The racial context of White mobility: An individual-level assessment of the White flight hypothesis

Census data are attached to the individual records of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the effects of neighborhood racial conditions and metropolitan-level structural factors on the residential mobility of individual White householders. Supporting the White flight hypothesis, the results indicate that the annual likelihood of leaving the neighborhood increases significantly with the size of the minority population in the neighborhood, and Whites are especially likely to leave neighborhoods containing combinations of multiple minority groups. These neighborhood effects persist after controlling for a wide range of micro-level mobility predictors and do not appear to be rooted in the reaction to nonracial social and economic characteristics of the neighborhood. However, the effect of local racial conditions on the mobility of individual Whites is generally modest, significantly nonlinear, varies by several individual-level characteristics, and is conditioned by the relative availability of housing in predominantly White neighborhoods to serve as potential destinations. (C) 2000 Academic Press.