TITLE:
Residential Segregation and Housing Attainment: European Immigrant Groups in the Early Twentieth-Century United States
AUTHORS:
Robert L. Boyd
KEYWORDS:
Residential Segregation, Housing Attainment, European Immigrant Groups, Early Twentieth-Century United States
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.4,
April
17,
2026
ABSTRACT: Did residential segregation help or hurt European immigrant groups’ socioeconomic achievement in the early twentieth-century United States? The present study addresses this question with 1930 Census data on housing attainment, testing competing hypotheses about enclaves, ghettos, and ethnic boundaries. Regression analyses show that the next-door-neighbor segregation of European immigrant groups from the third-plus generation U.S. population is 1) positively associated with the immigrant groups’ respective home ownership rates, consistent with the enclave hypothesis, but 2) negatively associated with these groups’ respective median home values, consistent with the ghetto hypothesis. However, robustness checks demonstrate that these associations cease to be statistically significant when outliers are removed. The study thus concludes that the results tally with the ethnic boundary-blurring hypothesis—to wit, by 1930, European immigrant groups’ socio-spatial distance from the third-plus generation U.S. population was neither severe enough nor pervasive enough to affect the immigrant groups’ socioeconomic achievement.