Google street view shows that gentrification in Chicago has largely bypassed poor minority neighborhoods, reinforcing urban inequality

Gentrification has become a catchphrase in recent decades, signaling a reversal of fortunes for declining neighborhoods and cities. Yet Jackelyn Hwang and Robert Sampson show that race plays a significant role in the degree to which neighborhoods undergo renewal in Chicago, reinforcing durable patterns of urban inequality and revealing the limits of stated preferences for racial diversity. Using Google Street View to collect data on visible indicators of gentrification, they find that neighborhoods suffering from a lack of investment with high concentrations of blacks and Latinos in the mid-1990s had lower levels of reinvestment over the next 14 years. While gentrification does favor a degree of racial diversity, most poor minority neighborhoods have not witnessed widespread reinvestment

Gentrification, Race, and Immigration in the Changing American City

This dissertation examines how gentrification—a class transformation—unfolds along racial and ethnic lines. Using a new conceptual framework, considering the city-level context of immigration and residential segregation, examining the pace and place of gentrification, and employing a new method, I conduct three sets of empirical analyses. I argue that racial and ethnic neighborhood characteristics, including changes brought by the growth of Asians and Latinos following immigration policy reforms in 1965, play an important role in how gentrification unfolds in neighborhoods in US cities. Nonetheless, these processes are conditional on the histories of immigration and the racial structures of each city. The first empirical analysis uses Census and American Community Survey data over 24 years and field surveys of gentrification in low-income neighborhoods across 23 US cities to show that the presence of Asians and, in some conditions, Hispanics, following the passage of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, contributed to early waves of gentrification. The second empirical analysis introduces a method of systematic social observation using Google Street View to detect visible cues of neighborhood change and integrates census data, police records, prior street-level observations, community surveys, proximity to amenities, foreclosure risk data, and city budget data on capital investments. The analysis demonstrates that minority composition, collective perceptions of disorder, and subprime lending rates attenuate the evolution of gentrification across time and space in Chicago. The third analysis uses similar data in Seattle, where segregation levels are low and minority neighborhoods are rare, and shows that a racial hierarchy in gentrification is evident that runs counter to the traditional racial order that marks US society, suggesting changing racial preferences or new housing market mechanisms as Seattle diversifies. By deepening our understanding of the role of race in gentrification, this dissertation sheds light on how neighborhood inequality by race remains so persistent despite widespread neighborhood change.Social Polic

Replication Data for: "Pioneers of Gentrification: Transformation in Global Neighborhoods in Urban America in the Late Twentieth Century."

Few studies have considered the role of immigration in the rise of gentrification in the late twentieth century. Analysis of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data over 24 years and field surveys of gentrification in low-income neighborhoods across 23 U.S. cities reveal that most gentrifying neighborhoods were “ global” in the 1970s or became so over time. An early presence of Asians was positively associated with gentrification; and an early presence of Hispanics was positively associated with gentrification in neighborhoods with substantial shares of blacks and negatively associated with gentrification in cities with high Hispanic growth, where ethnic enclaves were more likely to form. Low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods and neighborhoods that became Asian and Hispanic destinations remained ungentrified despite the growth of gentrification during the late twentieth century. The findings suggest that the rise of immigration after 1965 brought pioneers to many low-income central-city neighborhoods, spurring gentrification in some neighborhoods and forming ethnic enclaves in others

Replication data for: Predators and Prey: Segregation's Effect on Subprime Lending and the Housing Crisis

Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey's (2010) article, "Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis," argues that segregation was a key cause of the foreclosure crisis by creating niche subprime markets of minority clients who were dierentially targeted by predatory lending. Their analytical model fails to demonstrate the role of segregation in the housing crisis. By using an inappropriate outcome variable, having post-treatment bias, and overfitting, their model does not capture the process described in their theory. We improve their analysis using an index of predatory l ending as the outcome variable and demonstrate how subprime lending did indeed concentrate in clusters of high minority areas. We more accurately assess the causal role of segregation using matching techniques. Our findings support their theoretical claim of the important role of segregation in impacting the foreclosure crisis and suggest that segregation had a key role in facilitating the housing bubble burst

"Racial and Spatial Targeting: Segregation and Subprime Lending within and across Metropolitan Areas

Recent studies find that high levels of black-white segregation increased rates of foreclosures and subprime lending across U.S. metropolitan areas during the housing crisis. These studies speculate that segregation created distinct geographic markets that enabled subprime lenders and brokers to leverage the spatial proximity of minorities to disproportionately target minority neighborhoods. Yet, the studies do not explicitly test whether the concentration of subprime loans in minority neighborhoods varied by segregation levels. We address this shortcoming by integrating neighborhood-level data and spatial measures of segregation to examine the relationship between segregation and subprime lending across the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. Controlling for alternative explanations of the housing crisis, we find that segregation is strongly associated with higher concentrations of subprime loans in clusters of minority census tracts but find no evidence of unequal lending patterns when we examine minority census tracts in an aspatial way. Moreover, residents of minority census tracts in segregated metropolitan areas had higher likelihoods of receiving subprime loans than their counterparts in less segregated metropolitan areas. Our findings demonstrate that segregation played a pivotal role in the housing crisis by creating relatively larger areas of concentrated minorities into which subprime loans could be efficiently and effectively channeled. These results are consistent with existing but untested theories on the relationship between segregation and the housing crisis in metropolitan area s