ABSTRACT
Introduction How does the relative racial and economic segregation of a neighborhood influence social networks? Concerns about the role of social ties and the influence of segregation arise from both John Kain’s (1968) work on spatial disconnects in urban regions and William Julius Wilson’s (1987) work suggesting that living in neighborhoods of extreme segregation causes the social and economic isolation of the underclass. The causal mechanisms for the social and economic deficits could be spatial or social structural. Neighborhood location or composition may have an effect on economic isolation (for a review, see Kleit 2001b). Kain’s work inspired decades of research on the regional spatial mismatch between the urban housing location of blacks and the suburban location of better jobs (for reviews, see Glaeser et al. 2004; Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1998).
