Measuring the geography of opportunity

Quantitative segregation research focuses almost exclusively on the spatial sorting of demographic groups. This research largely ignores the structural characteristics of neighborhoods – such as crime, job accessibility, and school quality – that likely help determine important household outcomes. This paper summarizes the research on segregation, neighborhood effects, and concentrated disadvantage, and argues that we should pay more attention to neighborhood structural characteristics, and that the data increasingly exist to include measures of spatial segregation and neighborhood opportunity. The paper concludes with a brief empirical justification for the inclusion of data on neighborhood violence and a discussion on policy applications.