skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: A Heterogeneous Schelling Model for Wealth Disparity and its Effect on Segregation
The Schelling model of segregation was introduced in economics to show how micro-motives can influence macro-behavior. Agents on a lattice have two colors and try to move to a different location if the number of their neighbors with a different color exceeds some threshold. Simulations reveal that even such mild local color preferences, or homophily, are sufficient to cause segregation. In this work, we propose a stochastic generalization of the Schelling model, based on both race and wealth, to understand how carefully architected placement of incentives, such as urban infrastructure, might affect segregation. In our model, each agent is assigned one of two colors along with a label, rich or poor. Further, we designate certain vertices on the lattice as “urban sites,” providing civic infrastructure that most benefits the poorer population, thus incentivizing the occupation of such vertices by poor agents of either color. We look at the stationary distribution of a Markov process reflecting these preferences to understand the long-term effects. We prove that when incentives are large enough, we will have ”urbanization of poverty,” an observed effect whereby poor people tend to congregate on urban sites. Moreover, even when homophily preferences are very small, if the incentives are large and there is income inequality in the two-color classes, we can get racial segregation on urban sites but integration on non-urban sites. In contrast, we find an overall mitigation of segregation when the urban sites are distributed throughout the lattice and the incentives for urban sites exceed the homophily biases. We prove that in this case, no matter how strong homophily preferences are, it will be exponentially unlikely that a configuration chosen from stationarity will have large, homogeneous clusters of agents of either color, suggesting we will have racial integration with high probability.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2106687
PAR ID:
10425781
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
EAAMO '22: Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 10
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. We investigate two discrete models of excitable media on a one-dimensional integer lattice ℤ: the κ-color Cyclic Cellular Automaton (CCA) and the κ-color Firefly Cellular Automaton (FCA). In both models, sites are assigned uniformly random colors from ℤ/κℤ. Neighboring sites with colors within a specified interaction range r tend to synchronize their colors upon a particular local event of 'excitation'. We establish that there are three phases of CCA/FCA on ℤ as we vary the interaction range r. First, if r is too small (undercoupled), there are too many non-interacting pairs of colors, and the whole graph ℤ will be partitioned into non-interacting intervals of sites with no excitation within each interval. If r is within a sweet spot (critical), then we show the system clusters into ever-growing monochromatic intervals. For the critical interaction range r=⌊κ/2⌋, we show the density of edges of differing colors at time t is Θ(t−1/2) and each site excites Θ(t1/2) times up to time t. Lastly, if r is too large (overcoupled), then neighboring sites can excite each other and such 'defects' will generate waves of excitation at a constant rate so that each site will get excited at least at a linear rate. For the special case of FCA with r=⌊2/κ⌋+1, we show that every site will become (κ+1)-periodic eventually. 
    more » « less
  2. This paper investigates the long-term impacts of the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) mortgage risk assessment maps on the spatial dynamics of recent income and racial distributions in California metropolitan areas over the 1990-2010 period. We combine historical HOLC boundaries with modern Census tract data and apply recently developed methods of spatial distribution dynamics to examine if legacy impacts are reflected in recent urban dynamics. Cities with HOLC assessments are found to have higher levels of isolation segregation than the non-HOLC group, but no difference in unevenness segregation between the two groups of cities are found. We find no difference in income or racial and ethnic distributional dynamics between the two groups of cities over the period. At the intra-urban scale, we find that the intersectionality of residing in a C or D graded tract that is also a low-income tract falls predominately upon the minority populations in these eight HOLC cities. Our findings indicate that neighborhoods with poor housing markets and high minority concentrations rarely experience a dramatic change in either their racial and ethnic or socioeconomic compositions—and that negative externalities (e.g. lower home prices and greater segregation levels) emanate from these neighborhoods, with inertia spilling over into nearby zones. 
    more » « less
  3. We present the first GPU-based parallel algorithm to efficiently update vertex coloring on large dynamic networks. For single GPU, we introduce the concept of loosely maintained vertex color update that reduces computation and memory requirements. For multiple GPUs, in distributed environments, we propose priority-based ordering of vertices to reduce the communication time. We prove the correctness of our algorithms and experimentally demonstrate that for graphs of over 16 million vertices and over 134 million edges on a single GPU, our dynamic algorithm is as much as 20x faster than state-of-the-art algorithm on static graphs. For larger graphs with over 130 million vertices and over 260 million edges, our distributed implementation with 8 GPUs produces updated color assignments within 160 milliseconds. In all cases, the proposed parallel algorithms produce comparable or fewer colors than state-of-the-art algorithms. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Understanding actor collaboration networks and their evolution is essential to promoting collective action in resilience planning and management of interdependent infrastructure systems. Local interactions and choice homophily are two important network evolution mechanisms. Network motifs encode the information of network formation, configuration, and the local structure. Homophily effects, on the other hand, capture whether the network configurations have significant correlations with node properties. The objective of this paper is to explore the extent to which local interactions and homophily effects influence actor collaboration in resilience planning and management of interdependent infrastructure systems. We mapped bipartite actor collaboration network based on a post-Hurricane Harvey stakeholder survey that revealed actor collaborations for hazard mitigation. We examined seven bipartite network motifs for the mapped collaboration network and compared the mapped network to simulated random models with same degree distributions. Then we examined whether the network configurations had significant statistics for node properties using exponential random graph models. The results provide insights about the two mechanisms—local interactions and homophily effect—influencing the formation of actor collaboration in resilience planning and management of interdependent urban systems. The findings have implications for improving network cohesion and actor collaborations from diverse urban sectors. 
    more » « less
  5. When policymakers invest in urban infrastructure, there are concerns that poor residents living near the infrastructure will be displaced. This paper investigates mechanisms that may lead to such infrastructure-induced gentrification using a general equilibrium urban commuting model. Our goal is to elucidate the channels through which infrastructure-induced gentrification occurs and understand how policy choices mitigate or accentuate gentrification. 
    more » « less