Social isolation in motion: How socioeconomic segregation in everyday mobility varies by neighborhood racial-ethnic composition in U.S. cities

Recent scholarship finds that socioeconomic (dis)advantage in urban neighborhoods’ routine mobility networks—the neighborhoods their residents visit and receive visits from—predicts their vitality. Mobility-based (dis)advantage is correlated with, but conceptually distinct from, the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood’s residents. Thus, residential and mobility-based disadvantage can lead to distinct or compounding inequalities. This paper builds on Wilson’s social isolation framework to analyze how mobility-based disadvantage is unequally distributed by neighborhood racial-ethnic composition in the United States’ 100 most populous cities and their commuting zones. Majority-Black and majority-Hispanic neighborhoods experience heightened levels of mobility-based disadvantage, which deepens well-known disparities with majority-white neighborhoods based on residents’ socioeconomic statuses. Generally, mobility disadvantage compounds inequalities based on residential disadvantage, but for some Black and Hispanic neighborhoods with relatively low residential disadvantage, mobility disadvantage is a distinct form of inequality. The extent of these inequalities varies by urban form, with white spatial clustering and residential segregation by income as salient moderators. Isolation in structural neighborhood networks emerges as a clear feature of racial-ethnic inequality, though that one varies between cities.