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Abstract: There is little doubt that the United States is characterized by very high levels of segregation by race and social class. However, much of the research on residential segregation has been geared towards describing macro-level patterns rather than the micro-level interactions through which these patterns are constituted and sustained over time.  Furthermore, to the extent that researchers have turned their attention to the study of residential decision-making, their focus has often been on explicating the choices made by poor families moving into and out of urban neighborhoods.  In this paper, drawing on in-depth interviews with about 90 white and African American families with young children, we highlight the crucial role of informal networks in the selection of where to live. While many decades of research have stressed the importance of amenities (such as schools) to families’ choices, few have asked the question of how families acquire information about the characteristics of particular neighborhoods and how they form a preference for (or an aversion to) these neighborhoods.  Our results suggest that network ties are crucial in this regard, regardless of families’ class or race: far from conducting systematic “research” on the range of options open to them—examining school performance, crime rates, consumption opportunities, housing value changes, and so forth—the majority of the families in our data were guided toward a set of neighborhoods by trusted network contacts.  These contacts could be friends, coworkers, or kin, but their influence is hard to overstate.  The consequence of this reliance on social ties was that families gravitated towards neighborhoods that reflected the composition of their networks.  Thus, we suggest that networks are one of the factors that reproduce the segregation—along lines of both class and race—of urban and suburban neighborhoods.