Exploring the Scale Effect in Social Mix Policy

Social mix policy aims to creating mixed communities for enhancing social interaction among various socio-economic groups. However, some research expressed doubts about the effectiveness of these policies, and claimed the need for more knowledge about the differentiated scale effect in social mix policy. This research tries to build one empirical bases for this scale effect of social mix. By analyzing the effect of income and racial mix on individual opportunity (measured by unemployment rate) in two different spatial scales - census block-group and census tract - in Los Angeles County in 2010, this research confirmed the existence of social mix effect, and showed that neighborhood effect is differentiated by spatial scale and the age of target population. This results contributes to building empirical evidences which could help create social mix policy which is based on more appropriate and effective spatial scale.