Research into urban problems influences, and is influenced by, both the problems themselves and the policies made in response to them. This book describes the policymaking process in general and the role of policy research in particular. It covers economic development, education, poverty, family support and social welfare, housing, intergovernmental financial relations, drugs, and racial discrimination and segregation.
We conduct a panel analysis quantifying the degree to which the mixture of low-income, middle-income, and high-income males in the neighbourhood affects the subsequent labour income of individuals, and test the degree to which these effects vary by timing (lagging up to three years), duration (one to four years), and cumulative amount of exposure and to what extent these effects are persistent. We employ a fixed-effects model to reduce the potential bias arising from unmeasured individual characteristics leading to neighbourhood selection. The empirical study applies individual-level data for the working-age population of the three largest cities in Sweden covering the period 1991–2006. The analyses suggest that there are important temporal dimensions in the statistical effect of neighbourhood income mix: recent, continued, or cumulative exposure yields stronger associations than lagged, temporary ones, and there is a distinct time decay (though some persistence) in the potential effects after exposure ceases, though with some gender differences.
We investigate the degree to which disadvantaged neighborhood peers influence disadvantaged youths' and young adults' propensity to commit criminal offenses, identifying causal effects with the allocation of social housing in Copenhagen. We find that those living in the same social housing development who have been previously charged only for drug possession cause more youth criminality, but those with no criminal records or records involving other offenses do not. Youth exposed to a one percentage point higher neighborhood concentration of drug possession offenders have a 4.2% higher probability of being criminally charged (a 16.7% increase with respect to the sample mean).
The Housing Discrimination Study 2000 (HDS 2000) is the third nationwide effort sponsored by HUD to measure the amount of discrimination faced by minority home seekers. This report provides national estimates of discrimination faced by African Americans and Hispanics in 2000 as they searched for housing in the sales and rental markets. It also provides an accurate measure of how housing discrimination has changed since 1989. The report shows large decreases between 1989 and 2000 in the level of discrimination experienced by Hispanics and African Americans seeking to a buy a home. There are, however, worrisome upward trends of discrimination in the areas of geographic steering in home sales for African Americans and the amount of help agents provide to Hispanics with obtaining financing. There has also been a modest decrease in discrimination toward African Americans seeking to rent a unit. This downward trend, however, has not been seen for Hispanic renters. Hispanic renters now are more likely to experience discrimination in their housing search than do African American renters.
There is substantial interest among policy makers in both Western Europe and North America in reducing concentrations of disadvantaged households through initiatives to enhance the 'social mix' of neighbourhoods. However, there is little consideration or understanding with regard to which mix of household characteristics matters most in influencing the socio-economic outcomes for individual residents. This paper explores the degree to which a wide variety of 1995 neighbourhood conditions in Sweden are statistically related to earnings for all adult metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women during the 1996–99 period, controlling for a wide variety of personal characteristics. The paper finds that the extremes of the neighbourhood income distribution, operationalized by the percentages of adult males with earnings in the lowest 30th and the highest 30th percentiles, hold greater explanatory power than domains of household mix related to education, ethnicity or housing tenure. Separating the effects of having substantial shares of low and high income neighbours, it is found that it is the presence of the former that means most for the incomes of metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women, with the largest effects for metropolitan men.
:During the past decade, a rapidly expanding body of empirical research has emerged that statistically links disadvantaged neighborhood environments with social and economic outcomes of low-income, minority children. Nonetheless, the mechanisms by which neighborhoods putatively affect children remain poorly understood. This article examines the perceptions of low-income parents regarding how their neighborhood might affect their children. We examine quantitative and qualitative data gathered from phone interviews with 246 parents who live in subsidized housing scattered across a wide variety of neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado. We supplement this information with data obtained through a series of focus group interviews with a subset of these parents. Our findings indicate that low-income parents perceive the following primary neighborhood mechanisms: (1) the degree (or lack) of social norms and collective efficacy (24%); (2) influence of children's peers (12%); (3) exposure to crime and violence (11%); and (4) the presence and quality of institutional resources (3%). Approximately one-third of all parents reported that their neighborhood had no impact at all on their children, citing that their children were either "too young" to be affected by these mechanisms or that parents had sufficient resources to buffer any deleterious effects of the neighborhood. Parents residing in high-poverty neighborhoods were much more likely to perceive a neighborhood effect, however. Binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses were employed to identify the extent to which an array of demographic characteristics and neighborhood type correlated with parents' perceptions. Latino parents were significantly less likely than other low-income parents to report a neighborhood impact mechanism. Relative to those who reported no particular neighborhood impact mechanism, those who identified: (1) safety issues were more likely to have a spouse or parent present, and have low self-esteem; (2) peer influences were more likely to have higher levels of education and live in a high-poverty but low-crime area.
We provide a US national portrait of annual average exposure to floods across racial/ethnic and income groups, using predictions from the First Street Foundation flooding exposure model. Nationally, we find that Native Americans in inland neighborhoods and Hispanics in coastal ones face (statistically) significantly higher average exposure to flooding than non‐Hispanic Whites, even when neighborhood income composition is controlled. Surprisingly, non‐Hispanic Blacks and Asians generally have significantly lower average exposure to floods than non‐Hispanic Whites. Lower income groups exhibit substantially higher exposure in inland areas than higher income groups—but not in coastal areas—when neighborhood racial/ethnic composition is controlled.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Urban theorists have tried for decades to define exactly what a neighborhood is . But behind that daunting existential question lies a much murkier problem: never mind how you define them—how do you make neighborhoods productive and fair for their residents? In Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves , George Galster delves deep into the question of whether American neighborhoods are as efficient and equitable as they could be—socially, financially, and emotionally—and, if not, what we can do to change that. Galster aims to redefine the relationship between places and people, promoting specific policies that reduce inequalities in housing markets and beyond. Drawing on economics, sociology, geography, and psychology, Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves delivers a clear-sighted explanation of what neighborhoods are, how they come to be—and what they should be.
Problem: Although planners aim to provide for income diversity in the communities they serve, too little is known about how income distributions in metropolitan neighborhoods are changing. Purpose: We investigate whether neighborhood income diversity has increased since 1970 by examining neighborhoods in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. Methods: We analyze neighborhoods in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2000 using a combination of nominal (H) and ordinal (E) entropy indices. We focus on neighborhoods we call bipolar, (where E/H > 1), in which very low- and very high-income groups predominate. We investigate these with tract-level statistics and by using a counterfactual. Results and conclusions: We find a dramatic increase in the number and incidence of these bipolars since 1970. Compared to other neighborhoods, we find that, on average, bipolars have significantly greater shares of very high-income families, racial diversity, shares of middle-aged persons, and shares of renters. We use a counterfactual to reveal that much of the growth in bipolars over the last three decades has been fueled by income distributions at the metropolitan scale becoming more bimodal, with fewer middle-income families. Gentrification appears to explain only a minor share of growth in bipolars. Takeaway for practice: Metropolitan census tracts with pronounced bimodal income distributions have become more common since 1970. This appears to reflect changing metropolitan income distributions more than spatial rearrangement, although planning policies may be responsible in some instances. Whether residence in bipolar. neighborhoods will benefit very low-income households by reducing stereotyping and expanding social opportunities is unclear, but such places should be monitored.
Scholars have long debated the relative merits of site-based, subsidized housing owned and operated by a public entity or by the private sector. This is the first study to classify long-term residential trajectories of nationally representative low-income households in the United States by their initial assisted housing status. We employ a matched sequence analysis of neighborhood poverty and racial trajectories of low-income households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics who formed during 1988-1992. Among households carefully matched by their demographic and economic attributes, we find that those first forming households in public housing spend much longer durations over the subsequent 20 years in poorer, minority-dominant neighborhoods than similar households first forming in market-rate housing. In contrast, forming a household in private site-based subsidized housing is associated with superior neighborhood socioeconomic (but not desegregated racial composition) trajectories compared to starting in market-rate housing. Implications for housing policy are discussed.
A New Index for Comparing the Diversity of Population Inflows and Population Stocks The paper introduces a new “diversification index” (DIV), which compares the composition of the current or recent population inflow and the composition of pre-existing population stock, with positive (negative) values signifying a process generating more (less) diversity in the stock. Higher absolute values for DIV signify larger differences in the composition of the inflows and the pre-existing stocks of population. DIV is easy to compute and interpret, adaptable to handle population inflows or outflows, and widely applicable to a variety of phenomena. The paper defines DIV, discusses its properties, and calculates it for several hypothetical cases as a way of showing its intuitive appeal, such as how it would reflect a neighborhood gentrification scenario. DIV indices for both race and income groupings are computed from 1992 to 2006 for three neighborhoods in Chicago to demonstrate how inter-temporal trends in DIV provide insights into neighborhood dynamics. Finally, the paper discusses extensions, potential weaknesses, and other caveats related to the use of DIV in future applied research. A great deal of social scientific effort has been invested in the development of numerous indices for describing multi-group compositional characteristics of a stock of population defined by differences in some demographic, economic, ethnic or other dimension. Examples of such indices include nominal entropy (Theil’s Information), ordinal entropy, and Simpson’s D (Hirschman-Herfindahl); see Reardon and Firebaugh (2002) and Reardon et al. (2006) for evaluative reviews. Less research has been devoted to measuring compositional characteristics of flows of population, though the aforementioned indices typically may be applied to measuring flows as well as stocks. No index has yet been developed, however, that compares the compositions of an inflow of population and the baseline stock of population on a group-by-group basis. Such a comparative index would be useful for gauging the degree to which the composition of the inflow either matches that of the stock (and thus the degree to which the current stock is tending to remain stable) or differs from it (and thus the degree to which the current stock is tending toward more or less diversity over time due to its inflows). The “diversification index” (DIV) introduced in this paper aims to do exactly this. DIV compares the composition of the current or recent population inflow and the composition of pre-existing population stock on a group-by-group basis, with positive (negative) values signifying a process generating more (less) diversity in the stock. Higher absolute values for DIV signify larger aggregate differences in the composition of the inflows and the pre-existing stocks of population, based on group-by-group comparisons. DIV is easy to compute, easy to interpret, and widely applicable to various phenomena. This approach is quite distinctive from standard measures of inter-group diversity, which indeed could be applied to both a flow and a stock to suggest a difference in their degrees of diversity. These standard measures do not, however, 1 Population can be thought of either as residents of a geographic area or members of a nonspatial collection, such as occupation or standard industrial classification.
On February 19th, Jurgen Friedrichs, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology at the University of Cologne, passed away. Over the course of his career, Jurgen made an ...
This paper advances a theory of how metropolitan land-use patterns affect racial settlement patterns and tests it by measuring the relationship between seven dimensions of land-use patterns and five dimensions of segregation of Blacks and Whites for a representative sample of 50 large metropolitan areas, using multiple regression analysis. We find substantial, nonlinear relationships between changes in multiple dimensions of segregation and multiple dimensions of land use, with most evincing a direct relationship between more compact patterns and segregation once a threshold value is exceeded. The results can be explained holistically by positing that variations in different dimensions of land-use patterns differentially affect land/housing prices, inter-group propinquity, interracial commonality of commuting destinations, and spatial mismatch, which in turn appear to affect the ability of a metropolitan area to desegregate. But alterations in certain aspects of land use—density/continuity and job compactness—apparently spawn a combination of forces that affect desegregation in contrary ways; which force dominates seemingly depends on how extreme the given land-use pattern has become. These findings hold implications for those designing land-use policies designed to fight sprawl.
Prior scholarship has documented and tried to explain growing inequalities in individual wealth holdings—especially between homeowners and renters—but has not considered the role of residential position in the rural-urban hierarchy. We estimate fixed-effect models of one's rank in national net, housing and financial wealth distributions during the 2010–2018 period, based on Norwegian register data on prime-age individuals. We find dramatic geographic differences in trajectories of wealth accumulation that are strongly conditioned by tenure. Residing longer in a more urbanized area—especially in the central Oslo region—results in a substantially higher net wealth position only for homeowners. This result is driven overwhelmingly by their greatly superior gains in housing wealth over the period. By contrast, the net wealth and financial wealth positions for those who always rent are virtually indistinguishable across the hierarchy, regardless of duration of residence. Our evidence suggests that the positive correlation between earnings and rent levels across the rural-urban hierarchy yields this result.
This book investigates the efforts of homeowners to maintain and improve their dwellings. Their behavior, it has found, depends on economic variables as well as the sociological structure of their neighborhoods. Residential satisfaction, expectations of the neighborhood, and mobility plans were taken into account. Multivariate statistical analyses of models were conducted using household data from Minneapolis and Wooster, Ohio. Three important findings emerged. First, homeowners' sense of solidarity with their neighbors is as significant in determining their efforts at home upkeep as are their income or age. Second, the optimism of homeowners toward increases in property values results in behavior opposite to that produced by optimism about neighborhood quality of life. This implies that different kinds of predictable gaming behavior occur among homeowners, depending on the neighborhoods in which they live. Third, both short-term and extremely long-term plans to move prove damaging to home upkeep. The results of this study form the basis for a better understanding of such residential phenomena as class succession, racial transition, and gentrification. Galster's findings will also be valuable for analyzing policies that attempt to encourage neighborhood reinvestment.
