1. For good historical background on Roosevelt and the New Deal program of resettlement communities, see Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959).

2. Perdita Buchan, Utopia New Jersey: Travels in the Nearest Eden (New Brunswick, NJ: Rivergate Books, 2003), 197.

3. Oxford English Dictionary, https://oed-com.ezproxy.umsl.edu/view/Entry/125931?redirectedFrom=neighborhood+#eid.

4. Emily Talen, Neighborhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 11.

5. Bert J. Lott, The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

6. In the parable, each blind man grasps a different part of the elephant. The one feeling the trunk says it is a snake, the one grasping a leg says it is a tree, and so on. Only by putting the different parts together does one realize, of course, that it is an elephant.

7. Talen, Neighborhood, 4, 247–54. We feel, however, that what she defines as “everyday” is actually deeply and, in the context of twenty-first-century society, unrealistically aspirational.

8. We thank Karen Black for alerting us to this point.

9. George Knight, quoted in “A Knight to Remember,” NeighborWorks Journal 18, nos. 3–4 (2000): 27.

10. See Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80. Reflecting its influence, according to Google Scholar (accessed November 9, 2022), this article has been cited more than sixty-seven thousand times.

11. Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 12.

12. Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).

13. The term is of fairly recent coinage and was first explored in depth in Paul Brophy, ed., On the Edge: America’s Middle Neighborhoods (New York: American Assembly, 2016). Brophy, a veteran and widely respected figure in the field of community development, deserves recognition for originating and disseminating the idea.

14. Henry S. Webber, “Local Public Policy and Middle Neighborhoods,” in On the Edge: America’s Middle Neighborhoods, 165.

15. Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos, “The Measurement of Partisan Sorting for 180 Million Voters,” Nature Human Behavior 5, no. 8 (2021): 998–1008, 1005.

16. Joe Cortright, “Less in Common,” City Observatory, June 2015, http://cityobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/CityObservatory_Less_In_Common.pdf.

1. Suzanne Keller, The Urban Neighborhood: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Random House, 1968), 29.

2. An influencial source on the tension between ethnic/racial diversity and social capital and civic involvement is Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–74.

3. J. Eric Oliver, The Paradoxes of Integration: Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multiethnic America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

4. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 314.

5. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 77–78. Putnam describes Jacobs as “one of the inventors” of the term “social capital.” Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 308.

6. Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 158.

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America—Volume 2, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012 [1835]), chap. 8.

8. Nancy L. Rosenblum, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

9. Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

10. Rosenblum, Good Neighbors, 2.

11. The seminal essay on weak ties is Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Social Networks 78, no. 6 (1977): 1360–80.

12. Robert D. Putnam, “Social Capital Primer,” n.d., http://robertdputnam.com/bowling-alone/social-capital-primer/ (brackets in the original).

13. Collective efficacy can also be an important concept for understanding behavior in institutions such as schools and workplaces.

14. See, among others, Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy,” Science 277, no. 5328 (1997): 918–24; and Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Robert J. Sampson, and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Neighborhood Inequality, Collective Efficacy, and the Spatial Dynamics of Urban Violence,” Criminology 39, no. 3 (2001): 517–58. From the publication of that 1997 essay to the present thousands of scholarly papers have been published on the theme of collective efficacy.

15. Putnam (Bowling Alone, 446) traces the origin of the distinction between “bridging” and “bonding” social capital to Ross Gittell and Avis Vidal, Community Organizing: Building Social Capital as a Development Strategy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998).

16. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962).

17. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” 1373–76.

18. See, for example, Timothy J. Haney, “ ‘Broken Windows’ and Self-Esteem: Subjective Understandings of Neighborhood Poverty and Disorder,” Social Science Research 36, no. 3 (2007): 968–94.

19. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 55.

20. See especially Raj Chetty et al., “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 25147, 2018. The Equality of Opportunity Project has developed an interactive website that enables you to see how different neighborhoods affect the chance of escaping from poverty: “The Opportunity Atlas,” https://www.opportunityatlas.org/.

21. For a synthesis of the research on how place impacts economic success, see Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, 3rd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 62–67. For a synthesis of how neighborhood conditions affect children, see Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), chap. 6.

22. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has created an interactive website where one can compare life expectancy for individual census tracts with the county, state, and nation. “Life Expectancy: Could Where You Live Influence How Long You Live?,” Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, n.d., https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/interactives/whereyouliveaffectshowlongyoulive.html.

23. Nancy E. Adler and Katherine Newman, “Socioeconomic Disparities in Health: Pathways and Policies,” Health Affairs 21, no. 2 (2002): 60–76.

24. Mark Gapen et al., “Perceived Neighborhood Disorder, Community Cohesion, and PTSD Symptoms among Low-Income African Americans in an Urban Health Setting,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81, no. 1 (2011): 31.

25. Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace, The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York: Norton, 2018), 86–87.

26. Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 85, 126.

27. Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Children Living in High-Poverty, Low-Opportunity Neighborhoods,” September 24, 2019, https://www.aecf.org/resources/children-living-in-high-poverty-low-opportunity-neighborhoods/. Concentrated poverty is defined here as census tracts with 30 percent or higher poverty rates.

28. Robert Sampson (Great American City, chap. 10) stresses the importance of the broader spatial context or a “neighborhood’s neighbors.”

29. It is actually a series of economic decisions rather than a single decision, as it is often characterized, because relatively few families who buy a home buy just one and instead buy two or more, often interrupted by spells of renting, during their lifetimes.

30. See, e.g., Allison Wainer and Jeffrey Zabel, “Homeownership and Wealth Accumulation for Low-Income Households,” Journal of Housing Economics 47 (2020): 101624; Alan Mallach, “Building Sustainable Ownership: Rethinking Public Policy toward Lower-Income Homeownership,” Discussion paper, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 2011.

31. As reported in Valerie Wilson, “Racial Disparities in Income and Poverty Remain Largely Unchanged amid Strong Income Growth in 2019,” Working Economics Blog, Economic Policy Institute, September 16, 2020, https://www.epi.org/blog/racial-disparities-in-income-and-poverty-remain-largely-unchanged-amid-strong-income-growth-in-2019/; and Emily Moss et al., “The Black-White Wealth Gap Left Black Households More Vulnerable,” The Brookings Institution, December 8, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/12/08/the-black-white-wealth-gap-left-black-households-more-vulnerable/.

32. Dan Immergluck, Stephanie Earl, and Allison Powell, “Black Homebuying after the Crisis: Appreciation Patterns in Fifteen Large Metropolitan Areas,” City & Community 18, no. 3 (2019): 983–1002.

33. For a summary of seven studies that examine the search method for finding jobs, see Katherine M. O‘Regan, “The Effect of Social Networks and Concentrated Poverty on Black and Hispanic Youth Unemployment,” Annals of Regional Science 27, no. 4 (1993): 329.

34. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.”

35. Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration (New York: Free Press, 1999), 2, 19 and 12.

36. Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers (New York: Abrams, 2018), 12.

37. Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “Growth in the Residential Segregation of Families by Income, 1970–2009,” US 2010 Project, November 2011, https://s4.ad.brown.edu/projects/diversity/Data/Report/report111111.pdf.

38. Joseph Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi, “Lost in Place: Why the Persistence and Spread of Concentrated Poverty—Not Gentrification—Is Our Biggest Urban Challenge,” City Observatory, December 9, 2014.

39. Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 16.

40. Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, 128. See also Putnam, Bowling Alone, 42.

41. Cortright, “Less in Common,” City Observatory, September 6, 2015, https://cityobservatory.org/less-in-common/.

42. Neil Caren, “Big City, Big Turnout? Electoral Participation in American Cities,” Journal of Urban Affairs 29, no. 1 (2007): 42. See also Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism and American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72.

43. “Who Votes for Mayors?,” http://www.whovotesformayor.org/, n.d. Notably, in every city the median age of actual voters was higher, usually much higher, than the median age of eligible voters.

44. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 35.

45. Putnam, 283.

46. For a review of the literature on internet use and social capital that supports a generally positive relationship, see Barbara Barbosa Neves, “Social Capital and Internet Use: The Irrelevant, the Bad, and the Good,” Sociology Compass 7, no. 8 (2013): 599–611. See also Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman, “Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb,” City and Community 2 no. 3 (2003): 277–311.

47. The classic work on “third places” is Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (Boston: Da Capo, 1989).

48. Analysis by authors using 1960 US Census Bureau and 2019 5-Year American Community Survey data.

49. James A. Sweet and Larry L. Bumpass, American Families and Households (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1987), table 9.2; US Census Bureau, 2000 and 2010 decennial censuses; 2017 American Community Survey, all as reported in Alicia Vanorman and Linda R. Jacobsen, U.S. Household Composition Shifts as the Population Grows Older: More Young Adults Live with Parents, Population Reference Bureau, February 12, 2020.

50. As reported in Vanorman and Jacobsen, U.S. Household Composition Shifts.

51. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 97.

52. Based on Current Population Survey data, as reported in Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Characteristics of Families—2019,” News release, April 20, 2022, US Department of Labor, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf.

53. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 28.

54. Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Knopf, 1991).

55. There is a significant amount of literature on this point. See especially Justin P. Steil, Len Albright, Jacob S. Rugh, and Douglas S. Massey, “The Social Structure of Mortgage Discrimination,” Housing Studies 33, no. 5 (2018): 759–76.

56. US Census and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data (authors’ files).

57. Alec MacGillis, “Amazon and the Breaking of Baltimore,” New York Times, March 9, 2021.

58. Zillow, listing for 910 Savannah Street SE, https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/910-Savannah-St-SE-Washington-DC-20032/527250_zpid/.

59. Analysis by authors of Zillow House Value Index by metropolitan area for June 30, 2011, https://www.zillow.com/research/data/.

1. Bill Turque, “Are Cities Obsolete?” Newsweek, September 9, 1991.

2. Zachary Karabell, “The Golden Age of American Cities—And What’s Really Behind It,” The Atlantic, October 25, 2013.

3. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Knopf, 2012), 7.

4. Edward Luce, “The Future of the American City,” Financial Times, June 7, 2013.

5. See Christoper Leinberger, “The Next Slum?,” The Atlantic, March 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-next-slum/306653/.

6. Our approach has many similarities to assemblage and complexity theory in geography. For an introduction to these theories and their application to neighborhood change in Leipzig, Germany, see Katrin Grossmann and Annegret Haase, “Neighborhood Change beyond Clear Storylines: What Can Assemblage and Complexity Theories Contribute to Understandings of Seemingly Paradoxical Neighborhood Development,” Urban Geography 37, no. 5 (2016): 727–47.

7. William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun,” in Faulkner, Novels: 1942–1954, ed. Joseph Bloom and Noel Park (New York: Library of America, 1994), 535.

8. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1–24.

9. We agree with Kenneth Temkin and William Rohe, “Neighborhood Change and Urban Policy,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 15, no. 3 (1996): 159–70, who call housing filtering a “reformulation of the invasion/succession approach” (160).

10. Robert W. Park, “The City as a Social Laboratory,” in Chicago: An Experiment in Social Research, ed. T. V. Smith and Leonard D. White, 1–19 (New York: Greenwood, 1929).

11. Roderick D. McKenzie, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community,” in The City, ed. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 73.

12. Robert E. Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in The City, 54–56.

13. Park, “The City as a Social Laboratory,” 14.

14. Park, 14.

15. Homer Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, DC: Federal Housing Administration, 1939), 116.

16. Frederick Babcock, The Valuation of Real Estate (New York: McGraw Hill, 1932), 75 (our emphasis).

17. Edgar M. Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).

18. Real Estate Research Corporation, The Dynamics of Neighborhood Change (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1975).

19. John T. Metzger, “Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life-Cycle Theory and National Urban Policy,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1 (2000): 7–40.

20. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 25, 264. In the latter part of the passage, Jacobs is quoting Dr. Warren Weaver from the 1958 Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation.

21. Jacobs, 171.

22. William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962).

23. Andreis Skaburskis, “Filtering, City Change and the Supply of Low-Priced Housing in Canada,” Urban Studies 43, no. 3 (2006): 533–58; C. Tsuriel Somerville and Cynthia Holmes. “Dynamics of the Affordable Housing Stock: Microdata Analysis of Filtering,” Journal of Housing Research (2001): 115–40.

24. Rolf Goetze, Understanding Neighborhood Change: The Role of Expectations in Urban Revitalization (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger. 1979).

25. Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr. and Paul C. Brophy, Neighborhood Revitalization (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1975).

26. Temkin and Rohe, “Neighborhood Change and Urban Policy.”

27. Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, “Are the Suburbs Losing Status?,” Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard, February 4, 2019, https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/are-the-suburbs-losing-status.

28. This is true of Manhattan but not of New York City as a whole.

29. Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014).

30. There are a few examples of (somewhat) controlled experiments in housing policy. In the 1970s the federal government applied housing vouchers to different metropolitan areas to study their effects, and later the Moving to Opportunity demonstration program assigned households in a quasi-random manner to housing mobility programs and studied their effects. In neither case, however, were neighborhoods the focus of the experiment.

31. The strength of the association is measured in terms of statistical significance; for example, a statistical test may show that it is significant at the .05 level, meaning there is only a 5 percent likelihood that the association is due to chance or that a particular variable is responsible for X percent of the variation in another variable.

32. Angus Deaton, “Instruments of Development: Randomization in the Tropics, and the Search for the Elusive Keys for Economic Development,” London: The Keynes Lecture, British Academy, October 9, 2008; quoted in Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 378.

33. Sampson, Great American City, esp. 378–80.

34. Sampson, 379 (our emphasis).

35. Lin Cui and Randall Walsh, “Foreclosure, Vacancy and Crime,” Journal of Urban Economics 87 (2015): 72–84.

36. For an introduction to systems dynamics modeling for the social sciences, see George P. Richardson, Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

37. Chicago School scholars had a similarly sanguine attitude toward the most distressed areas, arguing that they performed a valuable function by accommodating those at the bottom of the labor market. Adverse neighborhood conditions motivate those households, as they move up in the labor market, to move out and assimilate into American society. Efforts to improve conditions in those areas would then create a kind of moral hazard, encouraging people to stay in areas that were ultimately dysfunctional. For an early critique of human ecology’s reliance on the individualistic model of classical economics, see William Form, “The Place of Social Structure in the Determination of Land Use: Some Implications for a Theory of Urban Ecology,” Social Forces 32, no. 4 (1954): 317–23.

38. George C. Galster, Roberto G. Quercia, and Alvaro Cortes, “Identifying Neighborhood Thresholds: An Empirical Exploration,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 3 (2000): 701–32.

39. George Galster, Making Our Neighborhood, Making Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

40. George C. Galster, Homeowners and Neighborhood Reinvestment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987).

41. Michael Schubert, “Through a Glass Darkly: Trying to Make Sense of Neighborhood Revitalization,” paper prepared for the Workshop on Neighborhood Change in Legacy Cities sponsored by the Center for Community Progress and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2016, 1.

42. For a discussion of the role of state government in driving or thwarting urban revitalization, see Alan Mallach, From State Capitols to City Halls: Smarter State Policies for Stronger Cities (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2022).

43. Robert K. Merton, “On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 39.

1. Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities and Democracy in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

2. Lance Freeman, A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

3. Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “Changing Contexts: Neighborhood Definition and Urban Organization,” American Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1985): 357–67. One dissenter making a claim for the importance of neighborhoods in eighteenth-century America is Carl Abbott, whose research focused on New York City, arguably then as now an outlier on the American urban scene. See Carl Abbott, “The Neighborhoods of New York, 1760–1775,” New York History, 55, no. 1 (1974): 35–54.

4. Charles Duff, The North Atlantic Cities (Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2019), 131.

5. By comparison, Manchester’s population grew by six thousand per year from 1801 to 1851, a growth rate seen as explosive at the time.

6. The US West then being Ohio, Michigan, and other states east of and along the Mississippi River.

7. Harvey W. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 38.

8. See Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 18–22.

9. “History,” Llewellyn Park, n.d., http://llewellynpark.com/Page/13266~93841/History.

10. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scribner, 1890), 21–22.

11. Oliver Zunz, Detroit’s Ethnic Neighborhoods at the End of the Nineteenth Century, revised ed. (Ann Arbor: Center for Research on Social Organization, University of Michigan, 1978), 4.

12. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum, 4.

13. Zorbaugh, 34.

14. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 64–65.

15. Anne Sinclair Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” in “Residents of Hull-House,” Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895), 5.

16. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 105.

17. Peter Krass, Carnegie (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2002), quoted in “Andrew Carnegie: Pittsburgh Pirate” (book review), The Economist, January 30, 2003.

18. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 125.

19. Florence Kelley, “The Sweating System” in Hull-House Maps and Papers, 38.

20. Kay Hymowitz, “Review of City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, by Tyler Anbinder,” New York Times, November 1, 2016.

21. Steve Chicon, “Buffalo in the ’20s: The Polish Colony ‘Out Broadway,’ ” Buffalo News, January 2, 2017.

22. Alzada P. Comstock, “Chicago Housing Conditions, VI: The Problem of the Negro.” American Journal of Sociology 18 (1912): 241–57, cited in John R. Logan, Weiwei Zhang, and M. D. Chunyu, “Emergent Ghettos: Black Neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880–1940,” American Journal of Sociology 120, no. 4 (2015): 1055–94 (our emphasis).

23. “Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan of Race Segregation,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 25, 1910.

24. Although the First Great Migration is generally described as taking place from 1910 to 1940, nearly all of the migration took place before the Great Depression. See Charles Hirschman and Elizabeth Mogford, “Immigration and the American Industrial Revolution from 1880 to 1920,” Social Science Research 38, no. 4 (2009): 897–920.

25. St. Clair Drake and Horace A. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 62.

26. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 17.

27. Buchanan v. Warley (245 U.S. 60).

28. Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 82.

29. Detroit Free Press, June 3, 1917, quoted in Beth Tomkin Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 97.

30. During the 1920s, the nation’s housing stock grew at a rate more than double that of the recent 2001–2005 housing bubble. Between 1923 and 1927 there were 4.36 million housing starts, representing an increase of 16.5 percent in the 1920 housing stock. By comparison, there were 9.18 million starts between 2001 and 2005, the peak years of the early twenty-first-century boom, representing an increase of 7.8 percent in the 2000 housing stock.

31. “When Chicago Buildings Were Built,” Chicago Tribune, September 5, 2014, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-when-chicago-buildings-were-built-20140905-htmlstory.html.

32. This is in dispute among urban historians. Based on the percentage of foreign-born residents, some scholars have argued that there was a significant increase in spatial integration of ethnic communities during this period. Eriksson and Ward, however, make the point, which we find compelling, that the reported fall in segregation is somewhat misleading. Immigrants lived near native-born people, but the latter were often the children of immigrants from the same source country. If researchers measure segregation from the third-plus generation (i.e., US-born to US-born parents), then the level of segregation was higher. Katherine Eriksson and Zachary A. Ward, “The Ethnic Segregation of Immigrants in the United States from 1850 to 1940,” Working paper 24764, National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2018.

33. Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 203.

34. Looker, Nation of Neighborhoods, 23.

35. Jack Smith “Give Me Shelter: L.A.’s Post-WWII Housing Shortage Foreshadowed the Crisis of the 1980s,” Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1989, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-17-tm-78-story.html.

36. Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese. “Suburbanization in the United States after 1945,” American History, Oxford Research Encyclopedias, April 26, 2017, http://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-64.

37. Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration 1966–1999 (New York: Free Press, 1999), 3.

1. Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999 (New York: Free Press, 1999), 4.

2. Leah Boustan, “The Culprits behind White Flight,” New York Times, May 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/white-flight.html.

3. One factor affecting the magnitude of each city’s urban exodus was whether there was still room to build new houses inside the city limits. Many cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit, still had vacant land within their boundaries. Thousands of new homes, mostly the row houses Philadelphians knew well, were built in the 1950s in the part of Philadelphia known as the Far Northeast. Many white families who might otherwise have bought in the surrounding suburbs moved there.

4. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 331.

5. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 214.

6. Our account draws from Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chap. 11.

7. Homer Hoyt, “The Future Trend of Land Values,” Appraisal Journal 12, no. 2 (1944): 121–26.

8. Homer Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1939), 62.

9. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 213.

10. Jackson, 215.

11. For an insightful synthesis of how the changes of the era were perceived and presented, see Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), esp. 109–31.

12. Beauregard, 94.

13. Joseph D. McGoldrick, “The Superblock Instead of Slums,” New York Times Magazine (November 19, 1944), 54. See also Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 81.

14. Wendell E. Pritchett, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 250–51.

15. Steve Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 159.

16. Anthony Downs, Urban Problems and Prospects (Chicago: Markham, 1970), 204–5.

17. Interview on WNDT-TV, New York City, May 28, 1963, cited in W. B. Dickinson Jr., “Urban Renewal under Fire,” Editorial Research Reports, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1963).

18. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 65 (citing federal statistics). The statistics that were published by the federal Urban Renewal Agency conflated Black and Puerto Rican households into a single “non-white” category. Outside a handful of cities, most notably New York City, however, the great majority of these households were African American.

19. Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, 53 estimates that as of the end of 1962, 427,000 families were impacted by urban renewal, including 260,000 living in approved urban renewal areas (counted by the federal government), and another 167,000 in areas that were in the planning stages as of 1962. Since relatively few new urban renewal projects went into planning after 1962 until the program’s demise in 1974, 500,000 families would appear to be a reasonable outside estimate.

20. “Urban Renewal Project Characteristics, June 30, 1966” (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing & Urban Development), 28–29; from University of Richmond, Digital Scholarship Lab, “Renewing Inequality: Urban Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race 1950–1966,” https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/renewal/#view=0/0/1&viz=cartogram.

21. For a vivid first-person account of what life was like in Mill Creek Valley before urban renewal, see Vivian Gibson, The Last Children of Mill Creek (Lakewood, OH: Belt Publishing, 2020).

22. The recent construction of Citypark, a state-of-the-art major league soccer stadium, has added some vitality to the area.

23. John Williamson, Federal Aid to Roads and Highways since the 18th Century: A Legislative History (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2012), 12.

24. Katherine M. Johnson, “Captain Blake versus the Highwaymen: Or, How San Francisco Won the Freeway Revolt,” Journal of Planning History 8, no. 1 (2009): 60.

25. Similarly, with equally devastating effect on many cities’ fabric and quality of life, urban parks and waterfronts also became “targets of opportunity” for highway construction.

26. Johnson, “Captain Blake,” 74.

27. A survey conducted by the federal Department of Transportation in 1967 and 1968 identified 123 separate freeway revolts. Raymond A. Mohl, “The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing and the Freeway Revolt” (Washington, DC: Poverty & Race Research Action Council, 2002), https://www.prrac.org/pdf/mohl.pdf.

28. Robert Fisher, Let the People Decide: Neighborhood Organizing in America, updated ed. (New York: Twayne, 1994), 99.

29. Quoted in “History,” Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, n.d., https://restorationplaza.org/history/.

30. Sara E. Stoutland, “Community Development Corporations: Mission, Strategy and Accomplishments,” in Urban Problems and Community Development, ed. Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 198.

31. See Benjamin Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities and Democracy in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 259–89.

32. National Commission on Neighborhoods, People Building Neighborhoods: Final Report to the President and the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979), vii.

33. Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods, 332.

34. Leah Platt Boustan, “Was Postwar Suburbanization ‘White Flight’? Evidence from the Black Migration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 1 (2010): 417.

35. See Ann B. Shlay and Gordon Whitman, “Research for Democracy: Linking Community Organizing and Research to Leverage Blight Policy,” City & Community 5, no. 2 (2006): 162; and Econsult Corporation, Penn Institute for Urban Research, and May 8 Consulting, Vacant Land Management in Philadelphia: The Costs of the Current System and the Need for Reform, report prepared for Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, 2010.

36. Charles C. Branas, David Rubin, and Wensheng Guo, “Vacant Properties and Violence in Neighborhoods,” ISRN Public Health (2012): 1–23.

37. Erwin de Leon and Joseph Schilling, Urban Blight and Public Health: Addressing the Impact of Substandard Housing, Abandoned Buildings, and Vacant Lots (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2017), 11.

38. de Leon and Schilling, 12.

39. Philip Brownstein speech, October 23, 1967, quoted in Sarah Rachel Siegel, “ ‘By the People Most Affected’: Model Cities, Citizen Control, and the Broken Promises of Urban Renewal” (PhD diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 2019), 58–59.

40. John McClaughry, “The Troubled Dream: The Life and Times of Section 235 of the National Housing Act,” Loyola University Law Journal 6 (1975): 1.

41. Steven Arthur Waldhorn and Judith Lynch Waldhorn, “Model Cities: Liberal Myths and Federal Interventionist Programs,” Urban Law Annual (1972): 48.

42. Susanne Schindler, “Model Cities Redux,” Urban Omnibus, October 26, 2016, https://urbanomnibus.net/2016/10/model-cities-redux/.

43. Office of Community Development, Evaluation Division, The Model Cities Program: A Comparative Analysis of City Response Patterns and Their Relation to Future Urban Policy (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1973), 80.

44. Jody H. Schechter, “An Empirical Evaluation of the Model Cities Program” (BA thesis, University of Michigan, 2011).

45. The earliest work found in a Google search of over 100 works with the words “neighborhood dynamics” in the title was from 1974. Of 107 works searched, nearly two-thirds appeared after 2000.

46. Neal M. Cohen, “The Reagan Administration’s Urban Policy.” Town Planning Review 54, no. 3 (1983): 304.

47. Beauregard, Voices of Decline, 247.

48. Paul E. Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 20 and 30.

49. Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York: Norton, 2018), 15.

50. Ta-Nehisi Coates, A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood (New York: Random House, 2008), quoted in Sharkey, Uneasy Peace, 18.

51. Sharkey, Uneasy Peace, 20.

52. As we write, violent crime is increasing across major American cities, though for the most part crime rates are still below where they were at their peak in the 1990s. It remains to be seen whether this increase in crime is a temporary result of COVID-19 and its attendant economic damage or whether it reflects a longer-term change.

53. Assessments of the number of CDCs that exist vary widely depending on the source and the definition used. The number cited in text, from Stoutland (“Community Development Corporations,” 198, excludes nonurban organizations as well as those that are not explicitly neighborhood-based. A more universal definition, used in a survey by the now-defunct National Congress for Community Economic Development, came up with a number more than three times as great. Many of these organizations were exiguous in the extreme.

54. The tools-based approach to public policies used in this chapter is based on Lester M. Salamon, ed., The Tools of Government: A Guide to the New Governance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

55. Enterprise Community Partners, “How It All Started,” https://www.enterprisecommunity.org/about/founding-story#:~:text=Jim%20and%20Patty%20Rouse%2C%20inspired,up%20and%20out%20of%20poverty.

56. Robert Kuttner, “Ethnic Renewal,” New York Times, May 9, 1976.

57. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development maintains a national data base on LIHTC projects: “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC),” https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/lihtc.html.

58. While this is the statutory minimum, in practice most credits are awarded subject to commitments for much longer periods of low-income occupancy, generally at least thirty years and often much longer.

59. Chester Hartman, “Debating the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit: Feeding the Sparrows by Feeding the Horses,” Shelterforce, January–February 1992, 12.

60. Jesse Drucker and Eric Lipton, “How a Trump Tax Break to Help Poor Communities Became a Windfall for the Rich,” New York Times, August 31, 2019.

61. Dees Stribling, “A Yacht Club, Michael Milken and Tesla: Meet 10 of the Nation’s Swankiest Opportunity Zones,” Bisnow, August 24, 2020, https://www.bisnow.com/national/news/opportunity-zones/10-upscale-opportunity-zones-105712.

62. Center for Community Change, Opening the Door to Homes for All: The 2016 Housing Trust Fund Report (Washington, DC: Center for Community Change, 2016), 3, 6, and 17.

63. David Erickson, The Housing Policy Revolution: Networks and Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 2009), 172–73.

64. Erickson, 127.

65. On flexible specialization, see Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The New Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

66. An early analysis of the importance of network governance in community development systems is Langley C. Keyes et al., “Networks and Nonprofits: Opportunities and Challenges in an Era of Federal Devolution,” Housing Policy Debate 7, no. 2 (1996): 201–29. Our treatment also draws on Erickson, The Housing Policy Revolution.

1. For a more extensive treatment of the material discussed in the first part of this chapter, see Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), particularly chaps. 2 and 3.

2. The earliest use of this term that we have been able to discover is in Elizabeth Chang et al., “The March of the Millennials: As Young People Flood into the City, the Only Constant Is Change,” Washington Post, October 18, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2013/10/18/march-of-the-millennials/.

3. Thomas E. Bier, Housing Dynamics in Northeast Ohio: Setting the Stage for Resurgence (Cleveland, OH: MSL Academic Endeavors eBooks, 2017), 28, http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/4.

4. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), esp. pages 310–29. For a more detailed description of conditions in Park Forest today, see Mallach, The Divided City, 162–65.

5. John Ostenburg, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in Park Forest, Illinois,” Confronting Suburban Poverty, blog post, February 5, 2014, http://confrontingsuburbanpoverty.org/2014/02confronting-suburbaqn-poverty-in-park-forest-illinois/ (site discontinued).

6. Wava G. Haney and Eric S. Knowles, “Perception of Neighborhoods by City and Suburban Residents,” Human Ecology 6, no. 2 (1978): 201–14.

7. Jeanne R. Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time (New York: Random House, 1967).

8. See “Neighborhoods: Highlighted Programs & Upcoming Events,” Garland, Texas, https://www.garlandtx.gov/2107/Neighborhoods.

9. “American Neighborhood Change,” University of Minnesota, n.d., https://www.law.umn.edu/institute-metropolitan-opportunity/gentrification.

10. Joe Cortright, “Lost in Place,” City Observatory, September 12, 2014, http://cityobservatory.org/lost-in-place/ (our emphasis).

11. Defined here as those with a median household income between 80 percent and 120 percent of the citywide median.

12. A thoughtful summary of the problems of the subprime market, written as the crisis was unfolding, is Randall Dodd and Paul Mills, “Outbreak: U.S. Subprime Contagion,” Finance and Development 45, no. 2 (June 2008), https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2008/06/dodd.htm#author.

13. Richard Greenberg and Chris Hansen, “If You Had a Pulse, We Gave You a Loan,” NBC News, March 22, 2009, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29827248.

14. Alan Mallach, “Lessons from Las Vegas: Housing Markets, Neighborhoods, and Distressed Single-Family Property Investors,” Housing Policy Debate 24, no. 4 (2014): 769–801.

15. The Reinvestment Fund, NIC Reports Nationwide Summary, Department of Housing and Urban Development. March 21, 2014, https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/NICReportsNationwideSummary.pdf.

This study, which compared areas that had received concentrated Neighborhood Stabilization Program investment with control areas in the same city or county, found that the outcomes of the subject areas compared to the controls were not different from would be expected in a random draw. A more ambitious study funded by HUD also found no statistically significant relationship between Neighborhood Stabilization Program investment and neighborhood outcomes. Jonathan Spader et al., The Evaluation of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, HUD User, 2015, https://www.huduser.gov/publications/pdf/neighborhood_stabilization.pdf.

16. The data is not for these neighborhoods, which have imprecise boundaries, as a whole, but in each case are for a single census tract in each neighborhood, as follows: Lincoln Park (Tract 713), Wicker Park (Tract 2415), Chatham (Tract 4402.02), and South Shore (Tract 4304).

17. Among the many studies documenting these patterns, see Gregory D. Squires, Derek S. Hyra, and Robert N. Renner, “Metropolitan Segregation and the Subprime Lending Crisis,” Housing Policy Debate 23, no. 1 (2013): 117–98; and Jacob W. Faber, “Racial Dynamics of Subprime Mortgage Lending at the Peak,” Housing Policy Debate 23, no. 2 (2013): 328–49.

18. Quoted in Michael Powell, “Banks Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks,” New York Times, June 6, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/07baltimore.html.

19. Alan Mallach, “Over the Edge: Trajectories of African-American Middle Neighborhoods in St. Louis since 2000,” Journal of Urban Affairs 42, no. 7 (2020): 1063–85.

20. US Bureau of the Census, “Week 19 Household Pulse Survey: November 11–23, 2020,” https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2020/demo/hhp/hhp19.html, Housing Table 1B. This includes only those tenants who reported and who pay cash rent.

21. US Bureau of the Census, Housing Table 1A.

22. Leland D. Cran et al., “Business Exit during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Non-Traditional Measures in Historical Context,” Federal Reserve Board, 2021, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2020089r1pap.pdf.

23. Nicholas Nissim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York, Random House, 2007).

24. See Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “Income Inequality and Income Segregation,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 4 (2011): 1092–153; and Kendra Bischoff and Sean F. Reardon, “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970–2009,” in Diversity and Disparities: America Enters a New Century, ed. John Logan, 208–34 (New York: Russell Sage, 2014).

1. “Market (Economics),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_(economics).

2. Zillow.com, accessed January 5, 2020.

3. The other major government-insured mortgage program is through the Veterans Administration. These loans were a major part of the mortgage market during the years following World War II but are far fewer today.

4. Continued racial steering on Long Island, New York, was documented in an investigation by Newsday, the regional newspaper. See Ann Choi, Bill Dedman, Keith Herbert, and Olivia Winslow, “Long Island Divided,” Newsday, November 17, 2019.

5. Andre M. Perry, Jonathan Rothwell, and David Harshbarger, The Devaluation of Assets in Black Neighborhoods: The Case of Residential Property (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2018). See also Junia Howell and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, “The Increasing Effect of Neighborhood Racial Composition on Housing Values, 1980–2015,” Social Problems 68, no. 4 (2021): 1051–71.

6. We put the word “true” in quotation mark to reflect the fact that in contrast to the widely held notion that every property has a precise true market value, the process by which market value is determined is highly subjective and value-laden, particularly with respect to properties and neighborhoods that vary from standard suburban models.

7. Nathaniel Baum-Snow, “Did Highways Cause Suburbanization?,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 2 (2007): 775–805. In many respects, the mass suburbanization of the 1950s and 1960s was the continuation of patterns that originated in the 1920s, which were interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, only to resume with greater intensity after the war. See Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and, in particular, Robert A. Beauregard, “Federal Policy and Postwar Urban Decline: A Case of Government Complicity?,” Housing Policy Debate 12, no. 1 (2001): 129–51.

8. An excellent overview of the political, economic, and social dynamics of this period is Robert Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). While the full history of the urban renewal program remains to be written, Jon C. Teaford, “Urban Renewal and Its Aftermath,” Housing Policy Debate, 11, no. 2 (2000): 443–65, is an excellent summary. A good summary of the role of the FHA appears in Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 203–18. See also Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017); and Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018).

9. While Black home buyers express racial preferences as well, their willingness to move into mixed and predominantly white neighborhoods is significantly greater than the converse.

10. For further information, see “Segment Details,” Claritas, n.d., https://claritas360.claritas.com/mybestsegments/#segDetails.

11. For a discussion of these factors, see Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).

12. The estimate of a median tenure of twenty-one months for renters is based on our analysis of the 2019 American Community Survey, which found that 59 percent of all renters in Indianapolis had moved to their present units from the beginning of 2017 through April 2019, so the median tenure is well under two years.

13. This thesis was first proposed in Andrew J. Oswald, A Conjecture on the Explanation for High Unemployment in the Industrialized Nations: Part I (Warwick Economic Research Papers, No. 475, 1996), and has been the subject of an extensive literature in both support of and opposition to what has come to be known as the Oswald hypothesis.

14. Being accepted by a landlord, while not extensively addressed in the literature, may be a significant and growing constraint on choice, particularly among tenants with prior problems of rent paying and eviction or threatened eviction. The use of credit reports, eviction filing records (even if the filing did not lead to eviction), and similar information for tenant selection appears to be increasing. See Kristin Ginger, “Eviction Filings Hurt Tenants, Even If They Win,” Shelterforce, July 30, 2018, https://shelterforce.org/2018/07/30/eviction-filings-hurt-tenants-even-if-they-win/.

15. The literature itself, while far too extensive to list here, has been summarized by a number of authors. See William Rohe and Mark Lindblad, Re-examining the Social Benefits of Homeownership after the Housing Crisis (Working paper, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2013); Alan Mallach, What Drives Neighborhood Trajectories in Legacy Cities? (Working paper, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2015); and Lawrence Yun and Nadia Evangelou, Social Benefits of Homeownership and Stable Housing, National Association of Realtors, December 2016, https://www.gmar.com/data/resources_files/Social%20Benefits%20of%20Homeownership%20%20Stable%20Housing.pdf.

16. There is evidence that a decline in homeownership in a neighborhood, however, can trigger declines in property values. See Chengri Ding and Gerrit-Jan Knapp, “Property Values in Inner-City Neighborhoods: The Effects of Homeownership, Housing Investment and Economic Development,” Housing Policy Debate 13, no. 4 (2003): 701–27.

17. Children and Nature Network, https://research.childrenandnature.org/research/neighborhood-amenities-such-as-parks-play-a-role-in-the-physical-activity-levels-of-children-with-special-health-care-needs/, citing Ruopeng An, Yan Yang, and Kaigang Li, “Residential Neighborhood Amenities and Physical Activity among U.S. Children with Special Health Care Needs,” Maternal and Child Health 21, no. 5 (2017): 1026–36.

18. Andrea L. Rosso et al., “Neighborhood Amenities and Mobility in Older Adults,” American Journal of Epidemiology 178, no. 5 (2013): 761–69.

19. “12 Things That Make a Neighborhood Truly Great,” Forbes, November 29, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/trulia/2014/11/29/12-things-that-make-a-neighborhood-truly-great/#1c0f6b5435f6.

20. The role of assets in community development is closely associated with John Kretzmann and John McKnight and their book Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets (Chicago: ACTA Publications, 1993).

21. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–91.

22. Surprisingly, although there has been a fair amount of scholarly research on the role that risk plays in the purchase of consumer goods and investment decision making, we are unaware of any formal research on risk assessment in home-buying decisions.

23. National Association of Realtors Research Staff, 2019 Homebuyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report (Washington, DC: National Association of Realtors, 2019). Since the data in the report did not distinguish between ages of children under eighteen, we interpolated based on the national distribution of households by age of children in the 2017 American Community Survey.

24. There is a moderately extensive body of economics literature on this theme. See, for example, Kathy J. Hayes and Lori L. Taylor, “Neighborhood School Characteristics: What Signals Quality to Homebuyers?,” Economic Review-Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (1996): 2–9.

25. A major work on the subject was published almost forty years ago: Richard P. Taub, D. Garth Taylor, and Jan D. Dunham, Paths of Neighborhood Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

26. See Wesley Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Jackelyn Hwang and Robert J. Sampson, “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods,” American Sociological Review 79, no. 4 (2014): 726–51.

27. See Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager, “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 3 (2001): 717–67; Rebecca Wickes, John R. Hipp, Renee Zahnow, and Lorraine Mazerolle, “ ‘Seeing’ Minorities and Perceptions of Disorder: Explicating the Mediating and Moderating Mechanisms of Social Cohesion,” Criminology 51, no. 3 (2013): 519–60; and Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), chap. 6.

28. Maria Krysan, Reynolds Farley, and Mick P. Couper, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Racial Beliefs and Residential Segregation,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 5, no. 1 (2008): 5–26.

29. See Maria Krysan, “Does Race Matter in the Search for Housing? An Exploratory Study of Search Strategies, Experiences, and Locations,” Social Science Research 37, no. 2 (2008): 581–603; and Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017).

30. These trends are documented and analyzed in Alan Mallach and Austin Harrison, “Leaving the Old Neighborhood: Shifting Spatial Patterns of Black Homebuyers and Their Implications for Black Urban Middle Neighborhoods in Legacy Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 31, no. 6 (2021): 891–923.

31. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 146.

32. Rachel A. Woldoff, White Flight/Black Flight (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).

33. According to a 2013 study by the National Association of Realtors and Google, 90 percent of home buyers searched online at some point during their search process. National Association of Realtors and Google, “The Digital House Hunt: Consumer and Market Trends in Real Estate,” National Association of Realtors, 2013, https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/Study-Digital-House-Hunt-2013-01_1.pdf. The study did not address the extent to which buyers used online searches to obtain neighborhood (as distinct from house) information. While we argue that the underlying dynamics of the search process have not been fully studied, there has been some recent research specifically on the use of the internet in home searches. See Krysan, “Does Race Matter in the Search for Housing?”

34. Krysan, “Does Race Matter in the Search for Housing?,” 18.

35. Live Baltimore, https://livebaltimore.com/.

36. The Live Baltimore website provides links to twenty-two separate programs through which prospective buyers may be able to obtain assistance with down payments and closing costs. “Down Payment & Closing Costs,” Live Baltimore, n.d., https://livebaltimore.com/buy/affording-a-home/down-payment-closing-costs/.

37. The insights of Robert Shiller may be relevant to neighborhood change. See Robert Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

38. A major confounding factor is the variation in the attributes (size, condition, other features) of the housing stock from one neighborhood to another, which may account for some part of the variation. Moreover, the smaller the neighborhood is, there are fewer sales that are likely to take place, which means the likelihood that the houses sold in any given year that are unrepresentative will increase. Despite these concerns, we have found that sales price patterns and variations tend to be highly consistent both geographically and over time.

39. The research on the deleterious effects of vacant properties on neighborhood conditions, particularly the value of adjacent properties and the effect on criminal activity and the perception of safety, is extensive. For a summary of salient research, see Alan Mallach, What Drives Neighborhood Trajectories in Legacy Cities?

40. An exception to this rule is in rapidly appreciating markets, where the owner expects the property to be worth substantially more within a short period, typically no more than two or three years. As a result, the owner may operate it at a loss or even keep it vacant for the duration. Those markets, of course, are rare, particularly in distressed urban neighborhoods.

41. For a detailed discussion of this and other variations of landlord business models, see Alan Mallach, “Lessons from Las Vegas: Housing Markets, Neighborhoods, and Distressed Single-Family Property Investors,” Housing Policy Debate 24, no. 4 (2014): 769–801.

42. Depending on state law, the accuracy of sales volume data may vary, since it is based on sales that are recorded and thus become matters of public record. Not all states, however, require buyers to record their purchases. While lenders and title insurers will typically require recordation and lawyers and real estate professionals encourage it, in some communities, such as immigrant enclaves, many cash transactions take place that may not be recorded.

43. See, for example, Maria Piazzesi and Martin Schneider, “Housing and Macroeconomics,” in Handbook of Macroeconomics, Part 2, ed. Charles I. Jones, John B. Taylor, and Harald Uhlig, 1547–640 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2016); and Frank J. Fabozzi, The Handbook of Mortgage-Backed Securities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005).

44. Data aggregated by the Mortgage Bankers Association and published in Brena Swanson, “This MBA Chart Shows Existing Home Turnover. But, What Does It Mean?,” Housing Wire, June 26, 2015, https://www.housingwire.com/articles/34324-this-mba-chart-shows-existing-home-turnover/.

45. Sales volumes significantly in excess of the replacement range are likely to be the product of either significant new housing inventory coming on the market or, if that is not the case, speculative activity and flipping.

46. This method is not 100 percent accurate, since for various reasons some investors have the tax bill sent directly to the property. It can be made more accurate by a second scan of properties where the two addresses are the same to eliminate owner names that are not normal human being names, such as “Flip-that-property LLC” and “Make Omaha Great Again Real Estate Co.”

47. Some states that provide homestead exemptions on property taxes to owner occupants require a declaration that the house will be the buyer’s primary residence, which is recorded with the deed. Where available, that can be considered a reasonably accurate measure.

1. Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 97–98.

2. See especially Ali Modarres and Joel Kotkin, “The Childless City,” City Journal, Summer 2013.

3. See Alan Mallach and Austin Harrison, “Leaving the Old Neighborhood: Shifting Spatial Decisions by Black Home Buyers and Their Implications for Black Urban Middle Neighborhoods in Legacy Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 31, no. 6 (2021): 891–923.

4. Elizabeth Chang, Neely Tucker, Jessica Goldstein, Clinton Yates, and Marcia Davis, “March of the Millennials: As Young People Flood into the City, the Only Constant Is Change,” Washington Post, October 18, 2013.

5. Terry Nichols Clark, The City as an Entertainment Machine (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011), 2.

6. National Association of Area Agencies for the Aging et al., The Maturing of America: Communities Moving Forward for an Aging Population, USAging, June 2011, https://www.usaging.org/files/Maturing_of_Ameria_ll.pdf.

7. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise. Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).

8. Data from “U.S. Immigrant Population and Share over Time, 1850–Present,” Migration Policy Institute, n.d., https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time.

9. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1961 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), Table 112, Annual Quotas Allotted and Quota Immigrants, by Quota Area, 1936 to 1960, 92.

10. Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff, “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970–2009,” in John Logan, ed. Diversity and Disparity: America Enters a New Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015), 208–34.

11. Sebastian John, “Edison, New Jersey: An Indian-American Town,” Span, January–February 2008, https://issuu.com/spanmagazine/docs/200801-02-combined.

12. Kate King, “ ‘Little India’ Thrives in Central New Jersey,” Wall Street Journal, September 25, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/little-india-thrives-in-central-new-jersey-1506340801.

13. Robert Sampson, “Immigration and the New Social Transformation of the American City,” in Immigration and Metropolitan Revitalization in the United States, ed. Dominic Vitiello and Thomas J. Sugrue, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 11–24.

14. This was the consensus of a focus group of Bangladeshi homeowners in Banglatown with whom one of the authors met in Hamtramck on December 16, 2019.

15. Salena Zito, “The Day That Destroyed the Working Class and Sowed Seeds of Trump,” New York Post, September 16, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/09/16/the-day-that-destroyed-the-working-class-and-sowed-the-seeds-for-trump/.

16. “Table 3. Union Affiliation of Employed Wage and Salary Workers by Occupation and Industry, 2020–2021 Annual Averages,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.t03.htm.

17. Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 145.

18. Reardon and Bischoff, “Residential Segregation by Income.”

19. High school graduates include individuals who received equivalency certificates (GEDs).

20. While an associate degree offers some financial advantage over a high school diploma, the wage premium is much less than 50 percent of the BA premium.

21. Alison Aughinbaugh, Omar Robles, and Hughette Sun, “Marriage and Divorce: Patterns by Gender, Race and Educational Attainment,” Monthly Labor Review 136 (2013): 1.

22. Claire Cain Miller, “How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?,” New York Times, September 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/upshot/how-did-marriage-become-a-mark-of-privilege.html.

23. J. S. Schiller, J. W. Lucas, B. W. Ward, and J. A. Peregoy, Summary Health Statistics for United States Adults: National Health Interview Survey 2010, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2012, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_252.pdf.

24. See Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Mariner Books, 2009).

25. “A Wider Ideological Gap between More and Less Educated Adults,” Pew Research Center, April 26, 2016, https://www.people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/.

26. Michael Dimock et al., Political Polarization in the American Public: How Increasing Ideological Uniformity and Partisan Antipathy Affect Politics, Compromise and Everyday Life (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014).

27. Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, 96.

28. Putnam and Garrett, 12.

29. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979); and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

30. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 263.

31. Sennett, 264.

32. Sennett would argue that the focus was on the self as reflected or developed through intimate relationships rather than on the self per se.

33. Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, 191.

34. Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, 265–66.

35. See Mallach and Harrison, “Leaving the Old Neighborhood”; Maria Krysan, “Does Race Matter in the Search for Housing? An Exploratory Study of Search Strategies, Experiences, and Locations,” Social Science Research 37, no. 2 (2008): 581–603; and Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017).

36. Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing, 244.

1. Isabel Wilkerson, “America’s Enduring Caste System,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 1, 2020.

2. See Elijah Anderson, Black in White Space: The Enduring Impact of Color in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); and Sheryll Cashin, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality (Boston: Beacon, 2021).

3. Anderson, Black in White Space, 27.

4. Courtney Bonam, Caitlyn Yantis, and Valerie Jones Taylor, “Invisible Middle-Class Black Space: Asymmetrical Person and Space Stereotyping at the Race-Class Nexus,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 23, no. 1 (2020): 24–47.

5. “Baltimore Tries Drastic Plan of Race Segregation,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 25, 1910.

6. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). For a detailed discussion of the short history of racial zoning and the background of the Buchanan decision, see Roger L. Rice, “Residential Segregation by Law, 1910–1917,” Journal of Southern History 34, no. 2 (1968): 179–99.

7. “How Covenants Changed Minneapolis,” Mapping Prejudice, University of Minnesota Libraries, https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/. The area shown on the map is one of Minneapolis’s most expensive neighborhoods today. Houses on Lake of the Isles sell for well over one million dollars. The neighborhood’s Black population share is only slightly over 1 percent.

8. Catherine Silva, “Racial Restrictive Covenants History: Enforcing Neighborhood Segregation in Seattle,” Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History, University of Washington, n.d., https://depts. washington.edu/civilr/covenants_report.htm.

9. Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 US 323 (1926).

10. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 US 1 (1948).

11. US Commission on Civil Rights, Understanding Fair Housing, Clearinghouse Publication 42 (1973), 4. The report does not provide a citation for the article that was the source of this statistic. Colin Gordon argues that private actors led the way in segregating America’s neighborhoods, with governments following their lead. “Who Segregated America?” Dissent, June 29, 2022.

12. Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, “The End of the Segregated Century: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890–2010,” Manhattan Institute for Policy Research 2012, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/end-segregated-century-racial-separation-americas-neighborhoods-1890-2010-5848.html; John Logan and Brian J. Stults, The Persistence of Segregation in the Metropolis: New Findings from the 2010 Census, US 2010 Project (2013), 160–68.

13. See Morton Grodzins, The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958); and Thomas C. Schelling, “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971): 143–86.

14. Walter Johnson depicts St. Louis as incorrigibly racist in The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2020).

15. See Mary Pattillo, “Black Middle-Class Neighborhoods,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 305–29.

16. There are also a small but not insignificant number of affluent majority-Black neighborhoods in the United States, most notably in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and in an area straddling the Queens–Nassau County boundary in New York.

17. Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

18. Pattillo, Black Picket Fences, 34.

19. William Lee, “A Crumbling, Dangerous South Side Creates Exodus of Black Chicagoans,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2016.

20. Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Crown, 2018), 5.

21. Obama, Becoming, 21.

22. National Commission on Neighborhoods, People, Building Neighborhoods: Final Report to the President and the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1979), 339–40, cites nine studies published between 1952 and 1976 documenting this point. According to Anthony Downs, “property values fall before blacks enter the neighborhood but rise after they begin entering in large numbers, especially if they are buying their own homes.” Anthony Downs, Neighborhoods and Urban Development (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1981), 94. In his detailed study of Detroit, Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) 199, reports that Blacks living in the areas undergoing racial transition (0–10% Black) had higher incomes than Blacks living in areas that were 11–49 percent Black. Blacks living in majority-Black neighborhoods had the lowest average incomes.

23. Charles L. Leven et al., Neighborhood Change: Lessons in the Dynamics of Urban Decay (New York: Praeger, 1976), 137.

24. Patillo, Black Picket Fences, 205.

25. Patillo, 203.

26. Mary Pattillo, “The Problem of Integration,” in The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity, ed. Ingrid Gould Ellen and Justin Peter Steil (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 29–32.

27. Homer Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, DC: Federal Housing Administration, 1939), 54, quoted in Lance Freeman, A Haven and a Hell: The Black Ghetto in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 78.

28. See Morton Grodzins, The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958); and Thomas C. Schelling, “Dynamic Models of Segregation,” Journal of Mathematical Sociology 1 (1971): 143–86.

29. Quoted in Marion K. Sanders, The Professional Radical: Conversations with Saul Alinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 86.

30. Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 21, 24.

31. Kwan Ok Lee, “Temporal Dynamics of Racial Segregation in the United States: An Analysis of Household Residential Mobility,” Journal of Urban Affairs 39, no. 1 (2016): 40–67. Lee defines Black-white neighborhoods as census tracts that are between 10 percent and 50 percent non-Hispanic Black and less than 10 percent Hispanic or non-Hispanic Asian.

32. William Easterly, “The Racial Tipping Point in American Neighborhoods: Unstable Equilibrium or Urban Legend,” Department of Economics, New York University, June 2003, https://users.nber.org/~confer/2003/si2003/papers/efbdg/easterly.pdf. A revised version of this paper, which, however, does not include the quoted language, appeared as William Easterly, “Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point,” BE Journal of Macroeconomics 9, no. 1 (2009): Article 25.

33. Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017).

34. Krysan and Crowder, Cycle of Segregation, 6.

35. Krysan and Crowder, 124.

36. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 77.

37. Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods, 84–85.

38. Richard P. Traub, D. Garth Taylor, and Jan D. Dunham, Paths of Neighborhood Change: Race and Crime in Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 186.

39. Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods, 165.

40. Juliet Saltman, A Fragile Movement: The Struggle for Neighborhood Stabilization (New York: Greenwood, 1990).

41. Rodney A. Smolla, “Integration Maintenance: The Unconstitutionality of Benign Programs That Discourage Black Entry to Prevent White Flight,” Duke Law Journal 30, no. 6 (1981): 891–939.

42. For discussion of the legality of local integration maintenance policies, see W. Dennis Keating, The Suburban Racial Dilemma: Housing and Neighborhoods (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), chap. 12; and Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods, 165–69.

43. Saltman, A Fragile Movement, 25.

44. The results of this research are summarized in Philip Nyden, Michael Maly, and John Lukehart, “The Emergence of Stable Racially and Ethnically Diverse Urban Communities: A Case Study of Nine U.S. Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 8, no. 2 (1997): 491–534.

45. Our account relies heavily on Barbara Ferman, Theresa Singleton, and Don DeMarco, “West Mount Airy, Philadelphia,” Cityscape 4, no. 2 (1998): 29–59.

46. Zillow Data, neighborhood Zillow Home Value Index through May 31, 2021.

47. Ferman, Singleton, and DeMarco, “West Mount Airy, Philadelphia,” 42.

48. Our account relies heavily on Michael Kirby, “Vollintine-Evergreen, Memphis,” Cityscape 4, no. 2 (1998): 61–87.

49. Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” New York Review of Books, September 22, 1966, quoted in Edward Goetz, The One-Way Street of Integration: Fair Housing and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in American Cities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), vii.

50. Derek Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

51. Jennifer Hochschild, Vesla Weaver, and Traci Burch, Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 115.

52. A national study found that in 2010 whites under the age of forty-four were much more likely to live on minority-majority blocks than whites over the age of sixty. Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino, “Together but Apart: Do Whites Live in Racially Diverse Cities and Neighborhoods?,” Population and Development Review 43, no. 2 (2017): 245.

53. Wenquan Zhang and John Logan, “Global Neighborhoods: Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis,” Demography 33, no. 6 (2016): 1933.

54. Zhang and Logan, “Global Neighborhoods,” 1951.

55. The buffering hypothesis was first proposed by William Frey and Reynolds Farley, “Latino, Asian, and Black Segregation in U. S. Metropolitan Areas: Are Multi-Ethnic Metros Different?,” Demography 33 (1996): 35–50.

56. Alan Mallach and Austin Harrison, “Leaving the Old Neighborhood: Shifting Spatial Decisions by Black Home Buyers and Their Implications for Black Urban Middle Neighborhoods in Legacy Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 31, no. 6 (2021), 891–923.

57. For an exploration of these issues through a case study of Philadelphia, see Meg Bloomfied Cucchiara, Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Loses When Schools become Urban Amenities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

58. Robert Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137–74.

59. Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics.

60. Michael T. Maly, Beyond Segregation: Multiracial and Multiethnic Neighborhoods in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 226.

1. States vary widely in the extent to which local governments can act to address health and safety concerns through local ordinances without explicit state authority, a complex subject that is beyond the scope of this book. For a closer look at the role of state government in limiting the scope of local action, see Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron, City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Alan Mallach, From State Capitols to City Halls: Smarter State Policies for Stronger Cities (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2022).

2. J. C. Reindl, “Why Detroit’s Lights Went Out,” Detroit Free Press, November 17, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/17/detroit-finances-dark-streetlights/3622205/.

3. Evgenia Gorina and Craig Maher, Measuring and Modeling Determinants of Fiscal Stress in US Municipalities, Mercatus Center Working Paper, Mercatus Center, George Washington University, November 2016.

4. Between 2010 and 2020, per capita spending by local public health departments fell by 18 percent. Lauren Weber et al., “Hollowed-Out Public Health System Faces More Cuts amid Virus,” Kaiser Health News, July 1, 2020.

5. Dennis R. Judd and Annika M. Hinze, City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America, 10th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 462.

6. Paul E. Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

7. Peterson, City Limits, 23.

8. The literature on sports stadium subsidies is voluminous. Two general sources are Roger G. Noll and Andrew Zimbalist, eds., Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); and Mark S. Rosentraub, Major League Losers: The Real Cost of Sports and Who’s Paying for It, revised ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

9. Peterson, City Limits, ch. 3.

10. Richard Schragger, City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 13–14.

11. Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 102.

12. Clarence N. Stone and Robert P. Stoker, Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in a Postindustrial Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015), 2, 21.

13. Howard Husock, “Don’t Let CDCs Fool You,” City Journal, Summer 2001.

14. Nicholas Lemann, “The Myth of Community Development,” New York Times, January 9, 1994.

15. John F. Kain and Joseph J. Persky, “Alternatives to the Gilded Ghetto,” Public Interest 14 (1969): 74–87.

16. Myron Orfield et al., “High Costs and Segregation in Subsidized Housing Policy,” Housing Policy Debate 25 no. 3 (2015): 574–607. In a contentious rejoinder, Edward Goetz defends the CDC approach. See Edward Goetz, “Poverty-Pimping CDCs: The Search for Dispersal’s Next Bogeyman,” Housing Policy Debate 25, no. 3 (2015): 608–18.

17. Randy Stoecker, “The CDC Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Critique and an Alternative,” Journal of Urban Affairs 19, no. 1 (1997): 9.

18. George Galster et al., The Impact of Community Development Corporations on Urban Neighborhoods (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2005), 3. While many important aspects of neighborhoods are indeed capitalized into market values, many are not, including community connections, civic engagement, and emotional attachments to place.

19. Galster et al., The Impact of Community Development Corporations, 2.

20. Denver County, Colorado, Census Tract 24.03.

21. Galster et al., The Impact of Community Development Corporations, 50.

22. Galster et al., 47.

23. While quality of life improvement, from the standpoint of economic theory, should strengthen the market, there are many reasons why that would not necessarily take place in a city that continues to lose population, where housing supply significantly exceeds demand and racial and other barriers impede the flow of information.

24. Anne C. Kubisch et al., Voices from the Field: Lesson and Challenges from Two Decades of Community Change Efforts (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2010). See also Meir Rinde, “Did the Comprehensive Community Initiatives of the 1990s, Early 2000s Bring about Change?,” Shelterforce, March 15, 2021.

25. Xavier De Souza Briggs and Elizabeth J. Mueller (with Mercer L. Sullivan), From Neighborhood to Community: Evidence on the Social Effects of Community Development (New York: Community Development Research Center, New School for Social Research, 1997).

26. Briggs and Mueller, From Neighborhood to Community, 7.

27. Patrick Sharkey, Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, and Delaram Takyar, “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofit on Violent Crime,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 6 (2017): 1214–40.

28. Our account of the South Bronx draws from Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000); and Robert Worth, “Guess Who Saved the South Bronx?,” Washington Monthly, April 1, 1999.

29. Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, Housing Policy in New York City: A Brief History (New York: Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, n.d.).

30. Furman Center, Housing Policy in New York City, 6–7.

31. Hunts Point–Longwood includes the following census tracts: Tracts 83, 85, 87, 89, 93, 115.02, 117, 119, 121.02, 127.01, 129.01, 131, and 159.

32. Uniform Crime Report data as reported in City of New York Police Department, “CompStat,” https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs-en-us-041pct.pdf. The data is from the 41st precinct, which serves Hunts Point and Longwood.

33. The total does not include 3,277 otherwise unsubsidized units that received tax exemptions, helping to keep rents down. To include these would lead to significant double counting, since many projects receive tax exemptions in addition to other subsidies.

34. Data is from NYU Furman Center, “Hunts Point/Longwood (Bx02),” https://furmancenter.org/neighborhoods/view/hunts-point-longwood.

35. National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations, Rising Above: Community Economic Development in a Changing Landscape (Washington, DC: National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations, 2010), 7.

36. Alexander Von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 62.

37. Orfield et al., “High Costs and Segregation.”

38. Mark McDermott tells the story of the evolution of Cleveland’s robust system of network governance in “The Evolution of the Community Development Industry: A Practitioner’s Perspective,” in Equity Planning Now, ed. Norman Krumholz and Kathryn Wertheim Hexter, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 44–59.

39. “About 3CDC,” Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, https://www.3cdc.org/about-3cdc/.

40. See, e.g., Brianne Brenneman, “Gentrification Disguised as Urban Revitalization,” Agora, February 21, 2018, https://agorajournal.squarespace.com/blog/2018/2/12/gentrification-disguised-as-urban-revitalization.

41. Henry S. Webber and Mikael Karlstrom, Why Community Investment Is Good for Nonprofit Anchor Institutions: Understanding Costs, Benefits, and the Range of Strategic Options (Chicago: Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, 2009), 4.

42. US Census Bureau, LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (2002–2019) (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, Longitudinal-Employer Household Dynamics Program, 2021), accessed on January 17, 2021 at https://onthemap.ces.census.gov.

43. John L. Puckett, “Federal- and State-Funded Urban Renewal at the University of Pennsylvania,” West Philadelphia Collaborative History, https://collaborativehistory.gse.upenn.edu/stories/federal-and-state-funded-urban-renewal-university-pennsylvania. By 1964, 120 colleges and universities and 75 hospitals had taken advantage of Section 112.

44. Judith Rodin, The University & Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and into the Streets (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 37.

45. Peter Marcuse and Cuz Potter, “Columbia University’s Heights: An Ivory Tower and Its Communities,” in The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis, ed. David C. Perry and Wim Wiewel (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 49.

46. David C. Perry, Wim Wiewel, and Carrie Menendez, “The University’s Role in Urban Development: From Enclave to Anchor Institution,” Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, July 2009.

47. See J. Brian Charles, “For College Towns, Having a World-Famous University Is a Mixed Blessing,” Governing, October 2018; and “University Will Pay More to New Haven,” Yale Alumni Magazine, January/February 2022.

48. Chapter 17, Public Laws of 2021, signed into law February 22, 2021.

49. Rodin, The University & Urban Revival, 134.

50. Rita Axelroth Hodges and Steve Dubb, The Road Half Travelled (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), 65.

51. Our analysis builds on Meagan Ehlenz, “Neighborhood Revitalization and the Anchor Institution: Assessing the Impact of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia Initiatives on University City,” Urban Affairs Review 52, no. 5 (2016): 714–50. Ehlenz’s data analysis ends in 2010; we have supplemented her analysis with 2015–2019 American Community Survey data.

52. Kevin Gillen and Susan Wachter, Neighborhood Value Updated: West Philadelphia Price Indexes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Institute for Urban Research, 2011).

53. Samantha Melamed, “The Penn Alexander Effect: Is There Any Room Left for Low-Income Residents in University City?,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 1, 2018, https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/penn-alexander-university-city-west-philly-low-income-affordable-housing-20181101.html.

54. One question is whether these figures reflect a large number of students, who often report low incomes but usually are not, in fact, poor. Students, however, compose less than 15 percent of University City’s population. See Ehlenz, “Neighborhood Revitalization and the Anchor Institution,” 734.

55. The census tracts we used to track trends in the West Philadelphia area outside of University City were 65, 72, 73, 80, 81.01, 81.02, 82, 83.01, 83.02, 84, 85, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98.01, 98.02, 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122.01, 122.03, 122.04, 375, 9800, and 9808.

56. Rodin, The University & Urban Revival, 57.

57. Carolyn T. Adams, From the Outside In: Suburban Elites, Third-Sector Organizations, and the Reshaping of Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 154.

58. Sabina Dietrick and Tracy Soska, “The University of Pittsburgh and the Oakland Neighborhood: From Conflict to Cooperation, or How the 800-Pound Gorilla Learned to Sit with—and Not on—Its Neighbors,” in The University as Urban Developer: Case Studies and Analysis, ed. David Perry and Wim Wiewel (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005), 25–44.

59. McCormack Baron Salazar, https://www.mccormackbaron.com/ (our emphasis).

60. Estimate from Sandra Moore in Rachel Bratt, Affordable Rental Housing Development in the For-Profit Sector: A Case Study of McCormack Baron Salazar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, Working Paper, March 2016), 47–48.

61. Cheryl Lovett, former executive director, St. Louis Housing Authority, quoted in Bratt, Affordable Rental Housing Development in the For-Profit Sector, 48.

1. Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964), xiii.

2. See Andrew J. Dufton, “The Architectural and Social Dynamics of Gentrification in Roman North Africa,” American Journal of Archaeology 123, no. 2 (2019): 263–90; Helen Parkins and Christopher Smith, eds., Trade, Traders, and the Ancient City (London: Routledge, 1998); and Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers, 1995), https://www.hlrn.org/img/documents/Engels%20The%20Housing%20Question.pdf.

3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 270–90.

4. The phrase “back to the city” implies that the typical gentrifier was moving back to the city from its suburbs and is thus very misleading. As research at the time showed, the great majority of gentrifiers moved from other neighborhoods in the same central city or from other metropolitan areas entirely. See, for example, R. T. LeGates and Chester W. Hartman, “The Anatomy of Displacement in the United States,” in Gentrification of the City, ed. Neil Smith and Peter Williams (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 178–203.

5. Susanna McBee, “HUD Finds Little Displacement of Poor in Inner-City Revivals,” Washington Post, February 14, 1979, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/02/14/hud-finds-little-displacement-of-poor-in-inner-city-revivals/1d7e5185-1812-4e2c-b119-47423ed7425c/.

6. Brian J. L. Berry, “Islands of Renewal in Seas of Decay,” in The New Urban Reality, ed. Paul E. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1985), 69–96.

7. Nadia Khomami and Josh Halliday, “Shoreditch Cereal Killer Cafe Targeted in Anti-Gentrification Protests,” The Guardian, September 27, 2015.

8. https://zmenu.com/cereal-killer-cafe-london-online-menu/.

9. It is worth noting that given Glass’s reference to the large Victorian homes that had been subdivided, the “working-class occupiers” being displaced by gentrification were not the original occupiers of the neighborhood but rather products of a prior but downward neighborhood change.

10. Neil Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” Economic Geography 58 (1982): 139n1.

11. Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees. “New-Build ‘Gentrification’ and London’s Riverside Renaissance,” Environment and Planning A 37, no. 7 (2005): 1165–90.

12. Markus Moos, “From Gentrification to Youthification? The Increasing Importance of Young Age in Delineating High-Density Living,” Urban Studies 53, no. 14 (2016): 2903–20. We disagree with Moos that “youthification” should be distinguished from gentrification. Moos’s youthification is not a separate phenomenon but instead is a central element of the most representative form of gentrification and should not be treated separately.

13. See, generally, Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (New York: Norton, 2018).

14. See Terry Nichols Clark, ed., The City as an Entertainment Machine (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); and Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill & Wang, 2011).

15. See Clark, The City as an Entertainment Machine.

16. Yongsung Lee, Bumsoo Lee, and Md Tanvir Hossain Shubho, “Urban Revival by Millennials? Intraurban Net Migration Patterns of Young Adults, 1980–2010,” Journal of Regional Science 59, no. 3 (2019): 538–66.

17. Neil Smith. “Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 4 (1979): 538–48.

18. Stage models of gentrification in which risk-oblivious “pioneers” start the process, only later giving way later to risk-averse large-scale developers and investors, have been around for a long time. See Phillip L. Clay, Neighborhood Renewal (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979); and Dennis E. Gale, “Middle Class Resettlement in Older Urban Neighborhoods,” Journal of the American Planning Association 45, no. 3 (1979): 293–304.

19. Smith, “Toward a Theory of Gentrification,” 545 (our emphasis). Many years later Smith half-heartedly recanted, writing in the early 1990s that “the original 1979 article was deliberately aimed at the near total domination of the gentrification discourse by neo-classical approaches which privileged demand as the dynamo of urban change.” Neil Smith, “Blind Man’s Bluff, or Hamnett’s Philosophical Individualism in Search of Gentrification,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 17, no. 1 (1992): 110–15. Smith, most probably disingenuously, claimed even more years later in a 2010 personal reflection that “I did not guess at the time that anyone would take the paper too seriously.” Commentary in Loretta Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly, eds. The Gentrification Reader (London: Routledge, 2010), 97. Despite these statements, however, Smith never materially changed his position to accept any of the points raised in the numerous papers challenging his thesis.

20. Robert Beauregard, “The Chaos and Complexity of Gentrification,” in Gentrification of the City, ed. Neil Smith and Peter Williams (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 39.

21. See especially Chris Hamnett, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: The Explanation of Gentrification,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1991): 173–89; Steven C. Bourassa, “The Rent Gap Debunked,” Urban Studies 30, no. 10 (1993): 1731–44; and David Ley, “Reply: The Rent Gap Revisited,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 3 (1987): 465–68.

22. Veronica Guerrieri, Daniel Hartley, and Erik Hurst, “Endogenous Gentrification and Housing Price Dynamics,” Journal of Public Economics 100 (2013): 45–60; and Ken Steif, Michael Fichman, and Simon Kassel, “Predicting Gentrification Using Longitudinal Census Data,” Urban Spatial Analysis, 2016, https://urbanspatialanalysis.com/portfolio/predicting-gentrification-using-longitudinal-census-data/.

23. C. J. Quartlbaum, “Grieving the Gentrification of Food,” Christ and Pop Culture Magazine 6, no. 3 (2018), https://christandpopculture.com/grieving-the-gentrification-of-food/ (our emphasis).

24. For Chicago, see Jackelyn Hwang and Robert J. Sampson, “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods,” American Sociological Review 79, no. 4 (2014): 726–51. For New York and Chicago, see Jeffrey M. Timberlake and Elaina Johns-Wolfe, “Neighborhood Ethno-Racial Composition and Gentrification in Chicago and New York, 1980 to 2010,” Urban Affairs Review 53, no. 2 (2017): 236–72. For St. Louis, see Todd Swanstrom, Henry S. Webber, and Molly W. Metzger, “Rebound Neighborhoods in Older Industrial Cities: The Case of St. Louis,” in Economic Mobility: Research & Ideas on Strengthening Families, Communities and the Economy, ed. Alexandra Brown et al. (St. Louis: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2016), 325–52. For Philadelphia, see Aaron Moselle and Annette John-Hall, “The Surprising Truth behind the Racial Dynamics of Gentrification in Philly,” WHYY, March 13, 2018, https://whyy.org/articles/surprising-truth-behind-racial-dynamics-gentrification-philly/. For St. Louis and Baltimore, see Alan Mallach and Karen Beck Pooley, “What Drives Neighborhood Revival? Qualitative Research Findings from Baltimore and St. Louis,” Working paper WP18AM12018, Lincoln Center of Land Policy, 2018. For Baltimore, see Alan Mallach, Drilling Down in Baltimore’s Neighborhoods: Changes in Racial/Ethnic composition and Income from 2000 to 2017 (Baltimore: Abell Foundation, 2020).

25. Mallach, Drilling Down in Baltimore’s Neighborhoods, 14.

26. Timberlake and Johns-Wolfe, “Neighborhood Ethno-Racial Composition.”

27. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do about It (New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2004), 224.

28. This was the method used to measure displacement in a highly publicized but badly flawed gentrification study conducted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Jason Richardson, Bruce Mitchell, and Juan Franco, Shifting Neighborhoods: Gentrification and Cultural Displacement in American Cities (Washington DC: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2019), https://ncrc.org/gentrification/.

29. George Grier and Eunice Greer, “Urban Displacement: A Reconnaissance,” in Back to the City: Issues in Neighborhood Renovation, ed. Shirley Bradley Laska and Daphne Spain (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980), 256. This piece was previously published separately as a report commissioned for the US Department of Housing and Development.

30. Even in New York City, some research suggests that gentrification typically does not lead to displacement. See Kacie Dragan, Ingrid Ellen, and Sherry A. Glied, “Does Gentrification Displace Poor Children? New Evidence from New York City Medicaid Data.” Working paper 25809, National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2019, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25809/w25809.pdf. For earlier evidence, see Lance Freeman and Frank Braconi, “Gentrification and Displacement: New York City in the 1990s,” Journal of the American Planning Association 70, no. 1 (2004): 39–52; and Lance Freeman, “Displacement or Succession? Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods,” Urban Affairs Review 40, no. 4 (2005): 463–91.

31. For a checklist of action steps that can be taken to minimize displacement, see Alan Mallach, Managing Neighborhood Change (Montclair, NJ: National Housing Institute, 2008).

32. This can be easily shown with a simple arithmetical model. If one takes a hypothetical universe of one hundred rental units that are all occupied by Black tenants in Year 1, at which time the pool of potential renters is also 100 percent Black, and assume that (1) 25 percent of the rental units turn over each year, (2) each subsequent year one white household is added to the pool of twenty-five potential tenants, and (3) white and Black households have equal opportunities to rent available units—that is, there is no discrimination or preferential behavior—then by the end of Year 10 twenty-four of the one hundred tenants will be white, and the number of Black tenants in the universe will have dropped by 24 percent. As it happens, the number of Black tenants in nine gentrifying St. Louis census tracts studied by Mallach and Beck Pooley declined by 22.3 percent from 2000 to 2010. Alan Mallach and Beck Pooley, “What Drives Neighborhood Revival?”

33. Mallach, Drilling Down in Baltimore’s Neighborhoods, 45.

34. Janine Bologna, Nava Kantor, Yunqing Liu, and Samuel Taylor, “The Right to Stay Put: City Garden Montessori School and Neighborhood Change,” Report, George Warren Brown School of Social Work and Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis, 2015, https://csd.wustl.edu/Publications/Documents/city-garden_final-report.pdf.

35. Rachel Woldoff, White Flight, Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), especially chap. 6, “Black Flight: Consequences of Neighborhood Cultural Conflict.”

36. Most prominently perhaps Spike Lee in a famous 2014 rant. For a complete transcript, see “Spike Lee’s Gentrification Rant—Transcript: ‘Fort Greene Park Is Like the Westminster Dog Show,’ ” The Guardian, February 26, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/26/spike-lee-gentrification-rant-transcript.

37. Jake Flanagin, “The Brooklynization of Detroit Is Going to Be Terrible for Detroiters,” Quartz, July 15, 2015.

38. Mallach, The Divided City, 110.

39. Todd Swanstrom, Karl Guenther, and Nathan Theus, “What People Talk about When They Talk about Gentrification: Creating Whole Communities,” University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2018, http://www.umsl.edu/wholecommunities/research/Focus-Group-Report.FINAL.1.17.19.pdf.

40. Stephen Danley and Rasheda Weaver, “ ‘They’re Not Building It for Us’: Displacement Pressure, Unwelcomeness, and Protesting Neighborhood Investment,” Societies 8, no. 3 (2018): 74.

41. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York: One World, 2017), 86. Coates’s formulation has been sharply challenged by other African American commentators. See Thomas Chatterton Williams, “How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power,” New York Times, October 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html.

42. D’Juan Hopewell, “Gentrification Will Save White Supremacy,” blog post, June 23, 2018, http://hopewellthought.com/2018/06/gentrification-will-save-white-supremacy/ (site discontinued).

43. Rick Jacobus, “It’s Not Either/Or: Neighborhood Improvement Can Prevent Gentrification,” Shelterforce, July 18, 2013.

44. Census tract 142.

45. A comparison could be drawn with the Bohemian neighborhoods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Montmartre in Paris and New York’s Greenwich Village, but such a comparison would be far-fetched particularly in light of the aggressively counterculture nature of those neighborhoods. The two have little in common except for the youth of their inhabitants.

46. Swanstrom, Webber, and Metzger, “Rebound Neighborhoods in Older Industrial Cities.”

47. Dowell Myers, “Peak Millennials: Three Reinforcing Cycles That Amplify the Rise and Fall of Urban Concentration by Millennials,” Housing Policy Debate 26, no. 6 (2016): 928–47.

48. Joe Cortright, “Not Peak Millennial: The Coming Wave,” City Observatory, March 28, 2016.

1. Henry S. Webber, “Local Public Policy and Middle Neighborhoods,” in On the Edge: America’s Middle Neighborhoods, ed. Paul Brophy (New York: American Assembly, 2016), 156.

2. For historic reasons, the principal house form in nineteenth-century working- and middle-class neighborhoods in a coastal belt that runs north from central New Jersey and includes most of coastal New England was the two- and three-family house with stacked units, known in Boston as “triple-deckers.” Such houses make up only a small part of the residential stock in other American cities.

3. Defined here as tracts in which the median household income was between 75 percent and 125 percent of the citywide median.

4. Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999 (New York: Free Press, 1999), 24.

5. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 33.

6. See Gregory D. Squires, Derek S. Hyra, and Robert N. Renner, “Metropolitan Segregation and the Subprime Lending Crisis,” Housing Policy Debate 23, no. 1 (2013): 117–98; and Jacob W. Faber, “Racial Dynamics of Subprime Mortgage Lending at the Peak,” Housing Policy Debate 23, no. 2 (2013): 328–49.

7. While much of the research on homeownership effects has controlled for income and other measurable variables, it is arguably impossible to control for the possibility of self-selection bias in terms of differences in values and behavior between those who become homeowners and those who do not. The body of research on homeownership effects is extensive, however, and virtually all the many studies point in the same direction. While in some cases the effects diminish significantly when one controls for length of tenure, this means less than it may seem, since most of the difference in tenure between renters and homeowners appears to be an inherent property of ownership in the US cultural context. While the extreme extent of the tenure gap is created in part by instability associated with the revolving door of poverty and eviction, even under the most optimal rental conditions less than half of the tenure gap disappears.

8. For a detailed discussion of milking, or predatory landlord behavior, see Alan Mallach, Meeting the Challenge of Distressed Property Investors in America’s Neighborhoods (New York: Local Initiatives Support Corporation, 2010).

9. Alan Mallach, “Over the Edge: Trajectories of African American Middle Neighborhoods in St. Louis since 2000,” Journal of Urban Affairs 42, no. 7 (2020): 1063–85.

10. See Todd M. Michney, Surrogate Subuerbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

11. Thomas E. Bier, Housing Dynamics in Northeast Ohio: Setting the Stage for Resurgence, (Cleveland, OH: MSL Academic Endeavors eBooks, 2017), http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/msl_ae_ebooks/4.

12. In a policy dating from the long-gone days where cities were generally much wealthier than rural townships, the State of Ohio pays for the maintenance of state highways in townships but requires cities to cover those maintenance costs from their budgets.

13. Joseph McNeely and Paul C. Brophy, “The Middle Neighborhood Movement, 1970–2000,” in On the Edge: America’s Middle Neighborhoods, ed. Paul C. Brophy (New York: American Assembly, 2014), 1–8.

14. The Federal historic preservation tax credit has little impact on residential neighborhoods because it applies only to income-producing properties. It has had a major impact on downtown revitalization in many cities.

15. This point is well described in two strong ethnographic studies of Black middle neighborhoods. See Rachael Woldoff, White Flight/Black Flight (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); and Mary Patillo, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

16. This is a point stressed by Woldoff, who characterizes the goals of those she describes as Black “pioneers.” “Their goal,” she writes, “was not to achieve a minimal standard of safety from extreme violent crime and brazen disorder; for them the desire for an improved atmosphere for their families included a neighborhood with a greater representation of conventional families and lifestyles.” Woldoff, White Flight/Black Flight, 147.

17. While that number is only two-thirds of the 2005 figure, the earlier numbers were inflated by subprime lending, which led to many purchase transactions some of which probably should never have been made.

18. Detroit Future City, Growing Detroit’s African American Middle Class: The Opportunity for a Prosperous Detroit (Detroit: Detroit Future City, 2019), 47.

19. See especially Courtney Bonam, Caitlyn Yantis, and Valerie Jones Taylor, “Invisible Middle-Class Black Space: Asymmetrical Person and Space Stereotyping at the Race-Class Nexus,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 23, no. 1 (2020): 24–47.

20. Henry Grabar, “Black Space, White Blindness,” Slate, September 18, 2018, https://slate.com/business/2018/09/black-neighborhoods-white-racism.html.

21. David Rusk, “The ‘Segregation Tax’: The Cost of Racial Segregation to Black Homeowners,” Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, October 2001, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/rusk.pdf.

22. Sandy Smith, “Some Philadelphia Neighborhoods Are Walking a Line between Boom and Bust,” Next City, May 15, 2017; https://nextcity.org/features/view/philadelphia-middle-class-neighborhoods-mount-airy.

23. Lauren Hood, “Detroit Needs to Preserve the Cultural Integrity of Its Black Neighborhoods,” Model D, February 7, 2017, https://www.modeldmedia.com/features/black-space-detroit-020717.aspx.

24. William Lee, “A Crumbling, Dangerous South Side Creates Exodus of Black Chicagoans,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2016, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-black-exodus-chicago-20160318- story.html.

25. For more information, see Middle Neighborhoods, middleneighborhoods.org.

1. Matthew 26:11.

2. Charles Duff, The North Atlantic Cities (Liverpool: Bluecoat, 2019), 40.

3. Anne Sinclair Holbrook, “Map Notes and Comments,” in Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895), 5.

4. These two numbers are not strictly comparable because the United States did not adopt the current standard for measuring poverty until 1965. For Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, see “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, https://www.fdrlibrary.org/documents/356632/390886/1937inauguraladdress.pdf/7d61a3fd-9d56-4bb6-989d-0fd269cdb073.

5. As can be seen from figure 12.1, the census began to distinguish characteristics of the Latinx population only after 1970.

6. Paul Jargowsky, The Architecture of Segregation (New York: Century Foundation, 2015), 4.

7. The classic work on neighborhood effects is Robert J. Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Harriet B. Newburger, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter, eds., Neighborhood and Life Chances: How Place Matters in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

8. George C. Galster, “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications,” presentation at the ESRC Seminar, St. Andrews University, Scotland, February 4–5, 2010. The 20 percent figure is used by some federal agencies to determine whether an area is eligible for certain federal programs, such as the Opportunity Zone program. Other federal programs, however, use different standards, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which makes investors eligible for greater benefits in areas with over 25 percent poverty rates.

9. Galster, “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects.”

10. For a critique of the conventional approach for studying neighborhood effects and a recommendation of an alternative approach similar to ours, see Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, 3rd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 96–102.

11. Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi, Lost in Place: Why the Persistence and Spread of Concentrated Poverty—Not Gentrification—Is Our Biggest Urban Challenge (n.p.: City Observatory, 2014). The study focuses on the inner core of each metropolitan area, defined as the area within ten miles from the center of each area’s central business district.

12. Jargowsky, The Architecture of Segregation, 2–3.

13. Jargowsky, 5.

14. Lance Freeman, A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

15. This figure appears in a number of documents and apparently originates in Jeremy Williams, Detroit: The Black Bottom Community (Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009), 10.

16. Eugene Robinson, Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 66.

17. Robinson, Disintegration, 66.

18. Kendra Bischoff and Sean Reardon, “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970–2009,” in Diversity and Disparities: America Enters a New Century, ed. John Logan (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), 215.

19. Cortright and Mahmoudi, Lost in Place, 14.

20. Cortright and Mahmoudi, 19.

21. For dashboards with data for each individual metropolitan area included in the Cortright and Mahmoudi study, see Joe Cortright, “Lost in Place,” City Observatory, September 12, 2014, https://cityobservatory.org/lost-in-place/.

22. For an overview of vacant property issues in the United States today, see Alan Mallach, The Empty House Next Door: Understanding and Reducing Vacancy and Hypervacancy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2018).

23. Jason Hackworth, Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 173.

24. Mallach, The Empty House Next Door, 27–35.

25. The only exception to this rule is where properties are rapidly appreciating and landlords are willing to take a short-term loss in return for a larger long-term gain. This does not apply to the typical concentrated poverty neighborhood.

26. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016).

27. For a review of what the authors call “hypermobility” and its negative effects on children and schools, see Molly Metzger, Patrick J. Fowler, and Todd Swanstrom, “Hypermobility and Education: The Case of St. Louis,” Urban Education 53, no. 6 (2018): 774–805.

28. Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), chap. 2.

29. Klinenberg, Heat Wave, 92, 97.

30. Klinenberg, 101.

31. Anne Gunderson, “Breaking the Cycle of Inner-City Violence with PTSD Care,” Chicago Policy Review, June 2, 2017, https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2017/06/02/breaking-the-cycle-of-inner-city-violence-with-ptsd-care/.

32. See, for example, Charles C. Branas et al., “Citywide Cluster Randomized Trial to Restore Blighted Vacant Land and Its Effects on Violence, Crime, and Fear,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 12 (2018): 2946–51; and Eugenia C. Garvin, Carolyn C. Cannuscio, and Charles C. Branas, “Greening Vacant Lots to Reduce Violent Crime: A Randomised Controlled Trial,” Injury Prevention 19, no. 3 (2013): 198–203.

33. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 2011).

34. Wilson, When Work Disappears, 65.

35. Sharkey, Stuck in Place, 46.

36. Raj Chetty et al., “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working paper 25147, 2018.

37. See, among others, Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz,” The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment,” American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 855–902. Chetty and other researchers point out that the effects of participation in the Moving to Opportunity program are highly uneven; for example, children who were under thirteen when they moved saw significant improvements in school outcomes, while those who were thirteen and over did not.

38. It is known as the Mount Laurel doctrine after two New Jersey Supreme Court decisions in 1975 and 1983 that enunciated the fair share principle in a case brought against the zoning practices of the Township of Mount Laurel, a postwar suburb of Philadelphia in Burlington County.

39. Anne C. Kubisch et al., Voices from the Field III: Lessons and Challenges from Two Decades of Community Change Efforts (Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2010), vii.

40. Michael S. Rosenwald and Michael A. Fletcher, “Why Couldn’t $130 Million Transform One of Baltimore’s Poorest Places?,” Washington Post, May 2, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/why-couldnt-130-million-transform-one-of-baltimores-poorest-places/2015/05/02/0467ab06-f034-11e4-a55f-38924fca94f9_story.html.

41. Rosenwald and Fletcher, “Why Couldn’t $130 Million Transform One of Baltimore’s Poorest Places?”

42. For a further discussion of the Sandtown-Winchester project, see Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 196–98.

43. Jason M. Barr, Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

44. For a good overview of the case for providing legal counsel to tenants in eviction proceedings, see Heidi Schultheis and Caitlin Rooney, A Right to Counsel Is a Right to a Fighting Chance: The Importance of Legal Representation in Eviction Proceedings (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2019). Established in 2017, New York City’s Right to Counsel initiative provides free legal services to all tenants facing eviction in housing court.

45. Estimates vary but tend to find that between one in four and one in five eligible households are able to obtain vouchers. See “Three Out of Four Low-Income At-Risk Renters Do Not Receive Federal Rental Assistance,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, n.d., http://apps.cbpp.org/shareables_housing_unmet/chart.html.

46. We refer to an entitlement housing allowance in general terms because we do not want to suggest that simply expanding the present HCV program, with its limitations, is necessarily the best way to accomplish this goal. President Joe Biden’s campaign platform included a call for universal housing vouchers. If and when a universal entitlement housing allowance is enacted, policymakers should carefully think through the best and most cost-effective form the program should take.

47. For a more extended discussion of this issue along with examples of successful schools, see Mallach, The Divided City, esp. at 218–23.

1. Quoted in Tal Axelrod, “Trump Makes an Appeal to Suburban Women at Rally: ‘Will You Please Like Me?,’ ” The Hill, October 13, 2020. The regulation that Trump is referring to is the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which required municipalities to identify and address policies that promoted racial segregation. In July 2020 the Trump administration rescinded the rule, which was subsequently reinstated in 2021 by the Biden administration.

2. Douglas S. Massey and Jonathan Tannen, “Suburbanization and Segregation in the United States: 1970–2010,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 9 (2018): 1594–611.

3. Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick, and Caroline B. Brettell, eds., Twenty-First Century Gateways: Immigrant Incorporation in Suburban America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

4. Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), 20.

5. See Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbia, updated ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011).

6. Robert A. Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 124–25.

7. Beauregard, When America Became Suburban, 127.

8. Beauregard, 130.

9. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), 317.

10. Thomas E. Bier, Housing Dynamics in Northeast Ohio: Setting the Stage for Resurgence (Cleveland, OH: MSL Academic Endeavors Ebooks, 2017), 28. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=msl_ae_ebooks.

11. Samuel H. Kye, “The Persistence of White Flight in Middle-Class Suburbia,” Social Science Research 72 (2018): 38–52.

12. Whitney Airgod-Obrycki, “Are the Suburbs Losing Status?,” Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, February 4, 2019.

13. See Karen Beck Pooley, “Debunking the ‘Cookie-Cutter’ Myth for Suburban Places and Suburban Poverty: Analyzing Their Variety and Recent Trends,” in The New American Suburb: Poverty, Race, and the Economic Crisis, ed. Katrin B. Anacker (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 171; and Andrea Sarzynski and Thomas J. Vicino, “Shrinking Suburbs: Analyzing the Decline of American Suburban Spaces,” Sustainability 11, no. 19 (2019): 5230.

14. Homer Hoyt, The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Washington, DC: Federal Housing Administration, 1939), 119.

15. Beck Pooley, “Debunking the ‘Cookie-Cutter’ Myth,” 40.

16. As reported in “Levittown, NY Real Estate & Homes for Sale,” Realtor.com, https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Levittown_NY.

17. Beck Pooley, “Debunking the ‘Cookie-Cutter’ Myth,” 73–74.

18. This is based on an update of data from Todd Swanstrom et al., Pulling Apart: Economic Segregation among Suburbs and Central Cities in Major Metropolitan Areas, Living Cities Census Series, Brookings Institution, October 2004. Middle-income suburbs are defined as those with per capita incomes between 75 percent and 125 percent of the per capita income of the metropolitan area; poor suburbs are those below 75 percent, while affluent suburbs are those above 125 percent.

19. Norton E. Long, “Political Science and the City,” in Urban Research and Policy Planning, ed. Leo F. Schnore and Henry Fagin, (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1967), 243–62.

20. Richard Child Hill, “Separate and Unequal: Governmental Inequality in the Metropolis,” American Political Science Review 68, no. 4 (1974): 1557–68.

21. In 1974, a federal appeals court ruled that Black Jack’s zoning ordinance forbidding the construction of multifamily housing had a discriminatory effect even if it could not be proved that it had a racially discriminatory intent and was therefore in violation of the Fair Housing Act (United States v. City of Black Jack, Missouri, 372 F. Supp. 319 [E.D. Mo. 1974]). The decision was effectively reversed a few years later when the US Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs must prove discriminatory intent to prevail in such cases (Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp, 429 U.S. 252 [1977]).

22. It is difficult to prove a causal connection because of the many factors involved, but the weight of the evidence suggests that individual success in school is affected by classmates’ socioeconomic backgrounds. For a balanced review of recent scholarly research on this question, see Sarah A. Cordes, “A Reality Check on the Benefits of Economic Integration,” Future Ed, Georgetown University, 2019, https://www.future-ed.org/a-reality-check-on-the-benefits-of-economic-integration/.

23. John Pacewicz and John N. Robinson III, “Pocketbook Policing: How Race Shapes Reliance on Fines and Fees in the Chicago Suburbs,” Socioeconomic Review 19, no. 3 (2021): 975–1003.

24. Listed on Zillow at: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1641-N-44th-St-East-Saint-Louis-IL-62204/5224963_zpid/, accessed November 21, 2022.

25. See Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2018), 166–68.

26. See Scott W. Allard, Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017), 137.

27. Sarah Reckhow and Margaret Weir, Building a Stronger Regional Safety Net: Philanthropy’s Role (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2011), 8.

28. Todd Swanstrom, “Equity Planning in a Fragmented Suburban Setting: The Case of St. Louis,” in Advancing Equity Planning Now, ed. Norman Krumholz and Kathryn Wertheim Hexter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 110.

29. Gregory Weiher, The Fractured Metropolis: Political Fragmentation and Metropolitan Segregation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991); Eric J. Heikil, “Are Municipalities Tieboutian Clubs?,” Regional Science and Urban Economics 26 (1996): 203–26; Kendra Bischoff, “School District Fragmentation and Racial Residential Segregation: How Do Boundaries Matter?,” Urban Affairs Review 44, no. 2 (2008): 182–217; Jonathan Rothwell and Douglas Massey, “Density Zoning and Class Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” Social Science Quarterly 91 (2010): 1123–43; Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), esp. ch. 8.

30. For disparities in health, see Malo André Hutson, George A. Kaplan, Nalini Ranjit, and Mahasin S. Mujahid, “Metropolitan Fragmentation and Health Disparities: Is There a Link?,” Milbank Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2012): 187–207. For disparities in life expectancy, see Yonsu Kim and Tim A. Bruckner, “Political Fragmentation and Widening Disparities in African-American and White Mortality, 1972–1988,” SSM—Population Health 2 (2016): 399–406.

31. We calculated the dissimilarity index using 2015–2019 American Community Survey data at the tract level for two groups: Blacks and all others. We believe this is the best approach because race is the most salient issue in neighborhood segregation, while other racial/ethnic groups are not a large part of the population in either county.

32. Our account of the development of Ferguson draws heavily on Madeleine Swanstrom, Streetcars and Segregation: Ferguson from the Civil War to Michael Brown (Honors thesis, Departments of History and Economics, Tulane University, 2018).

33. There is in fact a third Ferguson. North and east of Old Ferguson are neighborhoods with larger, often distinctive postwar suburban-style homes.

34. The barrier was finally removed after demonstrations in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

35. Richard Rothstein, “The Making of Ferguson,” Economic Policy Institute, October 15, 2014.

36. Our account of Ferguson and its contrast with University City draws from Napoleon Williams, III, Role of Municipal Governance in Stabilizing Mature Inner Suburbs: A Study of Five St. Louis Municipalities, 1970–2015, PhD Diss., Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2020.

37. Advertisement, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 25, 1978.

38. There is a second road into the area, but it was closed due to concerns about crime and only opened for school buses. During a January 2021 visit, both roads were open to traffic.

39. Distressed sales represent all foreclosures and sales of foreclosed properties. Based on data collected by William Rogers, as reported in Swanstrom, Streetcars and Segregation, 79.

40. “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

41. A study of 340 American cities where more than 20 percent of the population is Black found that Blacks were overrepresented in 2 and underrepresented in 129. International City/Council Management Association study as reported in Richard Fausset, “Mostly Black Cities, Mostly White City Halls,” New York Times, September 28, 2014.

42. An analysis by the New York Times found more than 730 municipalities that relied on fines and fees for at least 10 percent of their budget. Mike McIntire and Michael H. Keller, “The Demand for Money behind Many Police Traffic Stops,” New York Times, October 31, 2021.

43. Baltimore County, Maryland Strategic Plan 2020, November 15, 2010, 24.

44. Thomas J. Vicino, Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 160.

45. Gregory Smithsimon, “Punctuated Equilibrium: Community Responses to Neoliberalism in Three Suburban Communities in Baltimore County, Maryland,” in The New American Suburb: Poverty, Race, and the Economic Crisis, ed. Katrin B. Anacker (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 195.

46. Smithsimon, “Punctuated Equilibrium,” 208.

47. As reported in Bernadette Hanlon, John Rennie Short, and Thomas J. Vicino, Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2010), 191.

48. Hanlon et al., Cities and Suburbs, 166.

49. Vicino, Transforming Race and Class, 153.

50. See Cherlin, Andrew J. “ ‘GOOD, BETTER, BEST’: Upward Mobility and Loss of Community in a Black Steelworker Neighborhood,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 17 (2001): 1–21.

51. Henrietta Lacks, the wife of a steelworker and resident of Lyons Homes, died of cervical cancer in 1951. She achieved posthumous fame when it became known that a cell line from her tumor, which had been harvested without her consent, had become a critically important resource in cancer and other medical research. The story, which raises thorny medical, racial, and ethical issues, is well told in Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (New York: Crown, 2010).

52. This somewhat overstates the change, because much of the decline in Black-identifying residents is the result of an increase from 1 percent to 5 percent in the number identifying as being of two or more races.

53. This is impossible to prove in the absence of a clear and agreed-upon definition of “suburban,” but there is compelling evidence to support the assertion. See Jed Kolko, “America Really Is a Nation of Suburbs,” Bloomberg CityLab, November 14, 2018.

54. In Bowling Alone Robert Putnam concluded that “residents of large metropolitan areas incur a ‘sprawl civic penalty’ of roughly 20 percent on most measures of community involvement.” Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 215. The research on the relationship between sprawl and social capital, which is bedeviled by the challenge of separating sprawl from other characteristics such as education and income, is extensive and cuts both ways. One early careful study of the issue found that “at least one characteristic of sprawl—automobile hegemony—is inimical to neighborhood social ties.” Lance Freeman, “The Effects of Sprawl on Neighborhood Social Ties: An Exploratory Analysis,” Journal of the American Planning Association 67, no. 1 (2001): 69–78. Thad Williamson found that sprawl has negative effects on certain kinds of civic and political engagement. Thad Williamson, Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship: The Civic Cost of the American Way of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Measuring sprawl at the county level, Doan Nyugen found no relationship between sprawl and social capital. Doan Nyugen, “Evidence of the Impacts of Urban Sprawl on Social Capital,” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 37, no. 4: 610–27.

55. See, for example, the website for the Fox Meadow Neighborhood Association, https://www.foxmeadowna.org/.

56. Whyte, The Organization Man and Beauregard, When American Became Suburban.

1. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 12.

2. Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Social Networks 78, no. 6 (1977): 1361.