INTRODUCTION
Everyone who has lived in a place more than briefly has been shaped, knowingly or otherwise, by the experience. We are no exception. Todd grew up in a community that could reasonably be described as a good neighborhood. Sandwiched between the Mississippi River and I-94, the Desnoyer Park neighborhood is located on the west side of St. Paul, Minnesota, not far from the University of Minnesota. When Todd was growing up there in the 1950s and 1960s, it had everything from millionaires’ mansions on the River Boulevard to working- and middle-class single-family homes to modest apartment buildings. It was far from perfect—Todd does not remember a single person of color living in the neighborhood, for example—but it was a secure and stimulating place to grow up.
The three-room K–4 Desnoyer Park School was the center of the community. It had a large playground with a jungle gym and a baseball field, and every winter the fire hydrant was tapped to flood two ice rinks, one recreational and one for hockey. Every year the PTA held a winter carnival with games of chance in the school and Strauss waltzes played over loudspeakers for the skaters. Todd’s immediate neighborhood on Otis Avenue was especially close. On summer evenings kids would gather for games of tag and Simon Says, and every Fourth of July Mrs. Stoddard held a community picnic. To this day, Todd remembers the names of dozens of families who lived on his street.
Since 1984 Alan has lived in Roosevelt, a small village in what was once rural but is now exurban New Jersey. Built in the 1930s as a New Deal agricultural-industrial cooperative community and with barely nine hundred residents, it can be seen as a single neighborhood.1 Although neighborliness today is less intense than it was in the 1930s and 1940s, when old-timers years later described it as “one big family where doors were always open and neighbors could drop in on each other pretty much any time,” it remains an intimate, involved, and engaged community, the sort of place where people greet each other and often stop for a chat when they pass each other in the street.2
Over a hundred residents, with or without children in the village K–5 school, show up each year for the school graduation ceremony in the village, while local artists, poets, and musicians have been putting on regular events in town every year since 1987. But some of the connections are fraying. The volunteer fire department was disbanded for lack of members a few years ago, and ever since Herb Johnson and Les Weiner died, there are no more annual Hiroshima Day memorial events in the village amphitheater.
These places matter, but how? Our book is focused on that central question: What is the significance of neighborhoods in twenty-first-century America when, as so many observers have noted, we seem more absorbed in our digital devices than in the social environment immediately around us? As physical containers of social relations, we argue, neighborhoods still matter deeply, and yet their role is different than for earlier generations.
In the most fundamental sense, a neighborhood is a place, a geographic entity. The word “neighbor” itself comes from Old English, meaning “people living near to a certain place.”3 Therefore, from an etymological standpoint, a neighborhood is a group of people living close to each other, or a “body of neighbors.” From the earliest cities large enough to be considered cities in the modern sense, the creation of intermediate spaces, bigger than one’s dwelling or family compound but smaller than the city as a whole, has paralleled the creation of cities. “Despite profound differences in urbanization processes,” Emily Talen writes, neighborhoods, or localized spaces that people identify with and that facilitate human relationships, “emerged as a regular feature of urban experience all over the globe.”4 The Roman emperor Augustus gave official recognition to Rome’s neighborhoods, known as vici, each of which had its own religious shrines and civic administration.5 Over the millennia neighborhoods have varied in their physical form, official status, and governance, but every major city has had “little worlds” inside it that people cared about and related to. It is a constantly changing yet remarkably persistent motif of human society.
People understand a neighborhood as a physical space, but it is not just any physical space. It is an intermediate space. It is a recognized space. Its boundaries may be fuzzy, and people may well disagree about the borders of their own neighborhood or about what their neighborhood should be called, but neighborhoods are places that are clearly understood to exist and are recognized by the people who live there. The principal reason people all but universally identify with a place is, of course, that neighborhoods are far more than physical spaces and geographic entities. At its core, a neighborhood is about proximity, about people living close to one another and therefore developing distinctive social relations.
As befits such a significant, resilient feature of society, a neighborhood is complex. It is simultaneously a geographic entity, an economic unit, and a social organism. Thus, to understand a neighborhood, one must look at it through a multidisciplinary lens, recognizing its diversity and complexity. While we respect what many scholars have written about neighborhoods, we find that much of it is narrow and confined by disciplinary boundaries, projecting an image that recalls the parable of the blind men and the elephant.6 Similarly, neighborhoods need to be understood holistically. Our understanding of neighborhoods needs to be both contextual and dynamic. Neighborhoods are dynamic organisms, constantly changing, embodying a complex system of interactions and feedback loops, much like echo chambers where every action reverberates back and forth in a circular process of causation. With the possible exception of the very wealthiest and very poorest, neighborhoods are in constant flux, moving upward, downward, or sideways but always changing. Trying to stop neighborhoods from changing is no more practical than the apocryphal story of King Canute, who ordered the tides to stop without success.
Not only are neighborhoods internally complex, but they are also situated within larger contexts of both time and space. Neighborhoods are a product of both their histories and the larger forces operating around them, beginning with the city of which they are a part and extending to the global economy. They are affected by all of these forces but not determined by them. Far too much of today’s discourse about neighborhoods sees them purely as the passive products of larger forces, whether racial discrimination, public policies, institutional frameworks, or global capital flows. All such forces are important, but such thinking leaves room for agency, for the effects of the actions and choices of the millions of people who live in America’s neighborhoods and the organizations they have created to act on their behalf. People mold their neighborhoods just as their neighborhoods mold them.
The Idea of the Good Neighborhood
At the center of our argument is the idea of the “good neighborhood.” One could also call them healthy, vital, or decent neighborhoods or, in Emily Talen’s expression, “everyday” neighborhoods.7 When we talk about “good neighborhoods,” however, we do so with care. It is a term fraught with potential misunderstandings and stereotypes, smacking of popular but trivial stories about “the ten best neighborhoods in Houston” or “finding the best place to raise your family.” It is also tinged with nostalgia for the good old days when, in the refrain of the theme song for the sitcom Cheers, “Everybody knew your name.” This sort of nostalgia seems harmless but can easily shade into a yearning for bygone social hierarchies of racial and gender power and subordination.
The good neighborhood can also conjure up racist stereotypes. Real estate agents have often used “good neighborhoods” as code words for white middle-class neighborhoods.8 The reader may reasonably ask, how can we call the neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota, where one of us grew up, a “good neighborhood” when it was completely segregated? We are using the term “good,” however, not in the sense of a moral concept or Platonic ideal but in a narrower pragmatic sense: whether a neighborhood is good or not depends on how well it functions for the people who live there at that time. It is possible to acknowledge that a place worked for the people who lived there and try to understand why it worked for them so we can learn from that experience while at the same time condemning the racism that unjustly blocked people from living there because of the color of their skin.
Race is an inescapable presence in any discussion of American neighborhoods, linked as neighborhoods are to historic systems of oppression and discrimination that are far from merely a bad memory. When it comes to the dynamics of the American neighborhood, however, it is always about race but is never only about race. The white flight from the cities after World War II was about race, but it was also about desperate housing shortages and the sheer shabbiness of the postwar American city after fifteen years of neglect. However, it was racial discrimination, private and public, that made it white flight. In the course of this book, we will try to disentangle the many strands connecting race and neighborhoods.
Good neighborhoods must be understood through an interdisciplinary lens, not reduced to one dimension. Just as neighborhoods should not be reduced to their racial dimension, neither should they be reduced to economics. Some might argue that a neighborhood with a strong housing market—one with high and rising property values where buyers are clamoring to get in—is ipso facto a good neighborhood. We disagree. The market is a blunt instrument. In global cities such as New York and London, many homes in expensive neighborhoods are owned by speculators who may occupy them for only a few weeks of the year, while other units have become Airbnb rentals, turning the neighborhood into an endless stream of transients. A neighborhood may be a market success, yet it is not a good neighborhood if it fails to nurture social connections or sunders those that previously existed. Still, a strong housing market is an important element in most good neighborhoods if not a threshold condition of a good neighborhood.
If we know what good neighborhoods are not, then what are they? How are they defined? A good neighborhood, we readily admit, is not a concept capable of precise definition or quantitative measurement. Intuitively, most people know or think they know a good neighborhood when they see one. They might say that someone “bought a house in a good neighborhood” or “don’t go there at night, that’s a bad neighborhood.” These judgments, of course, can be and often are infected with misinformation and subjective bias. As we use the term “good neighborhood,” it has two necessary elements that, while they may be difficult to apply in any specific neighborhood, are analytically distinct and observable: access to things that are necessary for a good life and the nurturance of distinctive social relations.
First, a good neighborhood gives its residents connections to the things that are necessary for a decent life while not inflicting on them those things that prevent them from living such a life. This includes decent schools, well-functioning civic institutions and public services, access to jobs, and a healthy environment, including clean air, healthy food, and safe open spaces. A good neighborhood is reasonably safe and supports stable or rising property values so that residents can accumulate a modicum of wealth. Good neighborhoods are places where, in the words of one pioneering community development figure, “families can raise their children with the hope that their children’s lives will be better than their own.”9
Few neighborhoods can meet every aspiration. When choosing a neighborhood, all but the wealthiest people need to evaluate and make trade-offs. They may choose a neighborhood because it has excellent schools and pleasant parks even though the nearest grocery store is miles away. Good neighborhoods do not need to be perfect; they just need to work well enough for the people who live there. Indeed, we toyed with the idea of substituting the term “good enough neighborhood.” That modest term reflects the reality that while neighborhoods matter, the lives and identities of most twenty-first-century Americans are far less interwoven with neighborhood connections than was true of past generations.
Neighborhoods, though, need to be good enough to meet those needs that still must be met by neighborhoods. And this will vary across different groups in society. With their far-flung social networks, affluent people depend less on neighborhood connections to meet their needs. They may, for example, send their children not to the local public school but instead to a distant private school or even a boarding school. Lower-income households are far more reliant on the neighborhood’s amenities and social support networks.
The second necessary characteristic of a good neighborhood is that it nurtures distinctive social relations, the social connections epitomized by Mark Granovetter’s concept of “weak ties.”10 Unlike “strong ties” of kinship and friendship, weak ties do not involve substantial intimacy or powerful reciprocal obligations. They are crucial, however, for information sharing, trust building, and mobilizing diverse groups to defend the neighborhood. In chapter 1 we develop the idea of weak ties further. Suffice it to say at this point that weak ties perform crucial functions in good neighborhoods.
Weak ties are crucial for addressing two growing problems in American society: excessive individualism at the cost of community and social/political polarization. In their recent book The Upswing, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Garrett present an impressive array of surveys and other measures to show how, after steady growth in the United States of economic equality, political comity, and communitarian values from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1950s or 1960s, that trend abruptly reversed itself as the country turned away from communitarian to individualistic values. As Putnam and Garrett put it, from having been very much a “we” society in the 1950s and 1960s, the United States “has become demonstrably—indeed measurably—a more ‘I’ society.”11 At the same time, the country has engaged in what journalist Bill Bishop calls “the big sort,” separating ourselves geographically into separate enclaves of political, economic, and social tribes and thus eroding trust and undermining our ability to achieve political consensus.12
While hardly a solution in themselves, weak ties nurtured in good neighborhoods can help address these divisions. Precisely because of their informality and lack of intimacy, weak ties enable people to develop connections across economic, social, and even political divides. Weak ties do not require conformity to a single body of values or perspectives but instead nurture looser connections of tolerance and respect. By helping people to get along at the same time that they get ahead, weak ties work to reconcile the life between individualism and community in American life.
We do not look at every permutation of the American neighborhood in our book. Both the shortness of life and the strictures of our publisher constrain us. Our focus is principally on what might be called “traditional” neighborhoods, where the proximity inherent in the meaning of the word “neighbor” encourages face-to-face encounters in public spaces that nurture weak ties. Such neighborhoods include those of America’s older cities as well as for the most part those in the inner-ring suburbs and newer cities built during the first few decades after World War II. For this reason, we have little to say about the newer very low-density exurban neighborhoods, where virtually every form of human activity or contact requires an automobile. While those communities undoubtedly meet many people’s needs, we wonder whether the term “neighborhood” is even applicable. With distance and the absence of face-to-face contact forcing residents to be very intentional about whom they interact with, in some respects they are more communities of interest than neighborhoods. Perhaps they are the birthplace of new forms of neighboring and social connection, but if so that is a topic for a different book by someone else.
While our concept of neighborhood includes the neighborhoods of the rich and the poor, much of our focus is on those urban and suburban neighborhoods that are coming to be known as “middle neighborhoods,” the neighborhoods that have historically housed America’s vast middle class.13 As Henry Webber writes, they “have traditionally been the heart of American cities. They are the neighborhoods where working- and middle-class citizens live; raise families; pay taxes; send their children to school; go to church, synagogue or mosque; and shop at the local grocer.”14 Despite their erosion in recent decades, these neighborhoods, which still make up a large part of the universe of neighborhoods, are not only at risk of further decline but also have been far less studied than they deserve.
We do not, however, ignore the neighborhoods of the poor or the rich, particularly the former. The future of the nation’s low-income neighborhoods, particularly those low-income communities of color where disinvestment and discrimination have played such a destructive role, is a critical part of the neighborhood conversation. We address those neighborhoods directly in chapter 12.
Why Are Good Neighborhoods Threatened?
Our work is motivated by the conviction that everyone, whatever their economic condition, should be able to live in a good neighborhood and that however difficult it may be, this is an achievable aspiration. Yet, the challenge is that by any reasonable standard, far too few neighborhoods today, particularly those occupied by the less prosperous members of American society and by people of color, meet even a modest definition of what a good enough neighborhood should be. For all the disproportionate attention given to gentrification, outside a handful of hot markets it is the exception rather than the rule. The dominant trend of neighborhood change in recent decades has been decline, while access to good neighborhoods has increasingly become an elite good.
There are many possible explanations for the decline of good neighborhoods. Technological changes have played a part. Things as mundane as the rise of television and air conditioning during the second half of the twentieth century meant that fewer people sit on front stoops or porches or take strolls around the block on summer evenings, all activities conducive to neighborliness. More recent developments, such as the internet and social media, have further attenuated place-based social ties. The rise of shopping malls and big box stores undid countless neighborhood shopping streets, once critical stitches in the neighborhood fabric, and more recently those neighborhood shopping venues are being undone by the rise of ecommerce.
Another fundamental force is the change in the American family since the 1960s. The number of husband-and-wife couples raising children together, the backbone of earlier tightly knit neighborhoods, has dropped from nearly half of all American households to fewer than 20 percent. Stay-at-home mothers have all but disappeared from the scene. With people marrying later and living longer, far more of us live alone. While the young people who have flocked to the vibrant urban scenes of New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and many other cities may want some kind of neighborhood connection, they look for it in high-density, mixed-use enclaves, not the blocks of one- and two-family houses that make up the traditional neighborhoods of our cities and postwar suburbs. While their dramatic rise as a share of the American urban population since 2000 has undermined some traditional neighborhoods, it has also led to the growth of a new type of good neighborhood dominated by educated, affluent, and above all young residents.
Our economy has also changed fundamentally. The shift from an industrial to a so-called knowledge economy has led to the hollowing out of the American middle class, the heart of the traditional neighborhood. We have more rich and poor families—and fewer middle-class families—than we did a couple of generations ago. That reflects in turn many changes, including the shift from well-paying industrial jobs to lower-wage service jobs, the collapse of the unions that played such an important role in working-class life, and the growing earnings gap between those with and those without a college degree, all of which has made America’s haves and have-nots into two almost separate societies.
Economic polarization has been paralleled by spatial polarization. Not only do we have fewer middle-income families, but we also have even fewer middle neighborhoods, as households have increasingly sorted themselves by income. Although racial segregation has slowly declined in American neighborhoods since the 1960s, in its place we have far more economic, social, and even partisan political segregation. As a recent study concluded, “high partisan segregation [exists] across the country, with most voters of both political parties living in partisan bubbles with little exposure to the other party.”15 Not only have neighborhoods pulled apart economically, but neighborly relations more broadly have also deteriorated. Involvement in local organizations has dropped, voting in local elections has declined, and Americans report spending less time with their neighbors.16
Does this mean that neighborhoods no longer exist or are in danger of disappearing? Hardly. Human beings are social animals, and neighborhoods provide for human interaction that is fundamental to our being. But they have become weaker, both as frames for human connection and places that offer people, particularly people of color and those not affluent enough to have many choices about where to live, a decent quality of life and opportunities for them and their children. Too often, neighborhoods are places where families have little hope for their children’s futures.
Plan of the Book
This book examines how American neighborhoods have changed, what factors have driven those changes, and what challenges our neighborhoods face today in the early twenty-first century. Our approach is deliberately concrete and grounded in the lived reality of neighborhoods. While we are both scholars, we have also been practitioners, and that experience animates this book. We are interested in knowledge for its own sake but even more in knowledge that can guide action to support good neighborhoods and rebuild struggling ones. We are interested in neighborhoods, not an abstraction called “The Neighborhood.”
Chapters 1 and 2 frame the argument of the book. Chapter 1 elaborates on the idea of the good neighborhood that we have sketched out above, making the case for why good neighborhoods are important and why they are threatened. Chapter 2 develops our approach to studying neighborhood change. Placing our work in the context of prior thinking about neighborhoods, we argue that thinking about neighborhood change must be interdisciplinary, applying insights from fields such as sociology, economics, political science; contextual, taking into account the effects of different geographical scales on neighborhoods; and historical, recognizing the overlapping and multidimensional effects of time. To reflect all of these realities, neighborhoods cannot be grasped with linear reasoning; instead, they must be understood as dynamic systems with powerful feedback effects and tipping points.
Reflecting the importance of history to today’s reality, chapters 3 through 5 explore the constantly changing dynamics of American neighborhoods from the colonial era to the present. Neighborhood change has reflected shifts in the role of the American city as it has moved from being a mercantile to an industrial center and today a center of education and health care or, to some, a “creative” city. Neighborhoods have also mirrored changes in American attitudes and values, the shifting meanings of race and ethnicity and, particularly since World War II, the shifting public policies and institutional frameworks that have emerged as neighborhoods came to be perceived as a problem to be solved rather than simply part of the reality of people’s lives.
At the same time, we try to show how the people who live in cities have fought to create vital neighborhoods, from the immigrant enclaves of the early twentieth century and the segregated Black ghettos of the 1920s to today’s community development movement. A key to our approach is that historical periods do not end; they continue on as new historical forces are layered on top of old ones. The contemporary city, for example, is primarily a product of the forces of two historical periods: the forces of urban revival that began gathering steam in the 1990s are overlaid on the forces of urban decline that, while they may have peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, are still very much alive in American cities.
The next four chapters explore key forces and agents of neighborhood change. Chapter 6 addresses the pervasive role of the housing market in neighborhood change and shows how market factors operate within and are central to the larger neighborhood feedback system. Chapter 7 looks at the larger demographic, economic, and social changes that have affected neighborhoods since the end of World War II, while chapter 8 grapples with the pervasive but changing role of race. We stress the ways in which people, both Black and white, have used their agency to create successful Black and integrated neighborhoods while recognizing the pressures and threats to these neighborhoods posed by the continued presence of structural racism in American society. Chapter 9 then looks at the agents of neighborhood change and the ways in which neighborhoods and their residents are affected by institutional and organizational actors, beginning with city governments but including institutions such as universities and medical centers, which have come to play an outsize and sometimes positive but often problematic role in neighborhood change.
Reflecting our critique of theories of neighborhood change that overgeneralize across different neighborhood contexts, chapters 10 to 13 are organized around three different types of neighborhoods that have different yet related dynamics and challenges. Chapter 10 examines gentrification, arguably the most widely discussed and probably the most widely misunderstood form of neighborhood change in American cities today. We drill down into the dynamics of gentrification—who gentrifies, what neighborhoods gentrify, and why—but also into the relationship of gentrification and power and the significance of gentrification as one link in the larger context of the ongoing dynamic of neighborhood change.
If gentrification can be seen as a form of neighborhood revival, however problematic, the next three chapters look at different variations on the theme of neighborhood decline. Chapter 11 explores the decline of the traditional middle neighborhood, particularly the Black middle neighborhoods that largely emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 12 turns to the persistent challenge of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, tracing their origins and current conditions and posing the question of whether and how such neighborhoods can become good neighborhoods, a question we answer cautiously in the affirmative. Finally, chapter 13 addresses the increasing challenges faced by many suburban neighborhoods, particularly in the inner-ring suburbs built in the postwar suburban boom.
In the final chapter we tie together the themes that animate our thinking and ask the central question: How should scholars and practitioners be rethinking the theory and practice of neighborhood change to make them more intellectually compelling and practically useful in the twenty-first century? Ultimately, we need a robust multidimensional understanding of how and why neighborhoods change to be a framework for not only more productive research but also to support creative, effective policies and practices by neighborhood change agents that can move us toward a reality where the ability to live in a good neighborhood is available to all, not just a fortunate few.
Postscript: A Note on the Pandemic
Beginning in early 2020, COVID-19 changed everything. It caused us to appreciate neighborly connections more than ever but also to recognize their fragility and contingency. Neighborhoods are all about face-to-face encounters. With social distancing, we suddenly found that we could not even share a cup of coffee with a friend at a local café. Initially, even sidewalk encounters seemed hazardous. We missed these human connections. At the same time, we discovered that neighborhoods have qualities that can compensate, at least up to a point, for the risks created by propinquity, fostering social connection even while physically distancing. Forced to stay home, people found that they had more opportunities to nurture neighborhood connections and to appreciate how valuable those connections could be.
FIGURE 0.1. A community refrigerator in Colton, California
(Photo by Annakai Geschlider/IECN)
People formed neighborhood pods, hyperlocal text message groups, and phone trees. Neighbors joined together to share childcare, a pressing need for working parents after many childcare centers closed. Mutual aid societies fostered reciprocal helping relationships outside of government or market exchanges, an idea rooted in the anarchist tradition. Innumerable acts of neighboring, carefully organized or spontaneous, took place in cities and towns across the country, such as community refrigerators that popped up in front yards and on sidewalks (figure 0.1).
It would be heartwarming to report that neighborhood connections wove a tight safety net around those vulnerable to COVID-19, but that would be far from the truth. The safety net may be tightly woven in some neighborhoods but so loosely woven in others as to be all but meaningless. Even at best, it cannot substitute for the loss of income or jobs and can provide only limited comfort for the loss of a loved one. At the same time that COVID-19 prompted so many examples of neighborhood vitality, it also exposed the deep inequality across neighborhoods. Rates of COVID-19 infection and death were highest in low-income, immigrant, and African American neighborhoods. The pandemic brought out the continuing resilience of neighborhoods but also exposed their stunning inequality and the deep racial roots of that inequality, themes we return to often in this book.