Won't you be my neighbor?

 I recently wrote a research paper about Race vs. Socioeconomic Status. I feel that my section on residential segregation is very similar to "The Tale of Two Families." Here is what I wrote:

Residential Segregation has been a problem in the United States for hundreds of years. Professional researchers like William Clark, author of Changing Residential Preferences Across Income, Education and Age: Findings from a Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, examined where people choose to live, and why they choose to live there. He found that “preferences are fundamental in creating the patterns of separation in the residential fabric, but those preferences are modified substantially by education and income.” (Clark) When examining racial makeup of neighborhoods, one has to take into account the factors that lead the decision of where to live. Clark conducted his study by showing residents in several neighborhoods across the United States a series of cards displaying different combinations of homes in neighborhoods ranging from all white to all black, and he asked the residents to put the cards in order from most preferable to least preferable neighborhood they would rather live in. He found “that Blacks rarely prefer settings in which they are less than 50% is a fundamental factor in continuing separation. [He found that] this finding provides additional evidence to support other research that has also drawn attention to the fact that residential separation is not just an outcome of White choices.” (Clark) This shows that residential segregation is not caused by the dominant race, Whites, forcing other races into low-income neighborhoods but is actually caused by socioeconomic status and what type of people that other people feel comfortable living near. But how do we define socioeconomic status? “Assuming that education and income are relatively close surrogates for socioeconomic status, we can compare the shifts in the distribution for those measures versus the measure for race effects. Clearly, socioeconomic status is important.” (Clark) With the 2010 Census, funding distribution is calculated by how many of each race lives in a certain area. Residential segregation is prevalent in this document because there are no questions that ask how much money the family makes but instead there are two, out of ten, questions based on race. (Department of Commerce) This data will be used to see how many of each race lives in the area and with that information they will be able to tell whether or not the area needs more money. Although there are tendencies of minorities living in the same impoverished neighborhoods, this does not automatically mean that prominently white neighborhoods are nearly always wealthy or middle class neighborhoods. Also, Where we choose to live determines where our children will go to school and where we go to work. If the neighborhood a resident chooses to live in is an impoverished one, then they will not receive an adequate education which will lead to lower scores on standardized tests and ultimately rejection from college admissions.