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Purpose – This chapter presents information about the residential patterns and reported segregation or discrimination of Latinos in the greater Washington, DC, metropolitan region. The author provides definitions, associated concepts, causes and consequences, selected data findings, and a historical and demographic overview of the Latino population in the region.

Methodology/approach – A literature review of scholarly articles from the social sciences, policy reports, census data, and other public use data, and other publications.

Findings – Data from the Harvard University DiversityData Project (2012) reveals evidence of Hispanic residential segregation throughout the Washington, DC, metropolitan region. In addition, Hispanic children are more racially isolated, have less exposure to Whites, and are more densely populated and residentially clustered in the region.

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – This chapter does not present new research or original evidence about residential patterns, residential segregation, or housing discrimination among Latinos in the greater Washington, DC, metropolitan region.

Practical/social implications – The prevalence of residential discrimination, segregation and its impact on the restricted residential patterns, social mobility, and isolation of Latinos is a regional and national social problem. The greater Washington, DC, region will continue to receive Latino newcomers who will disperse into areas where they have not resided before. The ways in which they and their families are received and treated by their neighbors can provide context into race relations in a so-called post-racial America.

Originality/value of chapter – The residential patterns of Latinos in the greater Washington, DC, metropolitan region and evidence of the segregation and discrimination they have encountered caution us to examine how segregation perpetuates disadvantage, inequality, racialization, social distance, and other kinds of discrimination. Whether residential segregation is voluntary or involuntary, its remnants are a visceral force that cannot be ignored.

A developing body of research has demonstrated the impact of racial residential segregation on a variety of negative health outcomes. However, little is known about the effect of residential segregation on access to health care.

This study utilizes multilevel binary logit models based on individual-level health data from the 2008 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System linked to metropolitan-area level data to examine the association between Black-White segregation in 136 metropolitan statistical areas in the United States and health-care coverage.

Overall, an increase in Black-White segregation is related to a decrease in the likelihood of having health insurance for Black residents and an increase in the Black-White gap in health-care coverage. These effects are substantial even when controlling for the effects of educational, social, and economic factors.

This study is the first to examine the impact of segregation on an individual's ability to access health-care coverage, which is an essential starting point for accessing health care in the United States.

This chapter examines the history and evolution of land use regulation in the United States. The economic effect and influence on neighborhood composition is considered. The work of political theorists Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault is utilized to analyze the practice of zoning in the United States. An overview of the Standard Zoning Enabling Act, which sets the foundation for zoning within the United States, is presented. Michel Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary power” and Gramsci’s theory of “environmental hegemony” are highlighted to elucidate how land use regulations have operated to enhance the social and economic status of some populations, while limiting the opportunities of others. The potential for changing land use polices is also discussed.

In this chapter, Andrea Óhidy provides an overview of some central issues of the book. First, she shows the similarities in the challenges to increase the participation and success of Roma people in education and lifelong learning in the selected European countries; then, she discusses their policies and support programmes, which, on the one hand, try to improve the social situation of the Roma while promoting minority language and culture, on the other hand. She finds the reason for their similarities regarding the wording, defining and communicating and also concerning the main ideas and concrete projects for possible solutions, in the Roma inclusion policy of the European Union in the frame of the Open Method of Coordination, which has been introduced within the Lisbon Strategy, linked to the idea of lifelong learning. She considers the realisation of these policy measures at national, regional and local levels to have shown only unsatisfactory results until now.

Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.

In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.

We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.

The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.

We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.

Scholarship has demonstrated important consequences of segregation on health and health care outcomes, yet the mechanisms behind this association remain poorly understood. Several recent studies have shown inequities in the distribution of a wide variety of health-related organizations across urban neighborhoods, which may account for some portion of this negative health association. Though, within this literature, relatively little attention has been given to the distribution of health care facilities in particular.

Here, I consider how segregation is related to the distribution of several auxiliary health care practitioners in a series of spatial regression models of zip codes across the United States using data from the 2010 US Census and County Business Patterns (CBP).

I find that both Black and Latino segregation is negatively related to the density of a number of auxiliary health care practitioners, including mental health providers, dentists, physical/occupational/speech therapists, chiropractors, optometrists, podiatrists, and miscellaneous health care practitioners. However, this association is reduced (in certain instances to non-significance) with the inclusion of socioeconomic indicators, chiefly the percent of college educated individuals and the unemployment rate of the zip code. This is association is reduced for both Black and Latino segregation, with a larger reduction in the size of the effects for Latino segregation.

This research suggests that segregation plays an important role in the distribution of health care facilities, but that policy and public health interventions should focus on the intersection between racial residential segregation and socioeconomic considerations.

Although the measurement of segregation by gender or ethnic group in the labor force has long been of interest to both sociologists and economists, the sociology and economics literatures on this topic have evolved in different ways and remained largely separate. This has also been the case to some extent with research on the measurement of residential segregation. Although much of the segregation measurement literature is in sociology and geography, economists have contributed to this field as well, particularly in the development of measures of residential income segregation. Again, however, the economics literature has remained largely separate from that in geography and sociology.

The pattern of racial segregation in U.S. elementary and secondary schools has changed significantly over the last 25 years. This chapter examines the relationship between the racial composition of schools and the choices white parents make concerning the schools their children attend. Restricted access files at the Bureau of the Census allow us to identify each household's Census block of residence and, in turn, suburban public school districts and urban public school attendance areas. We find that the racial composition of schools and neighborhoods are very important in the school and location decisions of white families.