The Perpetuation of the Racialized Ideology of Neighborhood Quality: Evidence From 16 US Rental Markets

Housing dynamics in the United States were racialized by decades of State-sponsored racist policy. Exposure to particular neighborhoods yields benefits and harms that are vastly different across racialized populations. One outcome of that association is an ideology of racialized space that could both naturalize and perpetuate spatial racial inequality. Using 500k listings from the rental platform Craigslist spanning five years and 16 U.S. metropolitan areas, I show that descriptions of neighborhoods reflect the legacy of more traditional forms of neighborhood racialization, but are also the site of counter-narratives that resist that legacy. Advertisements tend to describe Asian and White neighborhoods more positively than other neighborhoods, while failing to positively describe Latino and Black areas, though that difference is less for Latino neighborhoods when accounting for socioeconomic status. In contrast, even high-income Black neighborhoods are not described as positively as poor White neighborhoods. Black and White neighborhoods are recognized for being historic, but, even accounting for housing stock age, Asian neighborhoods are not, reflecting the ‘permanent foreigner’ stereotype.