City & Community

Community Social Capital, Racial Diversity, and Philanthropic Resource Mobilization in the Time of a Pandemic
Hwang H and Lee YJ
Using the county-level data of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in the United States, we test the relationship between communities' social capital and philanthropic resource mobilization during a pandemic and how this relationship is moderated by the racial diversity and the severity of the pandemic in the community. The analysis suggests that the collective monetary contributions to frontline nonprofits responding to pandemics are closely related to the level of social capital in the community. The results also reveal that the positive relationship between social capital and resource mobilization is reinforced in racially diverse communities and when communities are affected by pandemics more severely. Our findings suggest that building inclusive communities by embracing diverse racial groups and individuals will contribute to communities' resilience to pandemics and other disasters.
Residential Segregation under Jim Crow: Whites, Blacks, and Mulattoes in Southern Cities, 1880-1920
Notter IR and Logan JR
We study the residential patterns of blacks and mulattoes in 10 Southern cities in 1880 and 1920. researchers have documented the salience of social differences among African Americans in this period, partly related to mulattoes' higher occupational status. Did these differences result in clustering of these two groups in different neighborhoods, and were mulattoes less separated from whites? If so, did the differences diminish in these decades after reconstruction due a Jim Crow system that did not distinguish between blacks and mulattoes? We use geocoded census microdata for 1880 and 1920 to address these questions. Segregation between whites and both blacks and mulattoes was already high in 1880, especially at a fine spatial scale, and it increased sharply by 1920. In this respect, whites did not distinguish between these two groups. However, blacks and mulattoes were quite segregated from one another in 1880, and even more so by 1920. this pattern did not result from mulattoes' moderately higher-class position. Hence, as the color line between whites and all non-whites was becoming harder, blacks and mulattoes were separating further from each other. understanding what led to this pattern remains a key question about racial identities and racialization in the early twentieth century.
GENTRIFICATION WITHOUT SEGREGATION? RACE, IMMIGRATION, AND RENEWAL IN A DIVERSIFYING CITY
Hwang J
Research on how neighborhood racial composition affects where gentrification unfolds yields mixed conclusions, but these studies either capture broad national trends or highly segregated cities. Drawing on the case of Seattle-a majority-white city with low segregation levels and growing ethnoracial diversity, this study uncovers an underexplored mechanism shaping patterns of uneven development and residential selection in the contemporary city: immigrant replenishment. The share of all minorities is negatively associated with gentrification during the 1970s and 1980s, and, in contrast to expectations, shares of blacks positively predicts recent gentrification while shares of Asians negatively predicts it. Increased concentrations of recent immigrants in neighborhoods with greater shares of Asians explain these relationships. These findings suggest that where arriving immigrants move limits residential selection in gentrification and shifts pressures to low-cost black neighborhoods. This study highlights how immigration and points of entry are important factors for understanding uneven development in the contemporary city and has implications for the future of racial stratification as cities transform.
Double Minority Status and Neighborhoods: Examining the Primacy of Race in Black Immigrants' Racial and Socioeconomic Segregation
Tesfai R
Sociologists have long viewed spatial assimilation as a measure of minorities' socioeconomic progress. While assimilation increases as socioeconomic status (SES) improves, blacks remain more highly segregated than any other race/ethnic group. I use the locational attainment model to determine whether black immigrants-like their U.S.-born counterparts-are highly segregated. This paper broadens the segregation literature by determining: (1) black immigrant segregation patterns after controlling for individual-level characteristics, (2) the extent to which segregation varies by location, and (3) if racial segregation has the same socioeconomic consequences for U.S.- and foreign-born blacks. I find that black immigrants face high racial and socioeconomic segregation in mainly Caribbean settlement areas. However, black immigrants in all but two predominantly African settlement areas experience no segregation. Essentially, I find that there is a great deal of diversity in black immigrants' segregation patterns stemming from differential treatment in the housing market based on African immigrants' higher SES and/or African immigrants' residential choices. Results in the two outlier African settlement areas (Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.) suggest that entry visa may play an important role in black segregation.
Neighborhood Diversity and the Rise of Artist Hotspots: Exploring the Creative Class Thesis through a Neighborhood Change Lens
Graif C
"It Was Love in All the Buildings They Tore Down": How Caregiving Grandmothers Create and Experience a Sense of Community in Chicago Public Housing
Pittman L and Oakley D
About 16,000 families residing in Chicago's public housing have been relocated over the last two decades through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) redevelopment initiative. We situate this paper within a larger conversation about the presence and utilization of community ties within public housing despite the territorial stigmatization of traditional public housing. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 20 Black caregiving grandmothers relocated from Chicago public housing we explore how women charged with performing the lion's share of the kinwork needed to ensure family stability experienced and created a sense of community while living in public housing. We show that by providing (1) safety nets for multiple generations, (2) social support and connections to neighborhood institutions, as well as (3) opportunities for Black activist mothering, these women, often at the heart of vertical lineages, created a sense of community amidst the problems in their communities.
Cultural antecedents to community: An evaluation of community experience in the United States, Thailand, and Vietnam
Muir JA, Braudt DB, Swindle J, Flaherty J and Brown RB
To what extent does community experience differ between low context and high context societies? Prior literature theorizes that consists of two separate, yet highly related concepts: , an individual's general to a place, and , how well an individual's community meets their societal needs. We test this conceptualization of community experience across communities in the US and two Southeast Asian nations: Thailand and Vietnam. We argue that Southeast Asian nations constitute "high context" societies with relatively high social integration and solidarity while the US is more individualized and less socially integrated and thus constitutes a "low context" society. Our results provide empirical evidence that individuals' experience of community varies between low and high context societies. These results demonstrate that cultural context continues to matter in regards to the lived experience of community and researchers need to remain vigilant in accounting for such differences as they seek to examine the concept of community more broadly.
The Influence of Women's Neighborhood Resources on Perceptions of Social Disorder
Jackson AL, Soller B and Browning CR
Research links neighborhood social disorder with poorer health. But factors beyond observed disorder may influence perceptions that social disorder is problematic. This study investigates whether women's aggregate socioeconomic resources relative to men's in the broader neighborhood context attenuate the extent to which more prevalent observed social disorder within the immediate residential neighborhood contributes to perceptions of more problematic social disorder. This attenuation likely is pronounced among women, for whom sexual harassment in public spaces is a more salient concern compared to men. Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, multilevel models analyze individual perceptions of problematic social disorder (N=3,107) regressed on the interactive effect of observed social disorder within the census block group (N=525) and women's relative resources within the neighborhood cluster (N=80). The results show that women's relative resources within the broader neighborhood context protect against women's perceptions that typically undesirable neighborhood conditions are problematic.
Riding the Stagecoach to Hell: A Qualitative Analysis of Racial Discrimination in Mortgage Lending
Massey DS, Rugh JS, Steil JP and Albright L
Recent studies have used statistical methods to show that minorities were more likely than equally qualified whites to receive high cost, high risk loans during the U.S. housing boom, evidence taken to suggest widespread discrimination in the mortgage lending industry. The evidence, however, was indirect, being inferred from racial differentials that persisted after controlling for other factors known to affect the terms of lending. Here we assemble a qualitative database to generate direct evidence of discrimination. Using a sample of 220 statements randomly selected from documents assembled in the course of recent fair lending lawsuits, we code texts for evidence of individual discrimination, structural discrimination, and potential discrimination in mortgage lending practices. We find that 76% of the texts indicated the existence of structural discrimination, with only 11% suggesting individual discrimination alone. We then present a sample of texts that were coded as discriminatory to reveal the way in which racial discrimination was embedded within the social structure of U.S. mortgage lending, and to reveal the specific micro-social mechanisms by which this discrimination was effected.
Residential Segregation is the Linchpin of Racial Stratification
Massey DS
Do Affordable Housing Projects Harm Suburban Communities? Crime, Property Values, and Taxes in Mount Laurel, NJ
Albright L, Derickson ES and Massey DS
This paper offers a mixed-method analysis of the municipal-level consequences of an affordable housing development built in suburban New Jersey. Opponents of affordable housing development often suggest that creating affordable housing will harm surrounding communities. Feared consequences include increases in crime, declining property values, and rising taxes. To evaluate these claims, the paper uses the case of Mt. Laurel, NJ - the site of a landmark affordable housing legal case and subsequent affordable housing development. Employing a multiple time series group control design, we compare crime rates, property values, and property taxes in Mt. Laurel to outcomes in similar nearby municipalities that do not contain comparable affordable housing developments. We find that the opening of the affordable housing development was associated with trends in crime, property values, or taxes, and discuss management practices and design features that may have mitigated potential negative externalities.
The Persistence of Segregation in the 21 Century Metropolis
Logan JR
The traditional black-white color line in the American metropolis is being replaced by a more complex pattern of color lines involving multiple groups with different racial and ethnic origins. The consequences are positive in some respects, but they do not overcome the continuing barriers to equal opportunity. The degree of segregation has receded from the near-apartheid that was created in the black ghettos of Northern cities in the middle decades of the last century. Yet the experience of segregation continues to impact blacks of all economic classes. Today's color lines also involve Hispanics and Asians. The multiethnic metropolis is fostering a degree of neighborhood diversity that used to be quite rare. At the same time all-minority areas, now including blacks, Hispanics, and sometimes Asians, continue to be reproduced, and the disparities in community resources between white and minority neighborhoods remain deeply entrenched.
Affluent Neighborhood Persistence and Change in U.S. Cities
Solari CD
Places are stratified along a hierarchy, with the affluent occupying the most resource-rich neighborhoods. Affluent neighborhood advantages include safety, high quality schools, and proximity to jobs. An additional benefit may be local economic stability over time. In a national context of rising interpersonal income inequality since 1970 and of the Great Recession, trends in neighborhood persistence and change expose this spatial advantage of the affluent. Using census data from 1970 to 2010, I find increasing rates of stability in the affluence and poverty of neighborhoods through 2000, with declines during the last decade. I also find that rates of chronic poverty and persistent affluence are high, ranging between 30 and 35 percent of neighborhoods across the 40-year period. This study highlights the structural persistence of affluence and poverty of neighborhoods as a vehicle for perpetuating social inequality and economic segregation.
Forging Hispanic communities in new destinations: A case study of Durham, NC
Flippen CA and Parrado EA
The Chicago School of urban sociology and its extension in the spatial assimilation model have provided the dominant framework for understanding the interplay between immigrant social and spatial mobility. However, the main tenets of the theory were derived from the experience of pre-war, centralized cities; scholars falling under the umbrella of the Los Angeles school have recently challenged the extent to which they are applicable to the contemporary urban form, which is characterized by sprawling, decentralized, and multi-nucleated development. Indeed, new immigrant destinations, such as those scattered throughout the American Southeast, are both decentralized lack prior experience with large scale immigration. Informed by this debate this paper traces the formation and early evolution of Hispanic neighborhoods in Durham, NC, a new immigrant destination. Using qualitative data we construct a social history of immigrant neighborhoods and apply survey and census information to examine the spatial pattern of neighborhood succession. We also model the sorting of immigrants across neighborhoods according to personal characteristics. Despite the many differences in urban form and experience with immigration, the main processes forging the early development of Hispanic neighborhoods in Durham are remarkably consistent with the spatial expectations from the Chicago School, though the sorting of immigrants across neighborhoods is more closely connected to family dynamics and political economy considerations than purely human capital attributes.
Dominican Immigrants and Discrimination in a New Destination: The Case of Reading, Pennsylvania*
Oropesa RS and Jensen L
The last decade has witnessed the diversification of immigrant destinations in the United States. Although the literature on this phenomenon is burgeoning, research on the experiences of smaller immigrant groups in new destinations is underdeveloped. This is especially the case for those from the Dominican Republic, a group that is expanding beyond the traditional gateway cities of the Northeast. Using a survey of Dominican immigrants in Reading, Pennsylvania, this study has two objectives. The first objective is to describe the prevalence of experiences with institutional and interpersonal discrimination. The second objective is to determine the extent to which these experiences are structured around racial markers (i.e. skin tone), forms of capital, forms of incorporation, and exposure to the U.S. Our results show that a substantial minority of Dominican immigrants claims to have been treated unfairly, primarily because of their "race and ethnicity." In addition, experiences with some types of discrimination are positively associated with skin tone (i.e., darkness) and several factors that are identified in models of assimilation.
The Racial Residential Segregation of Black Single Adults Living Alone
Marsh K and Iceland J
While many studies have examined the intersection of race and class with residential segregation and residential preferences, very little is known about the role played by household composition in shaping residential patterns. This paper focuses on the residential patterns of a particular kind of household: those consisting of persons single and living alone (SALA). We compare the residential segregation of black SALA households-an important subset of non-family households and a rapidly growing segment of the population-from white SALA households and both white and black married-couple households. We examine how group and metropolitan characteristics influence segregation levels for these household types. Using data from the 2000 census, we find that black SALA households are less segregated from white SALA households than from white married-couple households. Multivariate analyses show that smaller income differences across SALA households account for these segregation patterns, indicating the importance of economic resources in influencing residential patterns. Nevertheless, race continues to play an important role, as black SALA household segregation from both kinds of white households is high in absolute terms and relative to their segregation from black married-couple households.