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.
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,
No abstract is provided for this article.
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.
With data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census 1970 Public Use Samples and 1980 Public Use Microdata Sample tape files for 34 metropolitan statistical areas, the authors examine cross-metropolitan variations in Puerto Rican poverty, using an instrumental variables regression model. The analyses highlight the role of residential segregation and economic restructuring on Puerto Rican poverty in 1970 and 1980. Decomposition of changes during the 1970s revealed that the primary sources responsible for increased Puerto Rican poverty rates were structural: The effects of segregation on poverty grew stronger during the decade, and the ability of manufacturing employment and self-employment to attenuate poverty grew weaker.
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.
This study estimates the size and characteristics of the potential homeowner market and examines the relative default risks associated with expanded homeownership among lower-income, underserved households.
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.
This article conducts the first contextual analysis of ethnic-based discrimination in an Australian rental housing market: metropolitan Sydney. Logistic regression is employed to investigate how the likelihood of five behaviors by rental agents that may favor Anglo home seekers varies according to characteristics of the agent, home seeker, dwelling, and neighborhood. We find that several forms of discrimination favoring Anglos are consistently more likely in neighborhoods characterized by lower crime rates and shares of renter households, regardless of the ethnicity of the agent. Other patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that, in general in the Sydney rental market, agents regardless of ethnicity are motivated to discriminate by statistical discrimination. Our result that profit, not prejudice, drives discrimination implies that it will prove resilient to unfettered housing market forces and changes in societal ethnic tolerance, but instead, must be addressed through enhanced civil rights enforcement strategies.
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.
We advance scholarship related to home foreclosures and neighborhood crime by employing Granger causality tests and multilevel growth modeling with annual data from Chicago neighborhoods over the period 1998–2009. We find that completed foreclosures temporally lead property crime and not vice versa. More completed foreclosures during a year both increase the level of property crime and slow its decline subsequently. This relationship is strongest in higher income, predominantly renter-occupied neighborhoods, contrary to the conventional wisdom. We did not find unambiguous, unidirectional causation in the case of violent crime and when filed foreclosures were analyzed.
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.
The paper reviews post-war developments in the theory of housing sub-markets and filtering, emphasising the seminal conceptual and empirical contributions provided by William Grigsby. The study discusses the implications associated with these models with respect to formulating housing policy in a market-dominated economy.
Previous studies attempting to estimate the relative importance of family, neighborhood, residential stability, and homeownership status characteristics of childhood environments on young adult outcomes have: (1) treated these variables as though they were independent, and (2) were limited in their ability to control for household selection effects. This study offers advances in both areas. First, it treats the key explanatory variables above as endogenously determined (sometimes simultaneously so). Second, to deal both with this endogeneity and the selection problem, instrumental variable estimates are computed for how childhood average values of neighborhood poverty rate relate to fertility, education and labor market outcomes in later life. The paper analyzes data from the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that are matched with Census tract data, thereby permitting documentation of a wide range of family background and contextual characteristics. For children born between 1968 and 1974, data are analyzed on their first 18 years and various outcomes in 1999 when they are between 25 and 31 years of age. The application of instrumental variables substantially attenuates the apparent neighborhood effects. Nevertheless, support is found for the proposition that cumulative neighborhood poverty effects averaged over childhood have an independent, non-trivial causal effect on high school attainment and earnings. Keywords: Childhoodneighbourhood effectssocioeconomic successyoung adult outcomeseducational attainmentearningshomeownershipfamily backgroundPSID Acknowledgements This research is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The authors wish to thank Jorg Blasius, Jurgen Friedrichs, Harry Holzer, Alex Marsh and anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Seminar participants at the Universities of Southern California, Cologne and Cambridge also provided constructive suggestions. The research assistance of Jackie Cutsinger and Ying Wang and clerical assistance of Caitlin Malloy is gratefully acknowledged. The opinions expressed herein are the authors', and do not necessarily reflect those of the Boards of Trustees of the Ford Foundation or our respective Universities. Notes 1 The direction of the bias has been the subject of debate, with Jencks & Mayer (Citation1990) and Tienda (Citation1991) arguing that neighborhood impacts are biased upwards, and Brooks-Gunn et al. (Citation1997) arguing the opposite. 2 While other studies have discussed this issue, it has been in the context of the reflection problem (Manski, Citation1995) of people in the neighborhood tautologically cause the aggregate neighborhood characteristics to be what they are as well as the neighborhood causes constituent residents' behaviors (Duncan & Raudenbush, Citation1999). 3 Other recent research has employed natural experiments where the selection bias was minimized through geographic assignment of households through governmental housing program auspices (Aslund & Fredriksson, Citation2005; Edin et al., Citation2003; Oreopolis, Citation2003). 4 Such a longitudinal analysis has been strongly recommended as the vehicle for overcoming the reflection problem (Duncan & Raudenbsuh, Citation1999; Manski, Citation1995). 5 A database from Geolytics is used, the 'Neighborhood Change Database', that adjusts data in 1970, 1980 and 1990 tracts that have changed their boundary definitions over the years to values that would appertain had boundaries remained at their 1990 specifications. 6 For details, see Galster (Citation2003a). 7 There are two exceptions to this. First, for those years in which the family lived in a rural area, the observed value of county characteristics is used. Second, for child age zero the observed value is used since a first-stage equation for year zero (due to unavailability of lagged variables) cannot be estimated. 8 Details of the first-stage regressions are available upon request. 9 However, some were asked again in 1975 and a question about union membership was collected from 1968 through to 1981. 10 The estimates here also differ substantially from those finding no statistically significant impacts from neighborhood poverty and associated measures of disadvantage; e.g. see Corcoran et al. (Citation1992); Ensminger et al. (Citation1996); Plotnick & Hoffman (Citation1999). 11 Wheaton & Clarke (Citation2003) find cumulative neighborhood conditions much more powerful in explaining various child developmental outcomes than contemporaneous conditions.
No abstract is provided for this article.
We quantify the relationships between measures of neighborhood context and school performance (repeating a grade, grade point average and dropping out before a diploma is earned) for low-income Latino and African American adolescents ages 12–18. We employ administrative and survey data from a natural experiment involving the Denver Housing Authority's public housing program to minimize geographic selection bias and provide wide variation in neighborhood contexts. We use characteristics of the neighborhood initially offered by DHA to waiting list applicants as identifying instruments for the neighborhood context experienced as an adolescent. Cox proportional hazard models (OLS in the case of grades) demonstrate that neighborhoods having less social vulnerability, higher occupational prestige and lower percentages of African American residents robustly predict superior secondary educational performance in one or more dimensions, though magnitudes are typically contingent on ethnicity.
Are Ethnic Enclaves good or bad? Exploring the relationsship between individuals' incomes and the immigrant character of their neighbourhood
