The role of school location in children's air pollution exposure and ability to actively commute is a growing policy issue. Well-documented health impacts associated with near-roadway exposures have led school districts to consider school sites in cleaner air quality environments requiring school bus transportation. We analyze children's traffic-related air pollution exposure across an average Detroit school day to assess whether the benefits of reduced air pollution exposure at cleaner school sites are eroded by the need to transport students by bus or private vehicle. We simulated two school attendance scenarios using modeled hourly pollutant concentrations over the school day to understand how air pollution exposure may vary by school location and commute mode. We found that busing children from a high-traffic neighborhood to a school 19 km away in a low-traffic environment resulted in average daily exposures 2 to 3 times higher than children walking to a local school. Health benefits of siting schools away from high-volume roadways may be diminished by pollution exposure during bus commutes. School districts cannot simply select sites with low levels of air pollution, but must carefully analyze tradeoffs between location, transportation, and pollution exposure.

Race, class, neighborhood, and school quality are all highly inter-related in the American educational system. In the last decade a new factor has come into play, the option of attending a charter school. We offer a comprehensive analysis of the disparities among public schools attended by white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American children in 2010-2011, including all districts in which charter schools existed. We compare schools in terms of poverty concentration, racial composition, and standardized test scores, and we also examine how attending a charter or non-charter school affects these differences. Black and Hispanic (and to a lesser extent Native American and Asian) students attend elementary and high schools with higher rates of poverty than white students. Especially for whites and Asians, attending a charter school means lower exposure to poverty. Children's own race and the poverty and charter status of their schools affect the test scores and racial isolation of schools that children attend in complex combinations. Most intriguing, attending a charter school means attending a better performing school in high-poverty areas but a lower performing school in low-poverty areas. Yet even in the best case the positive effect of attending a charter school only slightly offsets the disadvantages of black and Hispanic students.

Neighborhood-focused activism is one way residents enact their vision for their community. This study examines the neighborhood socioeconomic antecedents of participation in neighborhood-focused activism in a diverse sample of residents of Chicago neighborhoods to test three theories of neighborhood socioeconomic context and participation: 1) affluence affords participation, 2) activism addresses neighborhood needs associated with disadvantage, and 3) socioeconomic inequality creates contention that necessitates participation. Measuring neighborhood socioeconomic status as two unique dimensions, neighborhood affluence and neighborhood disadvantage, and accounting for both individual and neighborhood characteristics, I find support for each theory. Neighborhood socioeconomic context matters for participation, regardless of individual socioeconomic characteristics. Only when these three perspectives are considered jointly can they fully capture the socioeconomic context of participation in neighborhood-focused activism.

This study examines patterns of ethnic residential integration in Great Britain and the United States. Using data from 2000/2001 censuses from these two countries, we compute segregation indexes for comparably-defined ethnic groups by nativity and for specific foreign-born groups. We find that blacks are much less segregated in Great Britain than in the U.S, and black segregation patterns by nativity tend to be consistent with spatial assimilation in the former country (the foreign born are more segregated than the native born) but not in the latter. Among Asian groups, however, segregation tends to be lower in the United States, and segregation patterns by nativity are more consistent with spatial assimilation in the U.S. but not in Great Britain. These findings suggest that intergenerational minority disadvantage persists among blacks in the U.S. and among Asians in Great Britain. We caution, however, that there are important differences in levels of segregation among specific foreign-born Asian groups, suggesting that assimilation trajectories likely differ by country of origin. Finally, the fact that segregation levels are considerably higher in the U.S. for a majority of groups, including white foreign-born groups, suggests that factors not solely related to race or physical appearance drive higher levels of ethnic residential segregation in the U.S.

This study contributes to the debate about tolls' equity impacts by examining the potential economic costs of tolling for low-income and non-low-income households. Using data from the Puget Sound metropolitan region in Washington State and GIS methods to map driving routes from home to work, we examine car ownership and transportation patterns among low-income and non-low-income households. We follow standard practice of estimating tolls' potential impact only on households with workers who would drive on tolled and non-tolled facilities. We then redo the analysis including broader groups of households. We find that the degree of regressivity is quite sensitive to the set of households included in the analysis. The results suggest that distributional analyses of tolls should estimate impacts on all households in the relevant region in addition to impacts on just users of roads that are currently tolled or likely to be tolled.

President Lyndon Johnson's appointment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (Kerner Commission) followed a series of inner-city riots in the 1960s. The Commission's 1968 report, issued months before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, famously concluded that the United States was moving toward separate societies, one Black and one White. In recent years, another version of racialized violence has garnered public attention: systemic police brutality and repeated killings of unarmed Black and Brown men by police, spawning a new civil rights movement proclaiming Black Lives Matter. Condemnation of this violence and acknowledgment of its racial content by leading public officials is now standard fare, but criminal convictions and departmental discipline are scarce. This review essay brings attention back to the institutionalized racism called out by the Kerner Commission, arguing that occasional and even chronic police violence is an outcome rather than the core problem. A more fundamental issue is a routine function of policing-protecting mainstream United States from the perceived risk from its "ghetto" underbelly through spatial containment.

The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) randomly assigned housing vouchers to public housing residents in an experimental test of the effect of neighborhood and location on household outcomes. In terms of adult employment outcomes, the 2 treatment groups did not significantly differ from the control group. We use MTO data to examine whether spatial proximity to jobs and job growth explains this lack of treatment effect. We first estimate differences in access to jobs and job growth for the 3 MTO groups. We then use 2-stage least squares models to test relationships between employment accessibility and 2 key outcomes: employment status and earned income. We find that employment accessibility declined for all groups, and these declines were strongest for the 2 treatment groups. However, our results show essentially no effect of employment proximity on earnings or employment status for MTO participants.

This article examines whether perceived neighborhood ethnic diversity is associated with a range of social outcomes in a postindustrial city undergoing regeneration. The research included a survey in 3 types of deprived area in Glasgow: those undergoing regeneration, those directly adjoining regeneration areas, and those further removed from regeneration areas. In areas undergoing regeneration, perceived diversity was positively associated with many residential, cohesion, safety, and empowerment outcomes. This was also true, although to a lesser extent, in deprived areas at some distance from regeneration areas. In areas immediately surrounding the regeneration areas, perceived diversity had mixed associations with residential and safety outcomes and few associations with cohesion and empowerment outcomes. The results suggest that the effects of perceived diversity are context dependent a city. Moreover, regeneration processes alter neighborhood contexts and therefore enable scale, timing, and duration of diversity to mediate the relationships between perceived diversity and social outcomes.

Our research advances what is known about the urban portion of the Latino diaspora, focusing on the extent to which Hispanic country-of-origin groups have spread throughout metropolitan America. Analyzing 1990-2010 census data for the seven largest origin groups, we find that all seven have become more evenly dispersed across metro areas, with group shares declining in primary gateways and increasing in other types of destinations. At the same time, Dominicans and Cubans remain highly concentrated in New York and Miami, respectively, and certain pairs of groups (e.g., Mexicans and Dominicans) continue to inhabit different metropolises despite a modest trend toward convergent settlement among most pairs. All groups have experienced some growth in exposure to ethnoracial diversity, particularly in primary gateway settings. However, Mexicans are less exposed than any other origin group to African Americans. The variation in our results by group attests to the delicate balance between the forces driving spatial concentration and dispersion. We conclude that multiple diasporas are underway rather than a single, uniform one. This pattern has relevance both for diversity within local Hispanic communities and for relations between Hispanics and other panethnic populations, most notably Whites and Blacks.

Involuntary housing displacement is a stress-inducing life event that can cause and exacerbate both psychological and material hardship. Forced moves may invoke a disattainment process, whereby displaced movers move into lower quality housing and neighborhoods, placing them in a precarious housing position. Employing propensity score analyses, this study uses data from the recent mover module of the American Housing Survey to match recent movers whose moves were voluntary to recent movers whose moves were forced. Results show that moves caused by displacement compared to voluntary moves generally lead to worse housing and neighborhood outcomes. However, these results are dependent on the type of displacement experienced. Movers forced to leave their homes due to eviction move into worse housing and neighborhoods while forced moves caused by private action and foreclosure do not. Meanwhile, forced moves caused by natural hazards or government action result in worse housing, but not neighborhoods.

State Film Incentives (SFIs) are a recent and popular economic development incentive. I study these through case studies of two prominent SFIs: those in Louisiana and New Mexico, using the Abadie et al. (2010) synthetic control case study method. This allows me to estimate the effect of SFIs relative to the "business-as-usual": what would have happened without SFIs. I estimate the effects of these SFIs on filming location, using databases from IMDb and Studio System, and on business establishments, and employment in the motion picture production industry, using the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. My results show increases in feature films, but not TV series filming, employment, or business establishments. This suggests that while there are some benefits to these incentives, their ability, under favorable circumstances, to develop a local film industry is very limited.

An extensive body of literature documents large-scale property-led redevelopment in the world and in China. However, in recent years China has seen the policy shift toward small-scale redevelopment, heritage preservation, and public participation in the regeneration process. Using the pilot project of "micro-regeneration" () in Guangzhou, this paper critically examines these aspects of change. We find that such a policy shift is attributed to increasing social contestations generated by large-scale redevelopment. The state uses heritage preservation to develop creative and cultural industries, which transforms the traditional neighborhood into a commercial and tourist quarter. The policy also encourages participation in urban redevelopment. However, residents still have limited influence over the course of redevelopment. The paper argues that micro-regeneration is a practice of worlding cities in the Chinese institutional context, involving the state dealing with the problems of redevelopment through new governance approaches.

Housing policy in the United States has long been characterized by unequal investment in homeownership and low-income rental assistance, with implications for racial (and ethnic) inequality in access to stable housing. In this study, I examine socioeconomic status and neighborhood characteristics of non-Hispanic White and non-Hispanic Black adults with children receiving HUD rental assistance using a nationally representative linked survey-administrative dataset. Results show that Black and White adults who receive rental assistance tend to have similar (low) incomes, yet Black adults experience significantly higher levels of neighborhood disadvantage than White adults. Furthermore, living in poverty is a substantially stronger predictor of receiving HUD rental assistance for White than Black adults. The results support the notion that rental assistance programs are a last resort for White households, many of whom may benefit from historical federal government support for homeownership. Rental assistance serves as an important safety net for Black families but fails to provide significant improvement in the neighborhood environment. The results contribute to a comprehensive understanding of racial inequality in the impacts of U.S. rental housing policy and the historical legacy of racial exclusion in U.S. homeownership programs.