Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves

George C. Galster

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226599991
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on economics, sociology, geography, and psychology, Galsterdelivers a clear-sighted explanation of what neighborhoods are, how they come to be—and what they should be. Urban theorists have tried for decades to define exactly what a neighborhood is. But behind that daunting existential question lies a much murkier problem: never mind how you define them—how do you make neighborhoods productive and fair for their residents? In Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves, George C. Galster delves deep into the question of whether American neighborhoods are as efficient and equitable as they could be—socially, financially, and emotionally—and, if not, what we can do to change that. Galster aims to redefine the relationship between places and people, promoting specific policies that reduce inequalities in housing markets and beyond.

PART 1

Neighborhoods: Overarching Frames and Definitions

ONE

Introduction

Virtually everyone in the United States has grown up or lived in what they would consider a neighborhood. Despite this intimate familiarity, most people have little understanding of the forces that bring neighborhoods into being and make them change, the many ways in which neighborhoods influence our lives, whether these neighborhood-related processes are good or bad for society, and how we might intervene with public policies if we think neighborhood outcomes should be improved. In this book, I shed light on all these dimensions. To use a medical metaphor wherein the neighborhood is the “patient,” this book develops principles for comprehending the etiology of disease, diagnosing the patient, assessing the disease’s consequences for the patient, and providing an efficacious prescription.

More specifically, in this book I address in a holistic, multidisciplinary way the fundamental questions regarding neighborhoods by marshaling a half century worth of theory and evidence from many social sciences. What is the neighborhood? What drives changes in its residents’ economic standing or racial/ethnic composition, physical conditions, and retail activities? How do households and property owners form expectations about neighborhood change and interact with each other? What are the idiosyncrasies of neighborhood change processes? What consequences for human and financial capital transpire when neighborhoods change, and who disproportionately bears the costs of such changes? Why do we have so many blighted neighborhoods and ones that evince little diversity on racial/ethnic or economic grounds? In what dimensions and through what mechanisms do neighborhoods affect their residents? Is the current constellation of American neighborhoods optimal from society-wide perspectives of efficiency and equity? In addressing these questions, I derive eight summary propositions. Based on this diagnostic analysis, I then advance public policy and planning prescriptions for dealing with three most significant problems associated with how we have made our neighborhoods: physical blight, economic segregation, and racial/ethnic segregation.

The Framing of This Book

I ground my analysis on two premises that jointly provide a holistic perspective on neighborhoods.1 First, the nature and dynamics of the phenomenon we call the neighborhood result from the aggregation of individual behaviors driven primarily by two sets of actors—household occupants and owners/developers of residential property—operating within the framework of price signals and constraints provided by a predominantly capitalistic housing market operating at the metropolitan scale. Second, the character and dynamics of the neighborhood, in turn, affect a wide range of perceptions, behaviors, dimensions of well-being and socioeconomic opportunities of its resident adults and children. Put more succinctly, we make our neighborhoods and then they make us.2

In the next two sections, I provide overarching frameworks for these premises. I first focus on the determinants of individual household residential mobility, tenure choice, and residential property investment decisions, synthesizing the existing scholarship on these behaviors. Then I focus on how these two sets of decision makers are behaviorally linked, how their actions get aggregated to produce neighborhood-level outcomes, and how these aggregate outcomes in turn reflect back on the individual decision makers and their families, shaping their perceptions, behaviors, quality of life, and future opportunities. My frameworks are distinguished by their consideration of different spatial scales—individual, neighborhood, local political jurisdiction, and metropolitan area—and how the forces affecting neighborhoods are woven together in a complex web of mutually causal, self-reinforcing relationships.

Making Neighborhoods: Individual Decisions about Residential Mobility, Tenure Choice, and Property Investments

My unified framework for understanding the household’s residential mobility and tenure choice behavior and the dwelling owner’s investment behavior—the fundamental building blocks of neighborhood change—is represented diagrammatically in figure 1.1. In this and succeeding figures, rectangles denote sets of characteristics, attitudes, expectations, and behaviors, and presumed causal linkages between them are shown as arrows or “paths.” In this part of the analysis, for simplicity I consider the stock of existing households, dwellings, and neighborhoods to be predetermined for the decision maker. Though expectations about future changes in existing and new neighborhoods are an essential part of the decision-making process, as I will amplify below, for the most part during the short period when households and property owners are actively deciding where to live, whether to own or rent, and how much to invest in properties, they take the current array of opportunities as essentially fixed. I will consider the longer-term decisions about adding to the housing stock via construction of new properties and rehabilitation of nonresidential properties later in this chapter, and especially in chapter 3.

Figure 1.1. The objective and subjective determinants of individual household residential mobility, tenure, and property investment behaviors

During some short-term “snapshot” period of observation, the objective characteristics of the individual, the current dwelling occupied, the current neighborhood (including interactions with neighbors), prospective dwellings and neighborhoods, and any relevant private or public investments or policies supplying resources to the neighborhood can be considered predetermined—that is, taken as fixed values by the individual decision maker. Based on these currently experienced objective characteristics, the individual will form perceptions, mold beliefs, make subjective evaluations of the current dwelling and neighborhood (perhaps in relation to alternatives), and develop expectations about the future of the neighborhood.3 Based on these objective characteristics and subjective perceptions, beliefs, evaluations, and expectations, the resident household will make a decision about remaining in the current location or moving, in combination with a closely related decision about whether to own or rent the occupied property. Based on analogous inputs, the owner of the dwelling under consideration (who might be the occupying household) will make a decision about whether to sell the property; hold it and either maintain, undermaintain, or improve its quality; or (in the extreme) abandon the property. In the case of owner-occupiers, these latter decisions must be made jointly.4

In sum, my framing posits that several distinct sets of objective characteristics of the individual and the context influence several subjective attributes of the individual. Together these objective, predetermined elements and subjective, “intervening” elements determine individual residential mobility, tenure choice and/or housing investment behavior. The causal impacts of objective individual and contextual characteristics upon these two decisions may be direct and/or indirect; that is, mediated to greater or lesser degree by the intervening subjective elements. Consider now in more detail in the next two subsections what comprises these various elements and how they may be interrelated in the context of received scholarship about residential mobility, tenure choice, and housing reinvestment behaviors.

Residential Mobility Behavior of Households

Five theories of voluntary5 intraurban residential mobility have competed in the scholarly literature for decades, though they typically share many features and the lines among them are often blurred.6 As I will demonstrate, the causal paths in figure 1.1 it views as predominant distinguish each theory.

The first, “life course” theory, posits that households move in a predictable pattern across their lifetimes.7 Households evaluate their current residential situations in light of their current shelter needs associated with their particular stages in life: single, married without children, married with young children, married with older children, and so on. They typically deem the status quo no longer suitable when a new life stage emerges, whereupon mobility transpires. Features and size of the dwelling are often crucial in these situations, neighborhood context less so, from the perspective of life course theory. This theory sees paths E and B/D-R in figure 1.1 as salient.

The second, the “stress” theory, takes the view that households assess whether to move by comparing the satisfaction associated with current and potential residential environments.8 Stress is defined as the difference between current and potential residential satisfaction, and is seen as being directly related to the probability of moving. Life-cycle transitions can generate stress, but so too can neighborhood conditions such as intolerable socioeconomic composition or racial transition. This theory expands the hypothesized salient paths in figure 1.1 to include not only those above in the “life course” theory, but also F/I/K-S.

The third perspective, the “dissatisfaction” theory, posits that mobility is a two-stage process that begins when a threshold of dissatisfaction is exceeded.9 During the initial stage, households evaluate salient aspects of the current residential environment (potentially including those associated with both dwelling and neighborhood) in light of their needs and aspirations, yielding a certain high or low absolute degree of “residential dissatisfaction.” If the household registers sufficient dissatisfaction, it will develop a desire to move and enters into the second stage of the process, which involves actively gathering information to assess alternative residential locations. The members of the household will make the decision to move if they can find a financially feasible alternative that prospectively offers some relief from their dissatisfaction. In this view, background characteristics of both the household and the residential context influence mobility desires and actions only through the intervening variable of the current absolute level of residential dissatisfaction; that is, only paths B/D-R and F/I/K-S in figure 1.1.

The fourth theory, “disequilibrium,” posits that households attempt to maximize their well-being by consuming an “optimal” bundle of residential (dwelling and neighborhood) attributes.10 At any moment, however, households may not reside in their optimal bundle (i.e., be in disequilibrium) because family or current residential circumstances may have changed since the original point of in-moving or because other, superior market opportunities may have arisen subsequently. The probability of moving out is directly related to the degree of such disequilibrium between the households’ current and prospective feasible residential options, and inversely related to housing market search and moving costs. Market search will be undertaken whenever the expected benefits (marginal gain in well-being) of locating a more optimal, feasible alternative exceed the expected search costs. Although the marginal expected benefits of mobility are directly related to the current degree of disequilibrium residential consumption, there is no implicit threshold of absolute disequilibrium involved. Nevertheless, the salient paths in figure 1.1 would still be B/D-R and F/I/K-S.

In the fifth approach, “perceived net advantage,” I synthesized aspects of the above theories and extended from them by drawing from behavioral psychology to include the role of future expectations.11 At any particular moment, households may be seen as holding a multifaceted set of beliefs that inform a potential mobility decision, which concern both current and future (1) household needs and aspirations, (2) dwelling and neighborhood characteristics of occupied location and feasible alternative locations, and (3) financial and other adjustment costs associated with moving. Contemporary and futuristic beliefs are influenced not only by active market search but by passively acquired information gained through commuting, mass media, conversations, and so on.12 Taking into account beliefs about its current and anticipated needs and aspirations, the household will comparatively evaluate which feasible alternative locations (both now and in the future) may best meet them over an extended time horizon. Mobility will be triggered when a feasible alternative evinces a prospective long-term advantage in fulfilling needs/aspirations (net of adjustment costs), as appropriately adjusted for uncertainty and time horizons. From the perspective of the perceived net advantage theory all direct and mediated causal paths to mobility shown in figure 1.1 are of potential salience.

One common implication of all these approaches to residential mobility, with the possible exception of the “life course,” is that undesirable changes in the current neighborhood should increase the propensity to move out.13 Many multivariate statistical studies have supported this implication by identifying several objective neighborhood indicators as robust predictors of greater mobility. These have included increasing crime and declining neighborhood physical quality,14 lower homeownership rates,15 higher (and growing) percentages of black neighbors16 or lower-income neighbors,17 and greater discrepancies between the household’s in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• PART 1. NEIGHBORHOODS: OVERARCHING FRAMES AND DEFINITIONS
• PART 2. MAKING OUR NEIGHBORHOODS
• PART 3. NEIGHBORHOODS MAKING OUR SELVES
• PART 4. REMAKING NEIGHBORHOODS FOR OUR BETTER SELVES
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index