How good assisted housing policy can be good education policy.

Where people grow up can be very important to their educational and other life outcomes. Using evidence from a public housing program in Denver, Colorado, George Galster finds that low-income Latino and African American children who lived for sustained periods in better off neighborhoods were less likely to drop out of secondary school or to repeat a grade. With this in mind, he argues that in order to increase the educational outcomes of low-income minority groups, public housing program planners should locate more subsidized dwellings in neighborhoods with greater advantage

A New Index for Comparing the Diversity of Population Inflows and Population Stocks

The paper introduces a new “diversification index” (DIV), which compares the composition of the current or recent population inflow and the composition of pre-existing population stock, with positive (negative) values signifying a process generating more (less) diversity in the stock. Higher absolute values for DIV signify larger differences in the composition of the inflows and the pre-existing stocks of population. DIV is easy to compute and interpret, adaptable to handle population inflows or outflows, and widely applicable to a variety of phenomena. The paper defines DIV, discusses its properties, and calculates it for several hypothetical cases as a way of showing its intuitive appeal, such as how it would reflect a neighborhood gentrification scenario. DIV indices for both race and income groupings are computed from 1992 to 2006 for three neighborhoods in Chicago to demonstrate how inter-temporal trends in DIV provide insights into neighborhood dynamics. Finally, the paper discusses extensions, potential weaknesses, and other caveats related to the use of DIV in future applied research

Neighborhood variation in early adult educational outcomes: The case of Norway

Individuals originating in different neighborhoods fare differently in later life. Part of this is because families sort non-randomly over the urban landscape; different types of families live in systematically different neighborhoods. Another part of the explanation is that children in different neighborhoods are exposed to different urban opportunity structures. The opportunity structure can exert its influence through social interactive, environmental and institutional factors. Using a multi-level framework applied to a Norwegian register-based data set with complete coverage of 1986-1992 cohorts with siblings, we decompose the variation in high school completion and in enrollment in higher education at age 22 into variances at the levels of family and neighborhood occupied at age seven. The variations in both outcome variables among young adults raised in different neighborhoods are substantively important. The gap in expected high school completion rates between children raised in the upper and lower quartiles of the neighborhood distribution is eleven percentage-points; the equivalent gap in being enrolled in higher education is 16 percentage points. We also find substantial heterogeneity in this neighborhood variation; for example, boys are more vulnerable to neighborhood variations, while children residing with both parents at the age of seven are less vulnerable. We argue that the large variation across neighborhoods in educational outcomes of young adults should be of concern for policymakers. It can both imply a suboptimal utilization of human resources and it can feed into inequalities later on in the lifecourse and harm social cohesion thereby

Evolving United States Metropolitan Land Use Patterns

We investigate spatial patterns of residential and non- residential land use for 257 U.S. metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far the largest changes in our land use metrics occurred in the realm of employment, which became more prevalent per unit of geographic area, but less spatially concentrated and further from the historical urban core, on average. Our exploratory factor analyses reveal that four factors summarize land use patterns in both years, and remained relatively stable across the two years: intensity, compactness, mixing, and core-dominance. Mean factor scores vary by metropolitan population, water proximity, type, and Census region. Improved measurement of metropolitan land use patterns can facilitate policy and planning decisions intended to minimize the most egregious aspects of urban sprawl

Income Diversity Within Neighborhoods and Very Low-Income Families

The past decades have witnessed increasing concern over the family ills engendered by neighborhoods inhabited overwhelmingly by families with limited resources. This study focuses on a different sort of residential context—neighborhoods with substantial income mixing—and the extent to which very low-income (VLI) families—those earning less than 50 percent of the area median income (AMI)—live in them. The study’s primary units of analysis are the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, according to the 2000 Census, and the secondary units of analysis are census tracts. The study specifies six mutually exclusive income groups based on the ratios relative to AMI, as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It also specifies four groups of neighborhoods according to their diversity of the six income groups, as measured by an entropy index. The descriptive results show that in 2000 (1) most neighborhoods had high diversity, although a decline is apparent in the overall income diversity of neighborhoods and in the share comprising high-diversity neighborhoods; (2) no neighborhoods with median incomes of less than 50 percent of AMI had high diversity; (3) 19 percent of all high-diversity neighborhoods (on average) consist of VLI families and 65 percent of all VLI families live in high-diversity neighborhoods, although both percentages have declined since 1970; (4) 5 percent of VLI families live in neighborhoods with median incomes of less than 50 percent of AMI, twice the percentage of 1970 but lower than in 1990; and (5) exposure of VLI families to other VLI families and moderate-income groups has steadily fallen since 1970 and concomitantly increased for families that have very high incomes (VHIs); indeed, the exposure to VHI families is approximately the same as exposure to other VLI families. This article addresses the mixed implications of these trends for the potential socioeconomic mobility of VLI families. This research was presented at Wayne State University\u27s 2010 Sociology Student Research & Awards Day. Presentation slides are included as supplemental materials. This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department

Public Housing Transformation and Crime: Making the Case for Responsible Relocation

The research in this article examines the effect on crime rates of public housing transformation in Atlanta and Chicago, focusing on the neighborhoods receiving households relocated with housing vouchers. Modeling the complex relationship between voucher holder locations and crime, using quarterly data, our analysis found that crime rates fell substantially in neighborhoods with public housing demolition, whereas destination neighborhoods experienced a much lesser effect than popular accounts imply. Nevertheless, on average, negative effects emerge for some neighborhoods with modest or high densities of relocated households compared with conditions in areas without relocated households. Overall, we estimate small net decreases citywide in violent crime over study periods during which crime declined significantly. These findings suggest a need for thoughtful relocation strategies that support both assisted residents and receiving communities