Multigroup Segregation Patterns and Determinants: The Case of Immigrants in an Italian City

Models of race-based segregation establish that individual characteristics or housing market attributes are complementary causes of the observed level of races’ concentration inside an urban space. The goal of this work is to establish which variables, and in which order of magnitude, among individual characteristics, housing features, and local amenities correlate with immigrants’ segregation, in the case of consistent within-city immigrants’ mobility. We capture the degree of segregation for different immigration groups by a local concentration statistics that is directly obtained from segregation curves, and we use data on the Verona Municipality as a case study. We find strong evidence in favor of the role of the housing market and housing ownership distribution across city areas.