Publications

Identifying sustainable neighborhoods: An empirical exploration of threshold effects

No abstract is provided for this article.

Neighborhood variation in early adult educational outcomes: The case of Norway

Individuals originating in different neighborhoods fare differently in later life. Part of this is because families sort non-randomly over the urban landscape; different types of families live in systematically different neighborhoods. Another part of the explanation is that children in different neighborhoods are exposed to different urban opportunity structures. The opportunity structure can exert its influence through social interactive, environmental and institutional factors. Using a multi-level framework applied to a Norwegian register-based data set with complete coverage of 1986-1992 cohorts with siblings, we decompose the variation in high school completion and in enrollment in higher education at age 22 into variances at the levels of family and neighborhood occupied at age seven. The variations in both outcome variables among young adults raised in different neighborhoods are substantively important. The gap in expected high school completion rates between children raised in the upper and lower quartiles of the neighborhood distribution is eleven percentage-points; the equivalent gap in being enrolled in higher education is 16 percentage points. We also find substantial heterogeneity in this neighborhood variation; for example, boys are more vulnerable to neighborhood variations, while children residing with both parents at the age of seven are less vulnerable. We argue that the large variation across neighborhoods in educational outcomes of young adults should be of concern for policymakers. It can both imply a suboptimal utilization of human resources and it can feed into inequalities later on in the lifecourse and harm social cohesion thereby.

Digitalisation, neighbourhood change and urban social processes: Conceptual framework and introduction to the Special Issue

Neighbourhoods are salient for many dimensions of individuals’ social and economic well-being, yet the impacts of rapidly emerging digital information and communication technologies (DICTs) on neighbourhoods and the social processes within them are understudied. This gap motivates this Special Issue, the themes of which we introduce here. We provide an overarching conceptual framework within which the topics, conceptualisations and empirical results of the 11 constituent research papers can be placed. Our framework posits multiple, mutually causal interrelationships between each element in the triad of neighbourhoods, individual residents’ characteristics and individual residents’ actions. In each element we focus on the role(s) of DICTs and their interplay with social processes. These technologies alter traditional housing search patterns, sometimes reinforcing existing segregation, but they also present opportunities for greater access to information and potential social integration. The issue’s 11 research papers, contributed by scholars from various global contexts, explore diverse aspects of these themes. They examine how DICTs mediate neighbourhood change by influencing local housing choices, amplifying or mitigating neighbourhood stigma and transforming social cohesion. By offering a rich empirical and conceptual exploration, this special issue aims to deepen our understanding of the transformative role that DICTs play in neighbourhoods, urging further research into their implications for neighbourhood change and urban social processes.

On the Measurement of Metropolitan Decentralization of Blacks and Whites

Three alternative methods of measuring metropolitan decentralization are compared with particular attention to their effectiveness in measuring the movement of blacks and whites in the United States. The author concludes that the relative decentralization index developed by R. Redick is conceptually superior to the other methods considered and that it does not create untoward computational difficulties. (ANNOTATION)

About This Issue/Longer View: U.S. Housing Scholarship, Planning, and Policy Since 1968: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Problem: How have the main themes of housing scholarship, planning, and policy evolved since 1968, and how do they inform current scholarship? Purpose: This introduction explores how housing issues have changed over thelast 40 years, to provide a holistic context for this special issue on the future(s) of housing. Methods: I review secondary sources, and draw on them to synthesize the important themes that shape housing policy and this special issue. Results and conclusions: Increasing owner-occupied housing is still the primary housing goal, as it was 40 years ago, but recent innovations in mortgage finance thatappeared to move it nearer may have backfired. How scholars and policy and planning professionals view the housing problem for lower-income households has evolved from simple housing quantity and quality inadequacies to something more complex: lack of affordability and homelessness, inadequate coordination of existing programs, and housing as an obstacleto economic opportunity. Despite current federal indifference, improvements in legal infrastructure and enforcement capacity have reduced, but not eliminated, housing discrimination since 1968. Federal funding diminished for public and, later, private supply-side initiatives in rental housing, and federal funds now support demand-side initiatives, small amounts of public housing, and grants to support increasingly important and autonomous state, local, and nonprofit sector efforts. Takeaway for practice: The articles in this special issue recommend that planners and policymakers systematically assess the degree to which buildings promote and protect human health, and that they encourage innovation in housing construction, and age and economic diversity in residential areas. In existing neighborhoods that may be threatened by concentrated foreclosures or creeping blight, the authors in this issue encourage stimulating community reinvestment lending and preventing foreclosures. They also advocate improving the design and coordination of the increasingly diverse array of programs at various levels of government. Their recommendations build on the history of 40 years of housing scholarship and policy I summarize here. Research Support: None.

The Impact of Community Development Corporations on Urban Neighborhoods

Supporters of urban revitalization have relied on community development corporations (CDCs) to carry a major share of the front-line burden. This research presents new evidence that these community-controlled, market-responsive organizations can indeed spark a chain reaction of investment. Advanced econometric analysis shows that CDC residential and commercial investments have led to increases in property values--the single-best measure of neighborhood improvement--as great as 69 percent higher than they would have been otherwise. To achieve these results, CDCs did more than just develop projects; they also brought business people, civic organizations, and public agencies into the neighborhood improvement process.

Rejoinder

Housing Discrimination and Urban Poverty of African-Americans

This paper develops a conceptual synthesis of six competing positions about the causes of inordinately high rates of poverty among urban African-Americans. This framework guides the specification of a six-simultaneous-equation econometric model, wherein both the pattern and the extent of racial residential segregation, inter-class residential segregation within the African-American community, school racial segregation, school performance, and poverty rates are endogenous. The potential roles of housing market discrimination are emphasized.

The Impact of Family Homeownership on Children's Educational Attainment and Earnings During Early Adulthood, Working Paper 004

The impact of neighbors who use section 8 certificates on property values

This article statistically examines the sale prices of single‐family homes surrounding Section 8 sites first occupied between 1991 and 1995 in Baltimore County. If only a few Section 8 sites were located within 500 feet, we found a strong positive impact on property values in higher‐valued, real‐appreciation, predominantly white census tracts. However, in low‐valued or moderately valued census tracts experiencing real declines in values since 1990, Section 8 sites and units located in high densities had a substantial adverse effect on prices within 2,000 feet, with the effect attenuated past 500 feet. Focus groups with homeowners revealed that the negative impact was based on the units' imperfect correlation with badly managed and maintained properties. We argue that policies should be devised to direct Section 8 households away from vulnerable neighborhoods, better regulate managers of Section 8 apartments, and more stringently screen and monitor Section 8 households.

Neighborhood Context and Educational Performance: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Will Dispersed Housing Programmes Reduce Social Problems in the US?

In recent years, US policy-makers have given increasing emphasis to geographicallydispersing recipients of housing subsidies, based on the assumption that residence in concentrated poverty neighbourhoods abets socially dysfunctional behaviours. The paper assesses this assumption, both theoretically and through a metaanalysis of extant empirical studies. It demonstrateshow only modest differences in the functional relationship between spatially concentrated poverty and resultant socially problematicbehaviourswill radically affect conclusions about the desirability of housing dispersalprogrammes.Dispersalwill only lead to a net reduction in problem behaviours in society as a whole if the relationship between neighbourhood poverty rate and individual propensity to engage in problem behaviours is characterised by a positive threshold or by an increasing marginal impact. Three types of empirical studies are reviewed in an attempt to ascertain the state of knowledge regarding the nature of this functional relationship: (1) case studies of participants in dispersed housing programmes; (2) statistical studies of property value impacts of dispersed housing programmes; and (3) statistical studies of the neighbourhoodcorrelates of the behaviour of individuals. Meta-analysisconcludes that the evidence is thin and contradictory.Thus, the US now faces the unenviable situation of having adopted a major housing strategy with only a shred of evidence to suggest what effect it might have on aggregate social problems.

FOCUSING ON SUCCESS: PATHWAYS OUT OF CHILDHOOD POVERTY Final Report to the Ford Foundation of Research Conducted Under Grants 1000-2027 and 1000-2027-1

No abstract is provided for this article.

Identifying the Correlates of Dwelling Satisfaction

This article represents a critique of empirical studies that have beenbased on the actual-aspirational gap approach to residential satisfaction. The reexamination of this theory suggests that empirical specifications should be disaggregated by household type and allow for nonlinear relationships between residential context and their associated levels of satisfaction. A multivariate regression analysis of dwelling satisfaction that employs such an appropriate specification is estimated for various strata of a 1980 sample of Minneapolis homeowners. Results provide strong support for the disaggregated, nonlinear modeling approach and, by implication, opens questions with much prior empirical work in the field.

The Ecology of Racial Discrimination in Housing

This research investigates the spatial variation in racial housing market discrimination. Using 1980 data for Cuyahoga County (Cleveland, Ohio), regression analysis indicates that compared to integrated or majority-black tracts with stable 1970-1980 racial compositions, all-white tracts, and especially transitional tracts evidencing large gains in proportion of black residents, have higher discrimination rates, ceteris paribus. These findings support the hypotheses that housing agents discriminate when they fear losing business from their prejudiced white customers and when they can exploit an unstable situation characterized by relatively high white/black housing demand elasticity ratios.

Are Neighbourhoods Self-stabilising? Exploring Endogenous Dynamics

This study investigates how neighbourhoods respond when they are upset by transient, exogenous shock(s). Do they quickly revert to their original, stable state, gradually return to this stable state, permanently settle into another stable state, diverge progressively from any steady state, or evince no discernable pattern of response? A self-regulating adjustment process promoting stability appears the norm, based on econometric investigations of multiple, annually measured indicators from census tracts in five US cities. Stability quickly re-established at the original state characterises most of the indicators analysed: rates of tax delinquency, low-weight births, teenage births and home sales volumes. Violent and property crime rates also evince endogenous stability at the original state, but take considerably longer than the other indicators to return to it when the exogenous shock is sizeable. Moreover, this crime adjustment process is considerably slower in neighbourhoods with higher poverty rates.

The Disparate Racial Neighborhood Impacts of Metropolitan Economic Restructuring

The authors examine the relationship between economic restructuring in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) and 1980-1990 changes in poverty rates in its census tracts. A summary indicator of economic restructuring, encompassing changes in employment/population ratios, shares of manufacturing employment, and shares of MSA manufacturing in a tract's county, is developed to explain why MSA restructuring is particularly distressing for blacks. Most poverty growth in predominantly black census tracts occurred in MSAs with greater restructuring, and each increment of restructuring was significantly associated with the poverty growth there. Black tracts in a central city with, or in a county with, a larger share of the MSA's manufacturing were most vulnerable.

The Social Neighborhood

This article analyzes both theoretically and empirically the relationship between owner-occupants' housing maintenance behavior and their social relationships within their neighborhoods. This "social dimension" of the neighborhood is posited as affecting maintenance through pressures for conforming to group housing standards. Hypotheses are derived from this theory and empirical tests are conducted using a sample of homeowners from Wooster, Ohio, in 1975. Through factor analysis a number of variables measuring an individual homeowner's social "attachment" to neighborhood are reduced to two dimensions: "commonality" and "integration." These factors are aggregated to form neighborhood levels of "cohesiveness." Both sets of attachment and cohesiveness factors are employed as independent variables in a multiple-regression analysis of maintenance frequency and expenditures, where the effects of homeowner characteristics, structural features, and physical and demographic dimensions of the neighborhood are controlled for. Results show that there is a significant relationship between both individual and aggregate measures of the social neighborhood and maintenance, but only when there exists a high aggregate level of neighborhood cohesiveness.