Despite rising minority socioeconomic status, declining levels of discrimination, and growing tolerance for other-race neighbors, residential segregation persists in the United States, and for African Americans remains as high as ever in several large metropolitan areas.

In Cycle of Segregation, Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder make a major contribution to our understanding of how and why residential segregation persists. The authors critique the theoretical and methodological models commonly used by social scientists to conceptualize and study residential segregation in the United States: the spatial assimilation model (which attributes segregation to socioeconomic differences between groups), the place stratification model (which attributes segregation to discrimination in housing and lending markets), and the group preferences model (which attributes segregation to widespread preference for same-race neighbors).

As an alternative, Krysan and Crowder offer a new conceptual framework, the “social structural sorting perspective,” which argues that segregation persists because residential decision-making is embedded within racialized social, economic, cognitive, and spatial structures and that these structures constrain locational behavior to replicate existing levels and patterns of segregation through a variety of self-perpetuating processes that yield urban landscapes that are systematically stratified by race and class.