Not directly related, but a fun(?) anecdote: I worked for a dog-friendly company in Seattle for a few years in the mid 20-teens. I started out commuting from my parents' place (who dog-sat for me), taking a commuter train and then a bus. I rarely chatted with anyone on the train/bus during that period.<p>After a few months I managed to find a place in the city and would ride the (pet-friendly) bus with my 90-pound samoyed, who despite usually being anxious in crowds took to it really well.<p>Long story short, the dog was an amazing cross-class ice breaker. I'm pretty introverted, but just about every trip someone would strike up a conversation with me, and it was usually folks I wouldn't otherwise interact with.<p>So anecdotally, usable public transit can be a good class desegregation strategy, and taking a charismatic dog with you supercharges it.
I have never observed that, given free choice, people prefer to associate with people that are unlike them. When you've recently immigrated to the US from a foreign country, you don't think "finally, I'm away from my countrymen, I can't wait to form a work group of zero people who speak my language and don't understand any of my assumptions and references." When you're planning a high school party, you don't think "me and my friends are on the football team, so we'd better not invite too many football players and will be sure to invite the comp sci guys, the band kids, the theater kids, and the stoners."<p>That said, I do agree with the meta-implication of this paper, which is that it's bad for society at large when the classes don't encounter each other socially at all.
I belong to a religion that's really strong in western U.S. and less prevelant as you go east. Congregations are assigned based on geography and sometimes language.<p>I prefer the congregations out east that cover half a city because you interact with more doverse people across a lot more socio-economic classes just due to the wider geographic area.<p>I wish there were good incentives to build combined/intermingled housing to have more mixed neighborhoods.
Fascinating to me that the corporate chains we love to hate like Olive Garden, Applebees, and big chain stores in general, have the benefit of facilitating the most cross-class* interactions of any business type. I saw a comment explain this could be due to a mixed social group where everyone can agree to go to Applebees because it's acceptable socially to the higher class people and acceptable financially to the lower class people.<p>*Important to note that "class" in this paper is defined as income class, even though they refer to it at times as social class
Not class segregation, but racial segregation. Yesterday I flew to the Atlanta airport and from there to the Portland Oregon airport. Probably 75-80% of the people flying to Atlanta were black. I was in the airport for about 5 hours and 80+% of the workers were black. When it was time to fly to Portland, I looked around the departure area and realized that 100% of the people flying to Oregon were white and when I got to the Portland airport, I paid attention to the workers are realized that 100% of them were white. For some reason, I’d always assumed that cities would naturally have a diverse mix of people, apparently not.