Identifying the determinants of social mobility for children of non-Western immigrants is of vital concern as immigration pressures grow across the West. Prior studies have minimized the role of place as one such determinant but suffers from several unsupportable assumptions. We interrogate this issue by quantifying the relative contributions made by family and neighborhood characteristics in explaining the educational attainments of young adults, paying special attention to how effects differ by gender and parental immigrant status. Our statistical models provide plausibly causal estimates by controlling for geographic selection bias. We estimate model parameters using several cohorts of children raised in Oslo, Norway, for whom government registers provide exceptionally detailed information about cumulative exposures of children to family and neighborhood contexts. Our decomposition demonstrates that differences in childhood neighborhood have a substantial effect on male (but not female) immigrant-native gaps in the probabilities of completing secondary school and of enrolling in university, though these effects are smaller than those reflecting differences in family background. We discuss implications of our findings for people- and place-based social policies aimed at enhancing immigrant opportunities.
(1991). Discrimination Against Female-Headed Households in Rental Housing: Theory and Exploratory Evidence. Review of Social Economy: Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 76-100.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Metzger fails to define or distinguish key concepts related to neighborhood change theories and policy and instead mischievously treats them interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. The intellectual history he presents is distorted and myopic. Unsupported assertions, distortions, and citations taken out of context characterize his use of evidence. No wonder he erroneously deduces that a monolithic, unchallenged neighborhood life‐cycle theory, promoted by an intellectual conspiracy headed by Anthony Downs, held sway in academic, planning, and policy‐making circles for the past half century.
This paper examines whether criminals commit more crimes when living among other offenders. We estimate a fixed-effect, negative binomial model of individual reoffending using a quarterly panel data set across a decade for 693 neighbourhoods in Glasgow, which provides plausibly causal relationships. The concentration of recently active offenders has positive effects upon the subsequent number of property and violent crimes committed by resident offenders both inside and outside the neighbourhood. The concentration of young males also has a positive effect upon both crime types in both locations. Further understanding of peer influences by crime type and location, and of the effects of offender concentrations on processes of social control are required. The deconcentration of offenders is justified on social equity grounds.
A cross-sectional simultaneous equation model is specified wherein metropolitan-wide levels of racial residential segregation, housing discrimination, interracial occupational dissimilarities, and black/white mean incomes are endogenous. Parameters are estimated via two-stage least-squares for a 1980 sample of 40 SMSAs. Results support the hypothesis of mutually causal interrelationships among the aforementioned urban racial phenomena. Simulations suggest that narrowing occupational differentials played a major role in reducing interracial income differences and segregation during the 1970s. Hypothetical policy simulations indicate the efficacy of an economic opportunity strategy for indirectly promoting desegregation, although direct approaches such as fair housing and dispersal of moderate-cost housing are also predicted to yield large reductions in segregation.
Previous studies on distributive environmental justice issues related to flooding exposure have been limited in spatial scale, afflicted by measurement shortcomings, and inconsistent in findings. We provide the first U.S. national and state-by-state descriptive portrait of annual average exposure to floods across all Census-defined racial/ethnic groups. Specifically, we investigate whether there are statistically significant interracial differences in average annual probabilities of experiencing a flood in the U.S. and how these differences vary across states and coastal vs. inland areas. We use predictions from the recent First Street Foundation flooding exposure model and demographic data from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey in our analysis. We observe no states in which non-Hispanic Blacks have a (statistically) significantly higher average exposure to floods than non-Hispanic Whites, but 21 states where the reverse is true. Hispanics have a significantly higher average exposure in three states, and a significantly lower average exposure in 18 states, compared to Whites. Notably, however, the aggregate Hispanic population of the three states where Hispanics face greater flood exposure (Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas) exceeds the aggregate Hispanic population of the 18 where their average exposures are lower than Whites’. There are eight states in which Native Americans have significantly higher exposure, and none where have lower exposure than Whites’, implying that additional research and appropriate, community-informed policy responses should focus on this group. Further studies are also needed at smaller spatial scales to identify communities of color facing disproportionate flood exposures.
This research investigates the spatial variation in racial housing market discrimination. Using 1980 data for Cuyahoga County (Cleveland, Ohio), regression analysis indicates that compared to integrated or majority-black tracts with stable 1970-1980 racial compositions, all-white tracts, and especially transitional tracts evidencing large gains in proportion of black residents, have higher discrimination rates, ceteris paribus. These findings support the hypotheses that housing agents discriminate when they fear losing business from their prejudiced white customers and when they can exploit an unstable situation characterized by relatively high white/black housing demand elasticity ratios.
No abstract is provided for this article.
This article analyzes both theoretically and empirically the relationship between owner-occupants' housing maintenance behavior and their social relationships within their neighborhoods. This "social dimension" of the neighborhood is posited as affecting maintenance through pressures for conforming to group housing standards. Hypotheses are derived from this theory and empirical tests are conducted using a sample of homeowners from Wooster, Ohio, in 1975. Through factor analysis a number of variables measuring an individual homeowner's social "attachment" to neighborhood are reduced to two dimensions: "commonality" and "integration." These factors are aggregated to form neighborhood levels of "cohesiveness." Both sets of attachment and cohesiveness factors are employed as independent variables in a multiple-regression analysis of maintenance frequency and expenditures, where the effects of homeowner characteristics, structural features, and physical and demographic dimensions of the neighborhood are controlled for. Results show that there is a significant relationship between both individual and aggregate measures of the social neighborhood and maintenance, but only when there exists a high aggregate level of neighborhood cohesiveness.
The paper investigates the impact of ethnic segregation on the life chances of low-income African American and Latino children, focusing on whether it is the ethnic composition of the neighbourhood per se that matters or other, correlated aspects of the residential environment. The approach links the consequences of segregation and neighbourhood effects literatures by arguing that metropolitan segregation forces directly shape children’s intra-neighbourhood ethnic exposure and indirectly shape their exposure to non-ethnic aspects of neighbourhood. Associations between a wide range of neighbourhood characteristics and children’s health, exposure to and engaging in violence, educational and fertility outcomes are quantified using a natural experiment, thereby permitting valid causal inferences. Data analysed come from a retrospective survey of Denver (CO) Housing Authority (DHA) residents. The analysis avoids parental geographic selection bias because DHA’s assignment of households to neighbourhoods mimics a random process. Logit models stratified by ethnicity show that growing up amid concentrations of African American residents is associated with a variety of adverse outcomes for low-income Latino and (especially) African American children, though outcomes associated with concentrations of Latino residents are more mixed. Virtually all of the negative associations disappear, however, when other aspects of the residential context are controlled, and several positive ones persist. The adverse developmental consequences of ethnic segregation appear to be generated primarily in Denver by concentrating minority children in neighbourhoods with higher rates of property crime and lower occupational prestige.
