Study Finds That Large Cities Foster Socioeconomic Segregation

A new study led by researchers at Stanford University finds that there is very little interaction between people in different socioeconomic groups in the nation’s largest cities. Big cities may be more socioeconomically segregated than small cities because they have a larger variety of stores, restaurants, recreation areas, and venues – and these choices cater to narrow socioeconomic brackets. The researchers used GPS data collected in 2017 from 9.6 million cellphones across 382 metropolitan areas in the United States to determine how often people of different socioeconomic statuses crossed paths during the day – essentially how many times people had the opportunity to interact, even briefly, with someone in a different income bracket. After inferring each person’s socioeconomic status from estimated rental prices on a real estate marketing website, the researchers counted potential interactions between users over the course of the day – times where two cellphones had GPS pings within 50 meters of each other within a five-minute window. They collected data on almost 1.6 billion path-crossings. Researchers found that people living in the 10 most populous metropolitan areas, which include cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, along with their surrounding areas, were significantly less likely...