In 2013 Detroit became the largest municipality to declare bankruptcy. Unfortunately, bankruptcy does not treat the long-term cause of Detroit’s financial crisis: the ongoing fiscal death spiral triggered by loss of industrial, commercial and residential tax base starting in the 1950s. The first loss came from manufacturers who abandoned older factories in the city in favor of suburban locations. The second came from the federal government, whose guarantees for FHA-VA mortgages and subsidies for expressway construction spurred suburbanization of Detroit’s (overwhelmingly white) middle class. Detroit trimmed services and raised tax rates in response. But this made it an increasingly uncompetitive location, thereby further contracting its property and income tax bases, forcing still more cuts in services and increases in tax rates. What is required to break out of the fiscal death spiral in which Detroit finds itself is substantially more federal and state revenue sharing and regional growth management.
We analyze data from a natural experiment involving Denver public housing that quasirandomly assigns low-income Latino and African American youth to neighborhoods. Intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated models reveal substantial effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and safety domains on youth and young adult educational, employment, and fertility outcomes. Effects are contingent on when a youth was first assigned to public housing and the neighborhood characteristic in question. Benefits from neighbors of higher occupational prestige are stronger if a child begins experiencing them at a younger age, whereas negative consequences of neighborhood crime are only manifested for teens. Neighborhood effect sizes apparently depend on the interaction among exposure duration, disruption effects of mobility, and developmental stage-specific differences in vulnerability to the given neighborhood effect mechanism operative. Our results hold powerful and provocative implications for where assisted housing should be developed and how applicants should be assigned to neighborhoods.
As compared with places that are gentrifying or experiencing concentrated disadvantage, middle neighborhoods have been largely ignored by urban scholars and planners. This oversight must be rectified because middle neighborhoods play a vital role in the overall health of a city and in the well-being of its poorest citizens, even if they do not live in them. This chapter establishes a rationale for why scholars and policymakers should seriously consider middle neighborhoods as a locus of potential policy innovation and intervention.
Summary of Findings HDS2000 finds that discrimination still persists in both rental and sales markets of large metropolitan areas nationwide, but that its incidence has generally declined since 1989 (see Exhibit ES-1). Only Hispanic renters face essentially the same incidence of discrimination today that they did in 1989. Otherwise, the incidence of consistent adverse treatment against minority homeseekers has declined over the last decade. 3 Exhibit ES-1: Consistent Adverse Treatment Against Blacks and Hispanics, 1989 and 2000 0.0%5.0%10.0%15.0%20.0%25.0%30.0%35.0%Black Hispanic Black Hispanic percent 1989 2000Rental Sales Metropolitan Rental Markets. African Americans still face discrimination when they search for rental housing in metropolitan markets nationwide. Whites were consistently favored over blacks in 21.6 percent of tests. In particular, whites were more likely to receive information 3 Note that the 1989 results presented here are not exactly the same as those that were reported in 1989. Comparable measures have been constructed from both years, but these are not exactly the same treatment measures as reported in 1989. Some 1989 indicators could not be replicated because of changes in testing protocols. Other measures have been more precisely defined or revised for greater clarity. See Annex 5 for a complete discussion of changes in the 1989 treatment measures.
Three challenges confront statistical researchers of neighbourhood impacts on individual behaviours: (1) operationalising 'neighbourhood processes'; (2) potentially non-linear relationships between neighbourhood characteristics and outcomes; and (3) the selection bias problem. To better comprehend these challenges and overcome them, the paper proposes an overarching conceptual framework wherein outcomes of interest are affected by neighbourhood interacting in a mutually causal fashion with housing tenure, housing wealth, household socio-economic status, and mobility behaviour. It advances a five-equation, simultaneous system for home ownership, mobility expectations, housing wealth, household socio-economic status and neighbourhood character. Although current US census data do not provide perfect proxies for neighbourhood processes, there is evidence that a battery of them could represent reasonable operationalisations. Tests for non-linearity could be conducted in this framework. This model could use a sufficiently robust set of instrumental variables to overcome the issue of neighbourhood selection bias, and thereby produce considerably more precise estimates of neighbourhood impacts on individual outcomes of interest. Implications for qualitative research approaches also are drawn.
The means through which socioeconomic status is transmitted across generations has long been of central interest to scholarship on inequality. We explore multi-generational reproduction of socioeconomic status through transmission of housing wealth by investigating how the tenure, size and location of housing occupied by grandparents relates to the tenure and value of housing occupied by their grandchildren. We estimate OLS, tobit and structural equation models based on Norwegian register data on three generations of families linked from 1960 to 2015. We find that those whose grandparents owned a large home in Oslo in 1960 had a much higher probability of owning a home in 2014, and among owners their dwellings were valued substantially more, compared to otherwise similar individuals whose grandparents were renters not living in cities. A natural experiment of housing price deregulation in Oslo indicates that resource transfers, not socialization of housing-related norms, was the dominant mechanism behind this process. Influences on parents' and grandchildren's income and education are substantial mediators. Results document the crucial role played by housing wealth in perpetuating social inequalities across several generations.
This paper presents a holistic conceptual framework within which various research topics related to discrimination may be interrelated and evaluated. It then critically analyzes extant research relating to central components in the framework: the detection of discrimination, causes of discrimination, consequences of discrimination, and policy initiatives related to fighting discrimination both directly by deterrence and indirectly by attacking segregation and the prejudices it spawns. A great deal is known about the nature of private acts of housing discrimination, but little about which policies are most effective in combating such discrimination. On the other hand, relatively little is known about the extent of housing discrimination perpetrated by local governments and public agencies and about both differential treatment and disparate impact forms of discrimination in mortgage and related (appraisal, insurance) markets.
The following note describes a skit designed primarily as a pedagogic device to illustrate in a meaningful (and, hopefully, provocative and humorous) way Marx's analysis of capitalism. Numerous concepts and phenomena are “brought to life” in the skit: exploitation, immiseration and alienation of workers, maintenance wage, labor theory of value, mechanization and the division of labor, systemic tendencies toward economic crises, relationship of various superstructural components (welfare, religion, etc.) to the economic base, and the radical theory of the state. More specifically, the economic base of a hypothetical capitalist society consists of a stylized production process involving “resources” (Oreo cookies), “labor” (students selected from the class) and eventually “capital” (table knives). The ability of the monopoly capitalist to accumulate surplus by exploiting workers becomes manifest. Other elements of the social superstructure (unions, government, religion, etc.)
Several emergent theories assert that neighborhood affects immigrants' socioeco‐nomic advancement. This study analyzes a range of demographic and socioeco‐nomic indicators for immigrants' census tracts, summarized as exposure indices. Indicators are based on 1980 and 1990 census tract information for five major metropolitan areas. Seventeen immigrant groups are examined and contrasted with general populations distinguished by race/ethnicity. Few general conclusions can be made about the "typical immigrant neighborhood." Most immigrants (especially whites) are highly spatially assimilated. Different immigrant groups often share the same census tracts in substantial numbers. There is considerable diversity among groups in their propensity to reside in central cities. White immigrant groups evince advantageous neighborhood socioeconomic indicators. With one exception, no immigrant group in any metropolitan area studied has such disadvantageous neighborhood indicators as black households, on average. These findings dispel any vestiges of the myth of the "immigrant ghetto" that might be generalized across immigrant groups or metropolitan areas.
This note presents empirical evidence on changes in an index measuring the relative decentralization of blacks for 40 MSAs during the 1970s. The evidence demonstrates that although other, more conventional indicators of suburbanization (which denote residence inside and outside the central city) demonstrate substantial changes, this is not the case for the decentralization indicator (which is independent of political jurisdictional boundaries). The implications are that blacks will gain little from near-central-city suburbanization if job growth, high-quality education, superior environments, and the like tend to follow higher-status whites into the evermore-distant exurbs.
This article uses tabular and mapping presentations of 1990 census tract data to investigate variations in adverse socioeconomic conditions across Washington, DC, neighborhoods. It also examines the levels of exposure of youth of different races or ethnicities to these adverse conditions. Underlying this analysis is the premise that aggregate neighborhood conditions related to poverty and welfare status, educational attainment, out‐of‐wedlock births, employment, drug use, and crime serve as proxies for resident youth's perceptions of the opportunity structure as filtered through the local social network. Empirical analyses show two distinct clusters of indicators that vary consistently across Washington neighborhoods; one is related to socioeconomic status, drug use, and fertility, and the other is related to crime rates. Both sets vary systematically by the racial‐ethnic composition of youth in the neighborhood. Youth in black, female‐headed families are exposed to the most negative neighborhood conditions.
The author argues in this chapter that it is not the loss of manufacturing jobs per se, but the relocation of employment, in tandem with the regions unplanned, speculation-driven housing development system, which have led to the atrophying of the City of Detroit over the last half century. The facts of shrinking Detroit are indeed dramatic. Two implications follow from these facts. First, the region has not been shrinking, only the core municipality has. This means that a process of hollowing out has been occurring, with the same number of people progressively relocating away from the core and into the fringe of the metropolitan area. Second, this hollowing out process began well before the vaunted deindustrialization of the region. Of the 20 largest metropolitan areas, metro Detroit ranks first in its dispersion of jobs away from the core. Metropolitan Detroit has indeed perfected the Fordist-style, mass production of something besides automobiles: abandoned housing and non-residential buildings.
We investigate patterns of residential and nonresidential land use in 311 United States metropolitan (Extended Urban) areas in 2000 using four measures: intensity, compactness, mixing, and core-dominance. A cluster analysis revealed four distinctive groups of land use patterns: (1) Most-Intense, Least-Compact, Least-Mixed, More-Monocentric Development, (2) Less-Intense, Most-Compact, Less-Mixed, Less-Monocentric Development, (3) Least-Intense, Less-Compact, Most-Mixed, Most-Monocentric Development, (4) More-Intense, More-Compact, More-Mixed, Polycentric Development. Bivariate statistics demonstrated that geographic, historic, economic, demographic, and transport variables differentiate land use pattern types. Based on their multidimensional distinctions, we label the four types of metropolitan areas: Ascendants, Insulars, Redevelopers, and Cosmopolitans.
The paper presents an analytical framework for elucidating the equity and social efficiency criteria that might be used to justify a housing policy aiming for a substantial mix of neighborhood residents by income, ethnicity and/or immigrant status. This framework permits the classification of multivariate statistical studies comprising the Western European evidence base and shows the importance of distinguishing intra- and extra-neighborhood processes when evaluating evidence related to the efficiency criterion. Evaluation of the evidence base in light of this framework reveals that it sufficiently supports a mixing policy aimed at avoiding concentrations of disadvantaged individuals if, and only if, policy makers emphasize equity grounds (i.e. improving the well-being of the disadvantaged absolutely). The evidence base does not support a mixing policy on efficiency grounds, regardless of whether intra-neighborhood social interactions or extra-neighborhood stigmatization/resource restrictions are presumed to be the primary causal mechanism for neighborhood effects.
Virtually all aspects of socioeconomic inequality in the United States are organized in space (Sampson, 2012). The spatial organization of inequality is, in part, simply a manifestation of inequali...
No abstract is provided for this article.
The paper specifies a simultaneous-equation model of metropolitan racial residential segregation and economic disparities. The extent and centralized pattern of SMSA segregation and black-white median income ratios and occupational dissimilarity indices comprise endogenous variables in a four-equation model. Characteristics of the SMSA's population, industrial structure, and labor and housing markets serve as exogenous variables. Parameters are estimated using two-stage least-squares techniques on data for 40 SMSAs sampled by HUD's 1977 Housing Market Practices Survey. Results strongly support the simultaneous-equation specification and indicate the likely severe bias of previous studies. In general, segregation appeared to significantly abet economic disparities, although greater centralization of a larger black community was associated with greater diversity of black occupations. Conversely, income disparities were positively correlated with a more centralized pattern of black residences, and occupational disparities were positively correlated with the extent of segregation.
We explore urban earnings premiums for young, native, rural-to-urban movers in Norway. Using an augmented difference-in-differences estimator (DiD-TR) on microdata we challenge previous claims about urban earnings premium's size and sources. Conventional econometric estimators understate the static premium and overstate dynamic premiums. We find that migrants exhibit lower mean but faster pre-move earnings growth than non-migrants. Post-move, the static earnings premium dominates. The observed trajectory is related to frequent pre-move changes of industrial sector, presumably to obtain better job-worker matches. Post-move, these changes occur less frequently. Highly educated females exhibit largest static premiums (34%), less-educated females least (24%), males an intermediate amount. Our findings suggest that cities primarily generate earnings premiums through agglomeration-based efficiencies and superior job-worker matches varying heterogeneously by education and gender.
