all three books deserve our attention. If I had to pick only one to recommend, it would be Privileged Places, not because it is so much better than the other books, but because it covers such a wide range of current policy and structural features supporting segregation that are less often discussed. More simply put, the information contained in it is harder to come by from other sources. The messages in There Goes the Neighborhood are quite familiar, while the intricate analyses in Won't You Be My Neighbor? are clearly the most sophisticated among these three books—the study is part of a large body of books and articles that have been generated by the Multiple City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI) with which many may already be familiar. Despite the fact that some have seemingly given up on integration as a goal, it has never really been tried, so we do not yet know how effective and successful it could be. The importance of integration to wealth (Oliver and Shapiro, Reference Oliver and Shapiro1995) and the opportunities presented by increasing population diversity and the aging of the baby boom (Myers Reference Myers2007) make this the perfect time to redouble efforts to try to, as Squires and Kubrin say, “sever the links among race, residence, and privilege” (p. 144).