Publications

Whether children benefit from being raised in a home owned by their parents has important policy implications and has been the topic of much scholarly debate. We match Panel Study of Income Dynamics data with census tract data to examine the impact of childhood experiences on adult outcomes for children followed over three decades. This allows us to document a wide range of characteristics. For children born between 1968 and 1974, we analyze data on their first 18 years and also various outcomes when they are between 25 and 31 in 1999. We control for a comprehensive set of observable parental characteristics and develop a method to control for unobservable child characteristics together with an instrumental variable for the remaining selection problems. Parental homeownership status and children's college education and home‐ownership status are closely related, although the former is generated partially by the greater residential stability associated with homeownership.

Although persons with serious mental illness experience significant unmet housing needs, basic information on how housing is successfully financed, developed, and operated for them is lacking. It is possible that standard housing rules of thumb may not apply to this population. (For example, community opposition may raise development costs.) This lack of information may be a stumbling block to policy makers, planners, and developers. This article attempts to close the gap by examining the financial profile of 153 properties developed for persons with serious mental illness by five nonprofit housing corporations between 1988 and 1992. Our analysis suggests that although this housing may require more management attention, it is not fundamentally different from market‐rate housing for low‐income tenants. After more than 10 years, the nonprofit housing developers continue to thrive, and virtually all of the properties continue to serve persons with mental illness, demonstrating that such housing can be successfully developed and operated.

The CDBG turns 40 this year. Thus, it is an appropriate time to take stock of this important program and consider how it can be improved. The purpose of this article is to introduce what we believe to be 6 key issues that must be addressed if the program is going to live up to its full potential. Those issues concern: the continuation of the program and funding levels; the formula for allocating funds to participating jurisdictions; the specification of the population groups targeted; the spatial targeting of funds; the programs role in furthering fair housing; and performance measurement. Each of these issues is discussed and the authors offer their recommendations for improving the efficiency and equity of the program.

This article looks at the two primary expected benefits of efforts to bring back, or retain, middle‐income households in the central city: (1) improved fiscal conditions caused by increasing the tax base and (2) decreased socioeconomic isolation of central‐city low‐income households. We examine the causal linkages reputed to produce these two benefits in light of the relatively limited relevant theoretical and empirical research. Although stressing that this work is only tentative and intended to be provocative, we cautiously conclude that thresholds matter. That is, it is likely that the number of middle‐income households in a given area must exceed a certain threshold for significant benefits to accrue. The geographic scale of this area, the threshold that applies, and the time needed for benefits to appear depend on the particular causal linkage at issue. In the last section, we derive implications for research and policy evaluation.

1. Introduction: Quantifying Neighbourhood Effects Jorg Blasius, Jurgen Friedrichs and George Galster 2. What mix matters? Exploring the relationships between individuals' incomes and different measures of their neighborhood context Roger Andersson, Sako Musterd, George Galster and Timo M. Kauppinen 3. Mixed Tenure Communities and Neighbourhood Quality Ade Kearns and Phil Mason 4. Homeownership, poverty and educational achievement: school effects as neighbourhood effects Glen Bramley and Noah Kofi Karley 5. The Influence of Neighbourhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility, Education, and Earnings Outcomes George Galster, Dave E. Marcotte, Marv Mandell, Hal Wolman and Nancy Augustine 6. Internal heterogeneity of a deprived urban area and its impact on residents' perception of deviance Jorg Blasius and Jurgen Friedrichs 7. The effects of neighbourhood poverty on adolescent problem behaviours: A multi-level analysis differentiated by gender and ethnicity Dietrich Oberwittler 8. The socio-cultural integration of ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. Identifying neighbourhood effects on multiple integration outcomes Merove Gijsberts and Jaco Dagevos 9. Intergenerational Neighbourhood-Type Mobility: Examining Differences between Blacks and Whites Thomas P. Vartanian, Page Walker Buck and Philip Gleason

Between 1992 and 1996 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settled a number of legal cases involving housing authorities and agreed to take remedial action as part of court‐enforced consent decrees entered into with plaintiffs. These housing authorities faced significant obstacles that impaired their ability to comply swiftly and fully with all of the elements in the desegregation consent decrees. The obstacles fell into two broad categories: contextual obstacles (racial composition of waiting lists and resident populations, lack of affordable rental housing, and inadequate public transportation), and capacity and coordination obstacles (conflict among implementing agencies and ineffective monitoring by HUD). Findings presented here highlight the sizable potential delay between the time a legal remedy is imposed and when plaintiffs in public housing segregation disputes realize any benefits. They also reinforce the argument that implementation problems will be legion when policies impose a significant scope of required changes on a large number of actors who must collaborate, yet are not uniformly capable or sympathetic to the goals being promoted. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

The issue of discrimination directed toward applicants for mortgages who are members of racial-ethnic minority groups has received markedly increased public attention during the 1990s. Various sorts of evidence, including disparities observed in Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data, vignettes of blatant discrimination, a smattering of court cases, pilot studies using paired testers, and multivariate statistical analyses of lenders' loan application files, have combined to paint a convincing picture of the problem (for reviews, see Galster 1992; Cloud and Galster 1993; and Yinger, chapter 2, this volume).

This article provides a holistic analysis of why and how federal assisted housing policy (specifically, public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC], and voucher programs) should be reformed in ways that would be more conducive to socially desirable outcomes at the neighborhood level. First, I argue that past research has documented mutually causal interrelationships between assisted housing policy and neighborhoods that have been couched as having negative connotations for both. Second, I argue that there is there a rationale on grounds of both efficiency and equity for altering assisted housing policy so it would encourage the creation and preservation of neighborhoods that are physically of good quality and economically diverse. Third, I advocate a circumspect menu of programmatic reforms that would be gradualist, option enhancing, and relatively budget neutral, yet would garner these positive impacts. As overarching reforms, I propose regional housing institution-building, fair housing law revisions, impaction standards, and diversity incentives built into Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. As reforms to site-based assistance programs, I propose: a new formula for disbursing LIHTC, to repeal and replace the Qualified Census Tract bonus, diversification/preservation incentives for existing assisted private developments, and preserving assisted housing in revitalizing neighborhoods. As reforms to tenant-based assistance programs, I propose: Small Area Fair Market Rents, premove and postmove mobility counseling, ancillary family supports postmove, reducing barriers to lease-up, and diversification incentives in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations.

A secondary analysis of thirty-six fair housing audits conducted between 1974 and 1987 reveals that racial steering has been a widespread, consequential phenomenon in many urban housing markets during the last decade. It is difficult from extant work to assess precisely its incidence nationally in the home sales sector because sites reporting such data have had atypically active fair housing enforcement efforts. It appears, however, that selective commentary by agents has been practiced as much if not more than differential patterns of home-showings. The consequence of this steering rarely has been to limit the number or concentration of geographic alternatives available to black auditors. Nor have all their options in predominantly white communities typically been precluded. Rather, steering in the sales sector most often has constituted a failure to show white auditors options in areas (and school districts) with nontrivial proportions of minority residents, and a propensity to show black auditors disproportionate numbers of homes in areas currently possessing or expected to possess significant proportions of minority residents. Limited evidence suggests that steering has occurred often in the rental apartment sector, although its consequences have yet to be ascertained in a systematic fashion. Implications of the findings for racial stability in neighborhoods and for fair housing policy are discussed.

Regeneration is an internationally popular policy for improving distressed neighbourhoods dominated by large social housing developments. Stimulating employment is often touted as a secondary benefit, but this claim has rarely been evaluated convincingly. In 2003, Glasgow City Council transferred ownership of its entire social housing stock to the Glasgow Housing Association and over £4 billion was invested in physical repairs, social services and other regeneration activities. Using a linked census database of individuals (Scottish Longitudinal Study), we evaluate the causal effect of the Stock Transfer on employment in Glasgow through a quasi-experimental design that exploits idiosyncrasies and changes in Glasgow’s administrative boundaries. We find that the Stock Transfer had a positive effect on employment for Glasgow residents who were not living in transferred social housing stock. We establish that this effect was mainly accomplished through the local employment multiplier effect of capital spending rather than through any other programmatic elements of the Stock Transfer. Exploratory analysis shows heterogeneous effects: individuals who were over 21, female, living with dependent children and with less education were less likely to benefit from the intervention. We did not find significant subgroup effects by neighbourhood deprivation.

Recent neo-Marxian criminological investigators have seen punishment meted out by the U.S. criminal justice system as reflecting prevailing ideologies that are, in turn, determined by the economic requirements of the capitalist system. The dominant form of criminal penalty now used in the U.S.—imprisonment—is seen as serving primarily an economic function, over and above its functions of retribution and deterrence. Given the chronic tendencies for oversupply of labor in advanced capitalist economies, imprisonment serves to restrain directly yet maintain a portion of the surplus; the threat of imprisonment serves indirectly to pacify an even larger portion. In times of stronger industrial demands for labor, the criminal justice system responds by granting more conditional releases (i.e., paroles) so that, while gainfully employed, part of the workforce remains under the direct control of the state. The purpose of this article is to provide empirical tests of this neo-Marxian position. When considering the entire 50 state sample, we find that the relationship between unemployment and new court commitments to prison and conditional releases was opposite from that predicted by the neo-Marxian paradigm, but conformed to these predictions for a subsample of Southern states. Strength of relationships did not vary consistently over the business cycle, but tended to grow intertemporally in the Southern states. These findings are contrasted to those of earlier studies and the latter are critiqued methodologically.

The urban neighbourhood – though increasingly assailed as a problematic spatial construct – still matters in contemporary societies because it is a crucial unit of reference in metropolitan housing markets. The logic is as follows. Key housing market actors – households, owners, developers, and agents – believe that the local area in which they live, own property, or try to sell property influences their own wellbeing for a number of social-psychological and/or economic reasons. Because these people then act on their neighbourhood-related beliefs in a variety of ways, this implies that neighbourhoods are important: they generate collective behavioural responses. Put more succinctly, neighbourhoods must still matter because housing market actors believe they matter and then behave based on these beliefs. Evidence to support this logic is assembled here from a wide variety of interdisciplinary sources. For households, we observe the strong relationship between neighbourhood conditions and satisfaction, housing search, and intra-urban mobility. For property owners and developers, we observe how neighbourhood attributes strongly influence property values and, relatedly, the virulence of NIMBY protests when changes in these a ributes are considered threatening. For housing agents, we see continued evidence of discriminatory exclusion and geographic steering on the basis of neighbourhood racial/ethnic and income composition.

Chapter 6 addresses the “black ghetto”-the persistent concentration of African-American poverty in the country's inner cities. The interwar Chicago School's race-agnostic paradigm was challenged by a handful of high-profile sociologists and economists in the mid-1940s in works that, though they documented a discriminatory thicket, failed to win public or policy traction. Only with the televised urban riots of the mid- to late 1960s, in the midst of Johnson's Great Society, did the black ghetto attain full-fledged problem status. Social scientists registered the new stakes in a wave of studies that established the battle lines for decades. Works that stressed the spatially concentrated legacy of racial discrimination were pitted-in a highly charged political climate-against culture-of-poverty accounts. The research lines, in turn, informed competing remedies, notably geographic dispersal, community development, and-in a reflection of the country's rightward drift-outright disengagement. The broad if uneven patterns in the post-1960s scholarship are a de-emphasis of race, on the one hand, and the strengthening of individualistic frames, on the other. There is, moreover, a rough disciplinary divide: Sociologists, he shows, have tended to highlight spatial and social factors, with economists and political scientists favoring, for the most part, more individualist and class-based accounts.

We explore urban earnings premiums gained by native individuals born 1979 to 1981 in rural Norway who, after completing their education and starting fulltime work, moved from a rural to an urban area. We employ for the first time in this field the adjusted interrupted time-series (AITS) model, which offers a superior means of controlling for selection than conventional fixed effects and difference-in-differences estimators because it controls for pre-move level and trajectories of earnings. We find that estimates produced by conventional specifications understate the static premium and overstate the dynamic premium because they fail to account for the upward trajectory of earnings that urban migrants (regardless of gender and education) evince before they move. Parameters estimated from AITS models jointly stratified by gender and education also reveal more heterogeneity in urban earnings premiums than has typically been revealed. Better-educated workers get larger static earnings premiums when they move to the city, men gain more from such a move than women with the same education, and the gender gap for those with less education is much larger. If our results may be generalized, they would suggest that cities primarily generate wage premiums through agglomeration-based efficiencies that are heterogeneously distributed across urban employers according to their capital and knowledge intensivity.

McClure and Schwartz argue that there is no US housing shortage for the 2000-2020 period because: (1) we added more dwellings than households; (2) vacancy rates are not low by historical standards; and (3) current headship rates are unrelated to the ratio of recent growth in dwellings to growth in households. I argue that these indicators offer misleading guides for addressing policy-relevant questions related to the supply of housing because household formation is endogenous to changes in the housing stock. I demonstrate the shortcomings of these indicators with a stylized graphic/numerical analysis of short-term and long-term housing market equilibrium and adjustment dynamics in two hypothetical metropolitan areas. Changes in household size (adjusted for demographic and income distributional alterations) and changes in housing rents and prices are more appropriate indicators for making housing policy choices, implying that current concerns over the responsiveness (long-run elasticity) of housing supply are indeed justified.

No abstract is provided for this article.

Inequalities among individuals and households in achieved socioeconomic status (income, wealth, and so on) in the United States have reached levels not observed for almost a century. We believe that a corresponding evolution of geographic inequalities in socioeconomic, environmental, institutional,