:This paper focuses on three areas of civil rights policy: housing, education, and employment. The authors describe the current state of discrimination and/or segregation and analyze their costs, diagnose past failures of public policies, and propose new strategies. Both antidiscrimination and prointegration policies are recommended. The authors argue that one cannot proceed effectively without the other. They show how interconnections between the housing, education, and employment components form a racist metropolitan structure that exacts high social costs and must be attacked with a comprehensive civil rights strategy.
This paper contributes to the literature on obtaining unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects, explored in the context of a centralized social welfare state. We employ a longitudinal database comprised of all working age adults in metropolitan Sweden 1991–1999 to investigate the degree to which neighborhood income mix relates to subsequent labor incomes of adults and how this relationship varies by gender and employment status. We control for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics by estimating a first-difference equation of changes in average incomes between the 1991–1995 and 1996–1999 periods. We further control for unobserved time varying characteristics through an analysis of non-movers. These methods substantially reduce the magnitude of the apparent effect of neighborhood shares of low-, middle- and high-income males. Nevertheless, statistically and substantively significant neighborhood effects persist, though relationships are nonlinear and vary by gender and employment status. Males who are not fully employed appear most sensitive to neighborhood economic mix in all contexts.
No abstract is provided for this article.
A theory of residential satisfaction is developed and used in the specification of a path model wherein compositional characteristics of households and the context of the dwelling and neighborhood in which they live influence various dimensions of satisfaction. Relationships are estimated for 767 households sampled in Wooster, Ohio, in 1975, using two-stage least-squares techniques. Results show that certain households demonstrate less satisfaction in any residential context, and that certain dwelling and neighborhood contexts elicit dissatisfaction across the full sample. Only a few such contextual factors prove significant in most compositional subsamples, indicating that different household types differently evaluate and/or adapt to similar contexts.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Several of the papers appearing in this issue were originally presented at a conference 'Inside Poverty Areas' hosted by the University of Cologne in December 2004. This issue of Housing Studies has been co-ordinated by us in collaboration with the regular co-editors of the journal. In addition to the reviews of the editors, all papers have been subjected to the usual, anonymous peer review process of Housing Studies.
The Denver Child Study explores the extent to which multiple dimensions of neighborhood context affect the physical and behavioral health, exposure to violence, risky behaviors, education, youth and young adult labor market outcomes, and marriage and childbearing of Latino and African-American children and youth from low-income families. The study uses a natural experiment involving the Denver, Colorado, Housing Authority (DHA), which since 1969 has operated public housing units located in a wide range of neighborhoods throughout the city and county of Denver. Because the initial assignment of households on the DHA waiting list to vacant public housing units (and, thus, to neighborhoods) mimics a random process, this program represents an unusual opportunity for reducing parental geographic selection bias and observing the unusual combination of low-income, minority youths raised for extended periods in advantaged (as well as disadvantaged) neighborhoods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
