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.
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.
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.
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.
No abstract is provided for this article.
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.
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.
Seventy-one fair housing audits em ploying interracial teams of matched investigators who posed as home seekers are reviewed. The audits re veal that racial discrimination con tinues to be a dominant feature of metropolitan housing markets in the 1980s. Black auditors seeking homes for sale faced a one-in-five chance, blacks seeking rental dwellings faced a one-in-two chance, and Hispanics seeking rental dwellings faced a one- in-three chance, on average, of being discriminated against.
The research investigates the effects of dwellings occupied exclusively by severely mentally disabled (SMD) tenants on sales prices of nearby homes. Hedonic price models are estimated for an exhaustive sample of single-family home sales from 1989 to first quarter 1992 in Newark and Mt. Vernon, OH. Proximity within two blocks of rehabilitated dwellings occupied by SMD had no significant relationship with sales prices. Prices of homes proximate to two small, newly constructed apartment complexes were 40% lower after the complexes opened, although those near three other similar apartment complexes were not.
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)
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.
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Ideally, planners would intervene in neighborhood processes before substantial forces of decline have gained momentum. Unfortunately, currently there is no guidance about which neighborhood indicators forecast future neighborhood changes. This study seeks a neighborhood early warning indicator that is readily available, frequently updated, and that predicts with substantial foresight and accuracy future changes in key aspects of neighborhood market processes and quality of life. We search over a range of neighborhood indicators for one or more that clearly lead others in a temporal sense, instead of lagging behind them. We employ Granger causality tests with indicators related to public safety, housing market, and economic activity that are based on data from Chicago neighborhoods between 1998 and 2009. Our key finding is that only one indicator analyzed, completed home foreclosures, systematically precedes other neighborhood indicators but does not systematically follow after them. All other indicators are enmeshed in complicated, often mutually causal temporal patterns, which render them inappropriate for forecasting. We conclude that completed home foreclosures is an appropriate early warning indicator of neighborhood decline in several dimensions. Takeaway for practice: Planners interested in identifying imminently emerging problems in their constituents' neighborhoods should regularly acquire and map data on home foreclosures as soon as they become available, and then undertake compensatory actions as quickly as feasible. Keywords: foreclosuresneighborhood indicatorsGranger causalityneighborhood decline Acknowledgments The opinions expressed in this paper are the authors and do not -necessarily represent those of MDRC, the Foundation, or their -respective boards of trustees. We thank Nathanial Roth for his excellent research assistance and the anonymous reviewers for their many constructive suggestions on earlier drafts. Sonya Williams (sonya.williams@mdrc.org) is a research associate in the low-wage workers and communities policy area at MDRC. George Galster (george.galster@wayne.edu) is Distinguished Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Wayne State University. Nandita Verma (nandita.verma@mdrc.org) is a senior associate in the low-wage workers and communities policy area at MDRC. Notes 1. Several cities tout the existence of websites that permit citizens, community groups, and other analysts to download up-to-date, local information providing richly textured portraits of their neighborhoods over time (see, e.g., CityNews Chicago; Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization-Minneapolis; Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System; Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles; Providence Urban Land reform Initiative). Although some of these websites proclaim that they provide an early warning system for predicting imminent neighborhood changes, in fact, they leave it to the user to draw inferences from the data about the future or offer arbitrary and unproven weighting schemes for aggregating indicators into some notion of forthcoming changes. Unfortunately, such neighborhood early warning systems have typically not been tested in a statistically rigorous way for their predictive power and thus we do not discuss them here (Dewar, Basmajian, Alter, & Law, 2005; Myott, 2000 Myott, E. 2000. Developing and analyzing: The neighborhood early warning system in Hamline-Midway Minneapolis, MN NPCR. -Retrieved from http://www.cura.umn.edu/sites/cura.advantagelabs.com/files/-publications/NPCR-1143.pdf [Google Scholar]). 2. Hipp (2010 Hipp, J. 2010. A dynamic view of neighborhoods: The reciprocal relationship between crime and neighborhood structural characteristics. Social Problems, 57(2): 205–230. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) also found, however, that more crime in 1990 not only predicted more concentrated disadvantage in 2000 but the reverse as well, thereby supporting theoretical expectations about mutually causal relationships. 3. Early investigations probing annual changes in a variety of neighborhood indicators were undertaken by Galster, Cutsinger, and Lim (2007) and Lim and Galster (2009), but they did not attempt to estimate predictive models or identify early warning indicators. 4. These works have recently been challenged by Kirk and Hyra (2012 Kirk, D. and Hyra, D. 2012. Home foreclosures and community crime: Causal or spurious association?. Social Science Quarterly, 93(3): 648–670. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), however, who argue that the foreclosures-crime relationship is spurious and disappears when other neighborhood characteristics are controlled in the statistical models. 5. A 10-year, $47 million effort still under way at this writing, NCP is a comprehensive effort to engage community-based groups to attack multiple problems simultaneously in education, workforce development, housing, social services, and public policy. Managed by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of Chicago (LISC/Chicago), NCP focuses its efforts on 14 neighborhood areas in Chicago with varying challenges. 6. With multiple incidents, the report is classified in the Uniform Crime Report category of the most serious crime (generally, the crime with the highest potential penalty). Note that these are police reports and do not reflect later adjudication of the incident (e.g., an assault recorded on the initial report as a criminal act later adjudicated as justifiable self-defense is still included). 7. The Metro Chicago Information Center accomplished the data collection, aggregation, and standardization tasks for this research, under contract to MDRC. We recognize that these crime data have shortcomings. Unreported crimes are not included and the underreporting rate is likely neither random nor constant across neighborhoods. Nevertheless, these are the sorts of data that have been used in prior scholarship (see the review in Raleigh & Galster, in press Raleigh, E. and Galster, G. in press. Neighborhood disinvestment, abandonment and crime dynamics. Journal of Urban Affairs, [Google Scholar]) and are likely to be available to planners. 8. The first indicator can be thought of as a proxy for the total mortgage capital flow associated with in-moving, home-buying residents; increases in this flow represent a higher valuation and desirability for the neighborhood. The second indicator is a proxy for both changes in capital gains by homeowners and incentives to maintain and improve properties. 9. HMDA data are used instead of sales price data due to the relatively longer time series available; HMDA data was available starting in 1992, whereas the sales price data was only available as two, incongruent time series that covered a more limited period. The HMDA and sales price data exhibited the same trends for the times in which we had overlapping coverage. Galster et al. (2005 Galster, G., Hayes, C. and Johnson, J. 2005. Identifying robust, parsimonious neighborhood indicators. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 24(3): 265–280. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) demonstrated the value of HMDA data as a source for constructing neighborhood indicators. 10. Foreclosure filings that are resolved in other ways are not classified as completed. Both filed and completed foreclosure data exclude ownership transfers that occur as the result of financial distress (short sales or deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure transactions). 11. Unfortunately, neither filed or completed foreclosure indicators give a precise estimate of when a foreclosed property becomes vacant and then (possibly) is occupied again. This is potentially problematic because it is primarily during the period of vacancy when a foreclosed home presents the greatest risk to neighborhood safety and physical upkeep. But, because our two indicators likely bracket the desired figure, we conducted our analyses in parallel using both. 12. Community Reinvestment Act data are less complete and comprehensive compared with the HMDA data, which do limit their utility in analyses of community change. In particular, there were several changes in coverage and scope of the data (i.e., banks required to report on commercial lending) that might mask or accentuate temporal relationship among indicators. 13. The use of "causal" in the name of the test is a reference to the particular statistical relationship, not to be mistaken for conceptual causality or causal mechanisms. This test has rarely been applied to neighborhood analysis; for two applications, see Freeman, Galster, and Malega (2006) and Batabyal (2011 Batabyal, S. 2011. Temporal causality and the dynamics of crime and delinquency. Atlantic Economic Journal, 39(4): 421–441. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 14. Strong associations between foreclosures and crime also have been found by Baumer, Wolff, and Arnio (2012); Cui (2010 Cui, L. 2010. Foreclosure, vacancy and crime, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh. (Department of Economics working paper)[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Ellen et al. (2012 Ellen, I., Lacoe, J. and Sharygin, C. 2012. Do foreclosures cause crime?. Journal of Urban Economics, 74: 59–70. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); Goodstein and Lee (2010 Goodstein, R. and Lee, Y. 2010. Do foreclosures increase crime?, Washington, DC: Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (Center for Financial Research Working Paper 2010-05)[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Immergluck and Smith (2006b Immergluck, D. and Smith, G. 2006b. The impact of single-family mortgage foreclosures on neighbourhood crime. Housing Studies, 21(6): 851–866. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); Katz et al. (2013 Katz, C. M., Wallace, D. and Hedberg, E. C. 2013. A longitudinal assessment of the impact of foreclosure on neighborhood crime. Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency, 50: 359–389. doi:10.117/022427811431155[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]); Stucky, Ottensmann, and Payton (2012); and Williams, Galster, and Verma (2013). The important role of foreclosures in leading decadal changes in neighborhood racial composition and other characteristics was forwarded by the seminal empirical work of Baxter and Lauria (2000 Baxter, V. and Lauria, M. 2000. Residential mortgage foreclosure and neighborhood change. Housing Policy Debate, 11(3): 675–699. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Lauria and Baxter (1999 Lauria, M. and Baxter, V. 1999. Residential mortgage foreclosure and racial transition in New Orleans. Urban Affairs Review, 34(6): 757–786. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Finally, Anenberg and Kung (2012); Harding, Rosenblatt, and Yao (2009); and Immergluck and Smith (2006a Immergluck, D. and Smith, G. 2006a. The external costs of foreclosure: The impact of single-family mortgage foreclosures on property values. Housing Policy Debate, 17(6): 57–79. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) have identified substantial home sales price discounts as a result of proximity to foreclosed homes. 15. Filed, rather than completed, foreclosures are conceptually a better candidate to serve as a leading indicator, particularly in places such as Illinois where the foreclosure process is fairly lengthy. While filed foreclosures would provide a longer lead time in relation to changes in other indicators of neighborhood quality of life, the analysis indicated that the filed foreclosures indicator had both lead and lag (i.e., reciprocal) relationships with the other indicators, which means that the model does not support using the filed foreclosure indicator as a leading indicator.
An econometric model of 1970-80 residential turnover rates for white households is estimated for census tracts in Cuyahoga County, Cleveland, Ohio. Results indicate that 1970 tract percentage black, coupled with its interaction with estimated segregationist sentiment for white residents, was the dominant explanatory variable, although the relationship was highly non-linear. Ceteris paribus, the maximum rate of racially motivated turnover by whites occurred in tracts that were at least 55 per cent black in 1970, regardless of whites' segregationist sentiments. However, tracts had negligible amounts of such turnover if they had below-average levels of segregationist sentiment and blacks did not represent a majority in the tract. Application of the results to the Schelling model indicated that white neighbourhood 'tipping-out' points varied from 98 per cent to 53 per cent white, within 1 standard deviation of the mean level of segregationist sentiment. Integration management policies conducted by the suburban Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights jurisdictions during the period did not succeed in dampening this pattern of white flight. On the contrary, ceteris paribus, Heights tracts had white turnover rates 16.6 percentage points greater.
The past decades have witnessed increasing concern over the family ills engendered by neighborhoods inhabited overwhelmingly by families with limited resources. This study focuses on a different sort of residential context-neighborhoods with substantial income mixing - and the extent to which very low-income (VLI) families - those earning less than 50 percent of the area median income (AMI)-live in them. The study's primary units of analysis are the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, according to the 2000 Census, and the secondary units of analysis are census tracts. The study specifies six mutually exclusive income groups based on the ratios relative to AMI, as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also specifies four groups of neighborhoods according to their diversity of the six income groups, as measured by an entropy index. The descriptive results show that in 2000 (1) most neighborhoods had high diversity, although a decline is apparent in the overall income diversity of neighborhoods and in the share comprising high-diversity neighborhoods; (2) no neighborhoods with median incomes of less than 50 percent of AMI had high diversity; (3) 19 percent of all high-diversity neighborhoods (on average) consist of VLI families and 65 percent of all VLI families live in high-diversity neighborhoods, although both percentages have declined since 1970; (4) 5 percent of VLI families live in neighborhoods with median incomes of less than 50 percent of AMI, twice the percentage of 1970 but lower than in 1990; and (5) exposure of VLI families to other VLI families and moderate-income groups has steadily fallen since 1970 and concomitantly increased for families that have very high incomes (VHIs); indeed, the exposure to VHI families is approximately the same as exposure to other VLI families. This article addresses the mixed implications of these trends for the potential socioeconomic mobility of VLI families.
:The goals of public housing have evolved from providing shelter to providing opportunities for escaping from welfare and buying one’s own home. Despite numerous federal policies aimed at enhancing resident self-sufficiency and homeownership through programs run by local public housing authorities, little is known about who participates and who succeeds. This study explores barriers to participation and success in an innovative resident self-sufficiency/homeownership program developed by the Housing Authority of the city and county of Denver. We conduct surveys of participants in the Foundations for Homeownership program, eliciting their perceptions regarding willingness and ability to participate in the program and, thereafter, completing it successfully. We find that at time of entry into the program, participants reported, on average, 4.6 major barriers that they perceive would limit their ability to achieve current goals. OLS and logistic regression analyses were conducted to ascertain the degree to which perceived barriers were associated with participants’ demographic, economic, or attitudinal characteristics.
