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Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality
Program Description
The Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, RSF's largest single
effort in the 1990s, was aimed at finding out why high rates of
joblessness have persisted among minorities living in America's central
cities. Despite a robust U. S. economy, millions of low-skill,
inner-city workers remain unemployed or stuck in low-paying, dead-end
jobs. One explanation is that the economic restructuring of recent
decades has increased the educational and skill requirements for most
jobs and that most inner-city workers do not have the training and
experience to qualify for these jobs. Many jobs, moreover, have moved
from cities to the suburbs, stranding inner-city workers. The Multi-City Study found that these two factors, which researchers
refer to as skill and spatial mismatches, tell only part of the story:
persistent racial barriers, especially employer bias against hiring
racial minorities, constitute an even more significant challenge to the
job prospects of inner-city workers.
Begun in 1992, the
Multi-City Study involved some forty researchers from fifteen
universities around the country. The approximately $4 million cost was shared equally by RSF and the Ford Foundation.
In all, some 8,000 African American, Hispanic, Asian, and white
household members and 3,200 employers in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and
Los Angeles were interviewed to provide both supply-side information on
minorities' labor market experiences and demand-side information on
employers' hiring and promotion practices and racial attitudes. By
combining data on both sides of the labor market equation, the
Multi-City Study may well become a benchmark study of racial inequality
in urban America for years to come.
The study provides a
detailed picture on the interacting dynamics of labor markets,
residential segregation, and racial stratification in the four
metropolitan areas. Researchers found that many inner-city workers
indeed lacked the reading, numeracy, and social skills to qualify for
most entry level jobs. Yet, as Harry Holzer of Michigan State
University reports in What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers,
the first book to emerge from the project, many employers exhibit
strong racial preferences in their hiring, based on their stereotyped
expectations of on-the-job performance. White men and women are
preferred over any other racial group, Hispanics are preferred over
blacks, and black women are preferred over black men.
The
inaccessibility of suburban jobs also acts as a strong obstacle to employment for inner-city workers. In most metropolitan areas, two-thirds of
all manufacturing, traditionally a source of well-paying jobs for the
inner-city poor, now takes place outside the central city. At the same time, most suburban
workplaces remain highly segregated. The racial preferences of
employers are matched by the perceptions of many blacks that they are
unwelcome in the suburban ring. In Atlanta, the Multi-City team found
that the greater the degree of hostility blacks perceive from white
residents, the less likely they are to search for work in that area.
The first book published by Russell Sage from the study, Holzer's What Employers Want,
summarizes the results of the initial employer surveys. In Stories Employers Tell, based on in-depth follow-up interviews with 200 firms, Philip Moss and Chris Tilly analyze the processes that determine the racial, ethnic, and gender composition of entry-level employees. Four volumes
- The Atlanta Paradox, The Boston Renaissance, Detroit Divided, and Prismatic Metropolis - analyze economic and social conditions in the participating cities. A summary volume, Urban Inequality (Alice O'Connor, Chris Tilly, and Lawrence Bobo, editors), compares
conditions across the four cities and describes the study's overarching findings on the sources of urban disparities.
Alice O'Connor of the
University of California at Santa Barbara acted as project
coordinator for the Multi-City Study, while Robinson Hollister of
Swarthmore College headed the research advisory committee. Irene Browne
and Gary Green served as principal investigators on the Atlanta
research team; Barry Bluestone, Miren Uriate, Chris Tilly, and
Philip Moss on the Boston team; Reynolds Farley, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry Holzer on the Detroit Team; and Larry Bobo, James Johnson, and Melvin Oliver on the Los Angeles team.
During
1995-96, seven Multi-City researchers were in residence at Russell Sage
analyzing the results of the surveys and presenting their research at a
series of workshops.
About a dozen doctoral dissertations were written using Multi-City data. In a further step to
encourage younger scholars to make use of the data, the Foundation
sponsored a small grants competition. Receiving awards were Maria Krysan
of Pennsylvania State University, who analyzed residential
preferences of survey respondents; Michael Stoll of the University of
California at Los Angeles, who studied the effects of residential
location in Los Angeles on having a job and of racial discrimination in
hiring and wages in the suburbs; and Camille Zubrinsky of Ohio State
University, who also used the Los Angeles data to investigate the
process of neighborhood change and segregation under conditions of
increasing multi-racial diversity.
Archived data from the project are available at the University of Michigan's Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Recent Visiting Scholars
1998 - 1999
Maria Krysan, University of Illinois, Chicago
1995 - 1996
Irene Browne, Emory University
Harry J. Holzer, The Urban Institute and Georgetown University
Lawrence D. Bobo, Stanford University
Melvin L. Oliver, University of California, Santa Barbara