The following note describes a skit designed primarily as a pedagogic device to illustrate in a meaningful (and, hopefully, provocative and humorous) way Marx's analysis of capitalism. Numerous concepts and phenomena are “brought to life” in the skit: exploitation, immiseration and alienation of workers, maintenance wage, labor theory of value, mechanization and the division of labor, systemic tendencies toward economic crises, relationship of various superstructural components (welfare, religion, etc.) to the economic base, and the radical theory of the state. More specifically, the economic base of a hypothetical capitalist society consists of a stylized production process involving “resources” (Oreo cookies), “labor” (students selected from the class) and eventually “capital” (table knives). The ability of the monopoly capitalist to accumulate surplus by exploiting workers becomes manifest. Other elements of the social superstructure (unions, government, religion, etc.)
Summary of Findings HDS2000 finds that discrimination still persists in both rental and sales markets of large metropolitan areas nationwide, but that its incidence has generally declined since 1989 (see Exhibit ES-1). Only Hispanic renters face essentially the same incidence of discrimination today that they did in 1989. Otherwise, the incidence of consistent adverse treatment against minority homeseekers has declined over the last decade. 3 Exhibit ES-1: Consistent Adverse Treatment Against Blacks and Hispanics, 1989 and 2000 0.0%5.0%10.0%15.0%20.0%25.0%30.0%35.0%Black Hispanic Black Hispanic percent 1989 2000Rental Sales Metropolitan Rental Markets. African Americans still face discrimination when they search for rental housing in metropolitan markets nationwide. Whites were consistently favored over blacks in 21.6 percent of tests. In particular, whites were more likely to receive information 3 Note that the 1989 results presented here are not exactly the same as those that were reported in 1989. Comparable measures have been constructed from both years, but these are not exactly the same treatment measures as reported in 1989. Some 1989 indicators could not be replicated because of changes in testing protocols. Other measures have been more precisely defined or revised for greater clarity. See Annex 5 for a complete discussion of changes in the 1989 treatment measures.
This note presents empirical evidence on changes in an index measuring the relative decentralization of blacks for 40 MSAs during the 1970s. The evidence demonstrates that although other, more conventional indicators of suburbanization (which denote residence inside and outside the central city) demonstrate substantial changes, this is not the case for the decentralization indicator (which is independent of political jurisdictional boundaries). The implications are that blacks will gain little from near-central-city suburbanization if job growth, high-quality education, superior environments, and the like tend to follow higher-status whites into the evermore-distant exurbs.
The economic restructuring of metropolitan areas has had disparate impacts on neighborhoods populated by minority groups. This chapter examines the impacts of the restructuring of the US economy in the 1980s and 1990s on metropolitan neighborhoods occupied by African Americans and compares this to white communities. It examines the determinants of changing poverty rates, the role played by economic restructuring, the disparate racial neighborhood impacts, and the causes of such impacts. The analysis shows that economic restructuring caused significant increases in poverty rates in black communities relative to predominant white communities.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsGeorge GalsterGeorge Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University. Galster has held positions at the Universities of: Harvard, Berkeley, North Carolina, Amsterdam, Delft, Glasgow, Mannheim, Oslo, and Western Sydney, among others. He served as Director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute before coming to Wayne State University in 1996. His research has focused on urban neighborhoods and housing markets, exploring how they change and how they change the people who live within them. This has resulted in over 130 peer-reviewed articles, 30 book chapters and seven books. His latest book is Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (2012). He has provided housing policy consultations to public officials in Australia, Canada, China, Scotland, and the U.S. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.
In this article, the authors assemble, synthesize, and assess the disparate, fragmented literature concerning thresholds related to neighborhood change. They find several theories of neighborhood change that imply the existence of thresholds and identify six alternative mechanisms for generating threshold effects. They critically examine empirical evidence on changing neighborhood racial group composition, income group composition, social and economic conditions (criminal activity, friendship, teen child-bearing, marriage, educational attainment, employment and earnings, social relationships, health, and welfare dependency), and housing investment. The authors find evidence of threshold effects in dynamics of all these neighborhood attributes. The possibility of identifying thresholds provides guidance to planners for spatially targeting reinvestments to those neighborhoods approaching or past critical thresholds. Future research needs to devise careful empirical tests designed to distinguish the alternative mechanisms producing thresholds and ascertain the generality of findings summarized in this review.
This powerful new theoretical approach to analyzing urban housing problems and the policies designed to rectify them will be a vital resource for urban planners, developers, policymakers, and economists. The search for the roots of serious urban housing problems such as homelessness, abandonment, rent burdens, slums, and gentrification has traditionally focused on the poorest sector of the housing market. The findings set forth in this volume show that the roots of such problems lie in the relationships among different parts of the market--not solely within the lower-quality portion--though that is where problems are most dramatically manifested and housing reforms are myopically focused. The authors propose a new understanding of the market structure characterized by a closely interrelated array of quality submarkets. Their comprehensive models ground a unified theory that accounts for demand by both renters and owner occupants, supply by owners of existing dwellings, changes in the stock of housing due to conversions and new construction, and interactions across submarkets.
Using crime data over a period of a decade for Glasgow, this paper explores whether the density of prior offenders in a neighbourhoods has an influence on the propensity of others to (re)commence offending. The study shows that the number of ‘newly active’ offenders in a neighbourhood in the current quarter is positively associated with the density of prior offenders for both violent and property crime from the previous two years. In the case of newly active property offenders, the relationship with active prior offenders is apparent only when prior offender counts exceed the median. The paper postulates that intraneighbourhood social mechanisms may be at work to create these effects. The results suggest that policies which concentrate offenders in particular neighbourhoods may increase the number of newly active offenders, and point to evidence of a threshold at which these effects take place.
This article uses tabular and mapping presentations of 1990 census tract data to investigate variations in adverse socioeconomic conditions across Washington, DC, neighborhoods. It also examines the levels of exposure of youth of different races or ethnicities to these adverse conditions. Underlying this analysis is the premise that aggregate neighborhood conditions related to poverty and welfare status, educational attainment, out‐of‐wedlock births, employment, drug use, and crime serve as proxies for resident youth's perceptions of the opportunity structure as filtered through the local social network. Empirical analyses show two distinct clusters of indicators that vary consistently across Washington neighborhoods; one is related to socioeconomic status, drug use, and fertility, and the other is related to crime rates. Both sets vary systematically by the racial‐ethnic composition of youth in the neighborhood. Youth in black, female‐headed families are exposed to the most negative neighborhood conditions.
Three challenges confront statistical researchers of neighbourhood impacts on individual behaviours: (1) operationalising 'neighbourhood processes'; (2) potentially non-linear relationships between neighbourhood characteristics and outcomes; and (3) the selection bias problem. To better comprehend these challenges and overcome them, the paper proposes an overarching conceptual framework wherein outcomes of interest are affected by neighbourhood interacting in a mutually causal fashion with housing tenure, housing wealth, household socio-economic status, and mobility behaviour. It advances a five-equation, simultaneous system for home ownership, mobility expectations, housing wealth, household socio-economic status and neighbourhood character. Although current US census data do not provide perfect proxies for neighbourhood processes, there is evidence that a battery of them could represent reasonable operationalisations. Tests for non-linearity could be conducted in this framework. This model could use a sufficiently robust set of instrumental variables to overcome the issue of neighbourhood selection bias, and thereby produce considerably more precise estimates of neighbourhood impacts on individual outcomes of interest. Implications for qualitative research approaches also are drawn.
The author argues in this chapter that it is not the loss of manufacturing jobs per se, but the relocation of employment, in tandem with the regions unplanned, speculation-driven housing development system, which have led to the atrophying of the City of Detroit over the last half century. The facts of shrinking Detroit are indeed dramatic. Two implications follow from these facts. First, the region has not been shrinking, only the core municipality has. This means that a process of hollowing out has been occurring, with the same number of people progressively relocating away from the core and into the fringe of the metropolitan area. Second, this hollowing out process began well before the vaunted deindustrialization of the region. Of the 20 largest metropolitan areas, metro Detroit ranks first in its dispersion of jobs away from the core. Metropolitan Detroit has indeed perfected the Fordist-style, mass production of something besides automobiles: abandoned housing and non-residential buildings.
This paper presents a holistic conceptual framework within which various research topics related to discrimination may be interrelated and evaluated. It then critically analyzes extant research relating to central components in the framework: the detection of discrimination, causes of discrimination, consequences of discrimination, and policy initiatives related to fighting discrimination both directly by deterrence and indirectly by attacking segregation and the prejudices it spawns. A great deal is known about the nature of private acts of housing discrimination, but little about which policies are most effective in combating such discrimination. On the other hand, relatively little is known about the extent of housing discrimination perpetrated by local governments and public agencies and about both differential treatment and disparate impact forms of discrimination in mortgage and related (appraisal, insurance) markets.
We investigate patterns of residential and nonresidential land use in 311 United States metropolitan (Extended Urban) areas in 2000 using four measures: intensity, compactness, mixing, and core-dominance. A cluster analysis revealed four distinctive groups of land use patterns: (1) Most-Intense, Least-Compact, Least-Mixed, More-Monocentric Development, (2) Less-Intense, Most-Compact, Less-Mixed, Less-Monocentric Development, (3) Least-Intense, Less-Compact, Most-Mixed, Most-Monocentric Development, (4) More-Intense, More-Compact, More-Mixed, Polycentric Development. Bivariate statistics demonstrated that geographic, historic, economic, demographic, and transport variables differentiate land use pattern types. Based on their multidimensional distinctions, we label the four types of metropolitan areas: Ascendants, Insulars, Redevelopers, and Cosmopolitans.
Several emergent theories assert that neighborhood affects immigrants' socioeco‐nomic advancement. This study analyzes a range of demographic and socioeco‐nomic indicators for immigrants' census tracts, summarized as exposure indices. Indicators are based on 1980 and 1990 census tract information for five major metropolitan areas. Seventeen immigrant groups are examined and contrasted with general populations distinguished by race/ethnicity. Few general conclusions can be made about the "typical immigrant neighborhood." Most immigrants (especially whites) are highly spatially assimilated. Different immigrant groups often share the same census tracts in substantial numbers. There is considerable diversity among groups in their propensity to reside in central cities. White immigrant groups evince advantageous neighborhood socioeconomic indicators. With one exception, no immigrant group in any metropolitan area studied has such disadvantageous neighborhood indicators as black households, on average. These findings dispel any vestiges of the myth of the "immigrant ghetto" that might be generalized across immigrant groups or metropolitan areas.
We quantify how social detachment (measured as neither working nor attending school) of low-income African-American and Latino young adults relates to their teen neighborhood conditions. Data come from retrospective surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households. Because DHA household allocation mimics quasirandom assignment to neighborhoods throughout Denver County, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. Our multilevel, mixed-effects logistic analyses found significant relationships between neighborhood safety and population composition and odds of social detachment of low-income, minority young adults that can be interpreted as causal effects. The strength of these relationships was often contingent on gender and ethnicity, however. We draw conclusions for macroeconomic, income-support, subsidized housing and community development policy.
No abstract is provided for this article.
The paper presents an analytical framework for elucidating the equity and social efficiency criteria that might be used to justify a housing policy aiming for a substantial mix of neighborhood residents by income, ethnicity and/or immigrant status. This framework permits the classification of multivariate statistical studies comprising the Western European evidence base and shows the importance of distinguishing intra- and extra-neighborhood processes when evaluating evidence related to the efficiency criterion. Evaluation of the evidence base in light of this framework reveals that it sufficiently supports a mixing policy aimed at avoiding concentrations of disadvantaged individuals if, and only if, policy makers emphasize equity grounds (i.e. improving the well-being of the disadvantaged absolutely). The evidence base does not support a mixing policy on efficiency grounds, regardless of whether intra-neighborhood social interactions or extra-neighborhood stigmatization/resource restrictions are presumed to be the primary causal mechanism for neighborhood effects.
This chapter argues that the metropolitan housing market primarily drives neighborhood change. It models this market as an interconnected array of submarkets segmented by housing quality. Within each submarket, there is latitude for independent adjustments of demand and supply but submarkets also are interconnected by actions of households, owners and converters of existing dwellings, and builders of new dwellings. Exogenous shocks impinging initially on one submarket create signals that eventually lead to systematic but non-uniform repercussions throughout the submarket array. These adjustments of demanders and suppliers fundamentally engender the neighborhood change process, which manifests itself in alterations in the composition of residents and the physical character of the dwellings. If such changes are persistent and consistent across a number of neighborhoods, there will be second-round effects on the local retail sector and the fiscal capacity of the local public sector. These impacts, in turn, feedback to magnify the initial impetus of neighborhood change. The chapter presents the first fundamental proposition of this book, the proposition of externally generated neighborhood change. It states that most forces causing neighborhoods to change originate outside the boundaries of that neighborhood, often elsewhere in the metropolitan area.
