Homebuying in New Orleans Before and After Katrina: Patterns by Space, Race and Income

Natural disasters can conceivably have significant impacts on the “neighborhood sorting” of different racial or economic groups across intrametropolitan space. Using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data we examine mortgage-financed homebuying activity within the New Orleans MSA before and after Hurricane Katrina. We find that, while the total amount of homebuying in the 7-parish New Orleans MSA was relatively unchanged between 2004 and 2006, homebuying in the city declined significantly, and declined most in places experiencing severe storm damage. We also find that after Hurricane Katrina, the proportion of homebuyers in the region and the city who were African-American or low-income declined. Finally, we find that segregation levels of African-American and lower-income homebuyers f declined in the year following Katrina. However, some of this effect is likely due to smaller overall numbers of lower-income and African-American buyers in the region.New Orleans, housing after disasters, segregation

Measuring social segregation between London’s secondary schools, 2003 – 2008/9

Segregation is a spatial outcome of spatial processes that therefore needs to be measured spatially. This is the axiom from which local indices of segregation are developed and applied to the local markets within which schools compete. The indices are used to measure patterns of social segregation between London’s state-funded secondary schools, education authorities, types of selecting and non-selecting schools, and, longitudinally, for cohorts of pupils entering the schools in each of the years from 2003 to 2008. The paper finds sizeable differences between apparently competing schools in the proportions of free school meal eligible pupils they recruit, with selective schools especially and also faith schools under-recruiting such pupils. Whilst there is some evidence that differences between schools have decreased over the period, the trend is considered to be an artefact of using free school meals as a measure of disadvantage, a measure that the paper ultimately questions.segregation, index, secondary schools, selective schools, faith schools, London

Living apart, losing sympathy? How neighbourhood context affects attitudes to redistribution and to welfare recipients

Rising levels of income inequality have been directly linked to rising levels of spatial segregation. In this paper, we explore whether rising segregation may in turn erode support for the redistributive policies of the welfare state, further increasing levels of inequality – a form of positive feedback. The role of the neighbourhood has been neglected in attitudes research but, building on both political geography and ‘neighbourhood effects’ literatures, we theorise that neighbourhood context may shape attitudes through the transmission of attitudes directly and through the accumulation of relevant knowledge. We test this through multilevel modelling of data from England on individual attitudes to redistribution in general and to welfare benefit recipients in particular. We show that the individual factors shaping these attitudes are quite different and that the influence of neighbourhood context also varies as a result. The findings support the idea that neighbourhood context shapes attitudes, with the knowledge accumulation mechanism likely to be the more important. Rising spatial segregation would appear to erode support for redistribution but to increase support for welfare recipients – at least in a context where the dominant media discourse presents such a stigmatising image of those on welfare benefits

"Racial Preferences in a Small Urban Housing Market: A Spatial Econometric Analysis of Microneighborhoods in Kingston, New York"

This paper use spatial econometric models to test for racial preferences in a small urban housing market. Identifying racial preferences is difficult when unobserved neighborhood amenities vary systematically with racial composition. We adopt three strategies to redress this problem: (1) we focus on housing price differences across microneighborhoods in the small and relatively homogenous city of Kingston, New York; (2) we introduce GIS-based spatial amenity variables as controls in the hedonic regressions; and (3) we use spatial error and lag models to explicitly account for the spatial dependence of unobserved neighborhood amenities. Our simple OLS estimates agree with the consensus in the literature that black neighborhoods have lower housing prices. However, racial price discounts are no longer significant when we account for the spatial dependence of errors. Our results suggest that price discounts in black neighborhoods are caused not by racial preferences but by the demand for amenities that are typically not found in black neighborhoods.Housing; Race; Neighborhood Amenities; Spatial Econometrics Commonwealth of Independent States