14 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE
Neighborhoods are constantly changing______economically, socially, demographically, and physically. Neighborhood stability is largely an illusion. In recent decades, however, neighborhood change has become in many ways more challenging than ever. While neighborhood decline in the 1960s and 1970s was part and parcel of a larger process of urban decline, since the millennium neighborhood decline has been spreading even in the face of the economic revival of many American cities, accentuating spatial inequality. In this process of decline, the neighborhoods we have dubbed “good neighborhoods” are both particularly important and particularly under threat.
A proper understanding of neighborhood change is essential to address the threat to good neighborhoods. Unfortunately, much writing about neighborhoods not only fosters a poor understanding of the dynamics of change but also provides little or no guidance for practitioners. It often fosters the illusion that neighborhoods can be frozen in time or that neighborhood change is a zero-sum chronicle of invasion and succession, with predetermined plot lines, attributing too much significance to isolated variables, on the one hand, or large structural forces, on the other. The effect is either excessive pessimism in the face of structural forces or excessive optimism about the efficacy of isolated interventions.
In this book we have made the case for a different approach. First, to understand neighborhoods, we must grasp that they are always changing. And we must reconcile the idea of the good neighborhood, which arguably implies stability and reliability, with the reality of change. Instead of understanding neighborhoods as mechanical objects that can be assembled piece by piece from separate parts, we must comprehend neighborhoods holistically, as dynamic systems with powerful internal feedback systems. Neighborhood change reflects the impacts of three separate systems: economic, social, and governmental/institutional. While the triggers of change are usually forces that originate outside the neighborhood, such as migration and economic shocks, their impact is mediated by the perceptions of those acting within or on the neighborhood, such as residents, public officials, and bankers. Those perceptions determine the actions people take, which in turn drive the trajectory of neighborhood change. All of these factors are constantly subject to powerful feedback loops, which are in turn magnified by the local context, including the governmental and institutional environment.
In this conclusion, we summarize our understanding of the good neighborhood as well as why good neighborhoods matter and how they are threatened. We then turn to the central question: If, indeed, neighborhoods are important and yet under serious threat, what can be done? Can good neighborhoods be nurtured and preserved in the twenty-first-century city?
Why Good Neighborhoods Matter
At the beginning of this book, we offered a definition of the good neighborhood that, while unquantifiable and often difficult to apply in practice, is, we believe, clear and compelling. Good neighborhoods are places that meet our basic needs as individuals and as social beings. Those needs include safety, a decent quality of life, access to good public goods and services, and a modicum of community identity and commitment. They are places where one can aspire to a good life for one’s children. Good neighborhoods do not need to meet an ideal standard, but they do need to be good enough to meet people’s needs. As American society has become more divided and polarized, good neighborhoods have become increasingly important. Good neighborhoods nurture weak ties that link people across social divides, nurturing the bridging social capital that helps to reconcile the tension between individualism and community in American life. They help us to get along at the same time that they help us to get ahead.
It is important to understand what types of places we are (and are not) talking about. Good neighborhoods are places where people live in sufficient proximity to one another that residents encounter each other during their daily routines. This includes most suburban as well as urban communities, but we hesitate to call the very low-density exuburban areas—where all needs outside the home are accessed through the automobile—good neighborhoods. They may be good places that meet the needs of their residents, as they perceive them, but they function differently than traditional neighborhoods, particularly with respect to the sorts of encounters that build weak ties. In many respects, they are not so much neighborhoods as communities of interest where people choose whom they will interact with. We are not physical determinists and offer no rules for density or mixed land uses that enable a place to be considered a neighborhood. What matters is not physical configuration but instead whether opportunities exist for serendipitous encounters that build neighborly relations.
We want to be clear that we are not pining for a golden age of neighborhood closeness and stability. Whatever may have been the dynamics of American neighborhoods twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago, that was then and this is now. The ethnically and racially homogenous neighborhood of the first half of the twentieth century, with its intense interactions and intimacy, is largely an artifact of the past. Neighborly relations then were more all-encompassing and more intimate. They were also more gendered and racialized. The United States today is a different country with different norms and neighborhoods that serve different social functions. Neighborhoods no longer occupy the central position in people’s lives that they once did.
The demise of the traditional ethnic neighborhood was anticipated even when it was seemingly alive and well. In an influential 1938 essay, sociologist Louis Wirth predicted that urban life would gradually erode the sentimental ties that he associated with folk traditions. In the city of the future, he expected human relations to become more “impersonal, superficial, transitory, and segmental” and neighborhoods, as traditionally understood, to disappear.1 Wirth overstated his case. But he was right that relationships rooted in neighborhood ties would become more superficial and transitory. While people are less mobile—in the sense of how often they move—than they were during the decades immediately following World War II, they are also less psychologically tied to place. Kinship and friendship networks are more geographically dispersed and are increasingly linked not through direct personal contacts but instead through virtual relationships and social media. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic and the increased use of Zoom and similar technologies to stay in contact with far-flung friends and family may have enhanced long-distance relationships. As increased digital connectivity means that more relationships no longer require proximity, neighborly relations inevitably become more marginal.
They may be more marginal, but neighborhood ties are as important as ever. While Granovetter dismisses as “absent” ties such ties as the “ ‘nodding’ relationship between people living on the same street, or the ‘tie’ to the vendor from whom one customarily buys a morning newspaper,” we disagree.2 These diffuse neighborhood contacts are valuable. Casual encounters foster a degree of familiarity that enhances the experience of sharing a neighborhood space, facilitating a degree of tolerance and peaceful coexistence even between people who have little else in common.3 The “being together of strangers,” as political scientist Iris Marion Young put it, is a valuable aspect of life in city neighborhoods.4
While neighborly relations today are less intense in many ways, ironically the lower intensity of the ties that good neighborhoods nurture are precisely what makes them so valuable in bridging the economic, racial, and religious divides that plague American society. In contrast to people’s strong ties, which are usually closed to those outside a limited circle of kinship or friendship, the weak ties nurtured in good neighborhoods establish links across social, economic, and racial differences. While not intimate, these links enable us to share space and participate in shared projects with people who are different from us.
In short, although many Americans today see neighborhoods as playing only a marginal role in their lives, they remain important. Good neighborhoods not only benefit their residents but also benefit society as a whole. Good neighborhoods should be understood as a public good, something all people have a right to have, not something left to the vagaries of the private market. Ensuring an adequate supply of good neighborhoods should be a public responsibility. There are sound reasons to believe, however, that fewer good neighborhoods exist today than fifty or even twenty years ago, and many that do survive are under stress. The fact that good neighborhoods confer broad benefits on society makes it all the more troubling that in recent decades they seem to have increasingly become a luxury good that can only be purchased at great expense.
The Threat to Good Neighborhoods
In making his case for why some things should not be bought and sold, Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel discusses what he calls the “skyboxification” of American life, the construction of exclusive skyboxes for the wealthy high above the ordinary fans in the stands and, by extension, the tendency for those with the money to pay for luxury goods that separate them from those with fewer resources.5 Skyboxification exemplifies a central threat to American neighborhoods. Affluent households are withdrawing from traditional neighborhoods, insulating themselves in increasingly exclusive communities. As they isolate themselves from others, the poor become increasingly trapped in areas of concentrated multigenerational poverty, the supply of good neighborhoods in the middle shrinks, and competition for the remaining supply drives up the cost of housing for middle-class families.
Up to a point, neighborhoods can be seen as commodities. Access to them is in large part determined by the market, and the choice of a neighborhood usually has an economic dimension. Skyboxification, however, accentuates their commodification, upsetting the balance between individual and communitarian motives that is the essence of a good neighborhood. In good neighborhoods, loyalty to place takes some of the edge off peculiarly pecuniary considerations. As pecuniary motivations come to dominate, the idea of a neighborhood as a shared public good that ties people together gradually unravels.
The commodification of neighborhoods is but one of a series of interwoven trends under way for the past fifty years that reduce the number of people able to enjoy the benefits of a good neighborhood. At one level, neighborhoods have been victims of large-scale economic and social forces beyond their control, most importantly the shrinkage of the middle class. The effect on neighborhoods of the hollowing out of the middle class has been exacerbated by increased economic sorting of households into separate neighborhoods. While the rise of single-person and nontraditional households has led to some new neighborhood formations, such as the millennial neighborhoods that have emerged in or near the downtowns of major cities, the decline in child-raising families has undermined the traditional single-family neighborhoods that make up the greater part of those cities, along with their postwar inner suburbs.
The economic polarization of America has been accompanied by growing social and cultural fragmentation. In Putnam and Garret’s phrase, the United States has moved from a “we” to an “I” society, and the social and political fault lines in American society have become increasingly pronounced.6 In a society dominated by increasingly narrow definitions of the community to which one belongs, which today may be an online or even imaginary community rather than a physical one, the meaning of neighborhood has diminished. And the physical neighborhood to which one belongs is increasingly stratified by not only income but also education, lifestyle preferences, and political affiliation.
In many ways, good neighborhoods have also been collateral damage in the over forty-year-long attack on government that began with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. The significance of public goods to the vitality of neighborhoods has never been fully acknowledged. The good neighborhood rests on a substructure of public institutions and well-functioning public services, such as public schools, parks, and transit. The informal social controls of the urban neighborhood, depicted by Ehrenhalt and others, did not exist in a vacuum but were supported by that substructure.7
The weakening of the public sector and the privatization of American life are central to the story of the decline of good neighborhoods. In a society that devalues public goods and valorizes low taxes and a privatized lifestyle, economic sorting accentuates the decline of the public sphere. Those with resources seek out low-tax jurisdictions at the suburban fringe where they can pursue a privatized lifestyle and do not have to bear the burden, as it were, of paying taxes to support the public services needed by less economically self-sufficient households. Moreover, the political jurisdictions in which a growing share of the less affluent live find themselves with increasing demands for services but less ability to pay for them and with little assistance from the state or federal government. And while the affluent may be willing to pay for the private goods that substitute for what might be public goods elsewhere, their choices reduce the resource base for the public goods available to others.
One element that can never be left out of the American story of neighborhood decline is race. Following our conviction that neighborhood change is always about race but never only about race, it is important to understand how neighborhood racial dynamics have played out against the backdrop of privatization and the decline of public goods. Racial dynamics have often been perceived as a zero-sum proposition in which gains by African Americans lead inevitably to losses by whites. Heather McGhee offers a powerful illustration of this in the story of public swimming pools in American cities. Through the middle of the twentieth century, cities across the United States built grand resort-like public pools as a recreational amenity for their residents (figure 1). In some cities more modest pools were built for Black residents, while in others no facilities were provided for them.
The decision by St. Louis’s public welfare director to open the city’s pools to Black residents in 1949 led to violent attacks on Black people. According to a newspaper account the next day, “approximately 400 policemen and detectives were called out to restore order early last night as crowds of white youths attacked Negroes in Fairgrounds Park and in streets near the park.”8 The following day the mayor rescinded the decision, closing some pools and resegregating others.
When the Oak Park pool in Montgomery, Alabama, was integrated in 1959, the city council decided to close it down rather than let Blacks and whites share it. “Uncomprehending white children,” McGhee writes, “cried as the city contractors poured cement into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. To defy segregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. It even sold off the animals in the zoo. The entire park system closed for over a decade.”9 Across the country private swimming clubs and pools took the place of public pools. In 1950 there were only about 2,500 private in-ground swimming pools in the United States; by 2009 there were 5.2 million private pools.10 The privatization of swimming pools is an apt metaphor for the way racism drained shared public resources from American cities.11
The belief that neighborhood racial change is a zero-sum proposition has played a significant role in the decline of many neighborhoods. In some respects that thinking is rooted in the invasion-succession model of neighborhood change going back to the Chicago School of Human Ecology. In contrast to seeing the neighborhood as a place shared by diverse populations linked by weak ties, the invasion-succession model frames neighborhood change as a kind of war of “us versus them,” whether couched in racial, ethnic, economic, or cultural terms. The implicit premise is that inevitably one side, typically the invaders, wins, taking over the neighborhood and driving out longtime residents, in a contemporary parallel to the popular but misleading story of how modern humans displaced the Neanderthals. The same thinking and much the same presumption of inevitability color much of the thinking about gentrification today.
FIGURE 14.1. The segregated Mullanphy Pool in St. Louis in 1914
(Photograph courtesy of Missouri Historical Society)
We are not naive enough to believe that neighborhood change is devoid of conflicts. There is an important difference, however, between seeing change as conflictual and seeing it as zero-sum. Neighborhood change is not inherently a zero-sum game, and neighborhood outcomes are not predetermined. As we discussed earlier, the widely accepted tipping point theory, which holds that if a neighborhood’s Black population exceeds some modest level the neighborhood will inevitably become entirely Black, embodies fundamental demographic and economic fallacies. Similar presumptions applied to gentrification are equally fallacious. The many neighborhood pathways we have explored throughout this book show that a wide variety of outcomes are possible. Neighborhoods and their allies cannot choose the exogenous forces that affect them, but they retain considerable agency in how they respond to them. The ability to understand both the scope and the limitations of that agency, in addition to the nature of the processes by which it can be expressed, lies at the heart of the ability to craft local initiatives capable of stabilizing or reviving struggling neighborhoods and replacing zero-sum with positive-sum neighborhood change.
Can This Neighborhood Be Saved?12
Many of the forces that threaten strong neighborhoods are rooted in large-scale demographic, economic and technological trends over which local practitioners and often even national policymakers have little control. Yet, those trends are not the whole story. The fact that many European countries are part of the same global economy and share similar demographic and technological trends but have experienced far less decline in their traditional urban neighborhoods suggests that other factors play significant roles. Political institutions and public policies are an important part of that story.
American political institutions and public policies have promoted the outward movement of population that continues to drain the vitality of urban and inner-ring suburban neighborhoods. Racial exclusion during the early years of suburban expansion and exclusionary zoning since then, coupled with the American pattern of fragmented municipal government and public education, have exacerbated economic and racial segregation. Neighborhood inequality and neighborhood decline are baked into our state and local governance framework.
Many federal policies have created perverse incentives that, while not intentionally aimed at neighborhoods, have the effect of undermining good neighborhoods for ordinary Americans while subsidizing places for economically privileged households. What might be called “stealth” neighborhood policies, including federal sewer and water grants, the federal income tax deduction of mortgage interest and property taxes, and policies favoring road construction over public transit, have promoted the movement of population out of older urban neighborhoods and new construction over rehabilitation of older structures.13 While the implicit bias in federal programs is less today than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, it is still present.
Although the federal government has few tools to directly address suburban exclusion and political fragmentation, any federal initiatives that would redress the underlying inequality of resources at both the individual and governmental levels would help preserve and strengthen good neighborhoods.14 Converting the current program of housing vouchers into a housing allowance entitlement so that every eligible household could live in decent housing at an affordable rent would not only transform the lives of millions of struggling households but also, by reducing evictions and involuntary mobility, help stabilize poor neighborhoods.
Demand-side subsidies, however, do not directly address the central issue in this book: the inadequate supply of good places for people to live in. To foster good places, the United States has evolved a complex and distinctive community development system. Emerging during the urban crisis era and growing out of a variety of influences, including neighborhood organizing against urban renewal and highway construction, over time its evolution has reflected many of the same privatization trends that have undermined local public services. Community development corporations (CDCs) have become more professionalized, resulting in often impressive real estate development activity achieved at the cost of community building, neighborhood organizing, and advocacy. Tax credits have largely replaced direct public spending, fostering a development culture powerfully influenced by investor preferences and culminating in the problematic and irresponsible 2018 Opportunity Zone tax credit program.
The shift to what we call network governance, the decentralized and complex system of collaboration among public, private, and nonprofit actors, may have been a necessary political compromise in the context of the rise to power of free market political forces beginning in the 1980s, but it is not well designed to address unequal neighborhood outcomes. Despite the creation of an elaborate support system made up of national and local intermediaries, foundations, and trade organizations, the results are uneven. Cities and neighborhoods with well-connected, professionally run CDCs capable of fully utilizing the tools offered by the system of network governance see visible results, including tangible projects and sometimes overall neighborhood improvement. Many other communities are left out in the cold.15
Despite these limitations, community development practitioners are doing valuable work, grappling with the tensions that have bedeviled the movement since its inception. The central, arguably permanent, tension in community development is between helping people and helping places. If people move out of poverty they may move out of the neighborhood, leaving behind a poorer place. Conversely, initiatives that improve the place but lead to rising rents and house prices may force longtime residents out of the neighborhood, undermining community. CDCs and others can and do try to manage this tension, but it never fully disappears. The people-place tension reflects the larger societal tension between individualism and community, a tension that good neighborhoods help to bridge by furthering individual achievement while at the same time nurturing commitment to community.
A fundamental premise of neighborhood change, which all would-be community developers should acknowledge, is that change is unavoidable but no one direction of change is inevitable. Not only is it pointless to try to re-create a neighborhood as it was twenty or fifty years ago, it is equally pointless to expect it to remain the same ten years from now or perhaps even next year. With the possible exception of the most distressed areas and the most solidly prosperous areas, neighborhoods are constantly changing. That said, no neighborhood is subject to one particular form of change. This belief is at the heart of much of the conflict and misunderstanding in the neighborhood change discourse, from the neighborhood life cycle and tipping point theorists of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent adherents of Neil Smith’s rent gap theory of gentrification. Assumptions that a modest percentage of Black in-movers inevitably leads to an all-Black neighborhood and that a rent gap inevitably leads to gentrification are both demonstrably false. Neighborhood change is driven by complex feedback systems. Any theory that claims to predict neighborhood outcomes along linear paths of causation is of dubious value.
An unvoiced premise, while clearly fallacious, underpins these theories, namely that the potential demand from what might be called the “trigger population” is effectively infinite. Tipping point theory implicitly assumes that there is an infinite number of Black households trying to move into white neighborhoods. While it may have seemed that way to some panic-stricken observers in the 1960s, it is clearly not true. Once we acknowledge that the number of white in-movers into white neighborhoods substantially outnumbers Black in-movers, we recognize that tipping point theory cannot be generally true, a conclusion substantiated by decades of data. The same point is relevant to gentrification. For all potentially gentrifiable neighborhoods to actually gentrify, the supply of affluent, well-educated millennials would have to be if not literally infinite at least vastly larger than it actually is. As a result, outside of a handful of magnet cities such as Seattle, the number of neighborhoods that actually gentrify is far smaller than the number that theoretically could. Yet, the fear of gentrification is pervasive.
The truism that no category of demand for homes and neighborhoods is unlimited has another more troubling implication, which directly affects the possibility of reviving many struggling neighborhoods. As we discussed in chapter 7, the demographic character of the United States has changed markedly since most urban and inner-ring suburban neighborhoods were built. Household formation has slowed down, while the traditional child-rearing nuclear family that formed the core market for these neighborhoods is a diminishing part of the national household pool. For a neighborhood whose raison d’être was, in the old marketing phrase, “a good place to raise a family” and where the aggregate number of households raising families is no longer sufficient to replace those who have already raised children and are ready to move out, this is bad news. And so long as developers continue to build at the suburban edge and siphon off demand, the brunt of declining household formation will fall on older neighborhoods in central cities and inner-ring suburbs.
Restoring Good Neighborhoods: What Can Be Done?
The limited demand for traditional urban neighborhoods is not an argument for inaction. It is an argument, however, for caution and managing expectations and, even more so, for exploring whether there are alternative ways to understand the relationship between market demand and good neighborhoods. While the driving issue in gentrifying neighborhoods can be characterized as managing the market, in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty it is one of doing without the market, while in middle neighborhoods it is a matter of building the market. The contextual patterns associated with each of these three neighborhood strategy frameworks make it possible to produce a middle-level theory of neighborhood change, which in turn can enable practitioners working in similar, if not identical, contexts to learn from one another.
Managing the Market in Gentrifying Neighborhoods
The term “gentrification” is commonly applied to what might otherwise be called economically ascending neighborhoods, that is, neighborhoods experiencing an in-migration of more affluent households, raising household incomes and, by extension, home prices. As we discussed in chapter 10, the term has taken on a life of its own and become fraught with negative associations. Gentrification, in the context of neighborhood change, is a phenomenon rooted in the restructuring of urban economies and the changing preferences of young educated workers for urban living. Assuming that it is not reversed as a result of possible changes in the work world following the COVID-19 pandemic, an outcome we consider unlikely, gentrification will not disappear.
Given a certain level of demand on the part of affluent young urban in-migrants, their rising demand must go somewhere. Ironically, much of the opposition to gentrification focuses on blocking construction of new housing, although there is compelling evidence that increasing supply can help moderate increases in housing costs.16 Moreover, many opponents appear to forget the basic point that neighborhoods are always changing. Assuming that the residents of neighborhood X are successful in preventing affluent young people from moving into their neighborhood, the results will be twofold: they will move somewhere else, with unknown effects, and neighborhood X will not remain the same and will change anyway, quite possibly in ways neither anticipated nor desired by its residents.
Gentrification, as we have stated, is simply one form of neighborhood change, following the model of feedback systems linking perceptions and behavior. As such, it can be managed. New housing can be built to channel demand, and affordable housing can be developed to provide long-term accommodation for lower-income households that might otherwise be displaced. Indeed, the market strength represented by gentrification can be harnessed to create affordable housing either through inclusionary zoning or with less negative effect on the market through neighborhood-level tax increment financing schemes that channel the additional tax revenues flowing from the increase in the market values into affordable housing. Such a scheme in Portland, Oregon, supported the construction of 2,200 affordable units in and around that city’s gentrifying Pearl District.17 Potential harms from rising property values can also be managed. Cook County, Illinois, and Philadelphia have adopted property tax measures that protect lower-income homeowners from being burdened by the higher taxes that might otherwise result from housing market appreciation in gentrifying areas.
Any effective strategy to manage gentrification requires the active engagement of the local government, but the political will needed to drive that engagement is not always present. In cities where gentrification is a widespread rather than isolated phenomenon, advocates’ energies would be more productively employed in fighting for local government measures to manage gentrification than in trying to prevent it from taking place. In other cities, of which there are probably many more, practitioners should recognize that, as we have noted earlier, we do not live in an age of gentrification; we live in an age of simultaneous urban revival and urban decline. The greater threat to good neighborhoods comes not from reinvestment and repopulation but from disinvestment and depopulation.
We are not saying that there are no conflicts between newcomers and old-timers in gentrifying neighborhoods. Such conflicts are not a function of gentrification per se but are common to all forms of demographic, social, and economic neighborhood change. Moreover, the sense of cultural or social displacement that change triggers is real and needs to be addressed. While the gentrification discourse muddles our understanding of neighborhood change, the anxieties that it taps into are real and based on lived experience. As we suggest in chapter 10, gentrification is as much, if not more so, about power than it is about the specifics of neighborhood change. For good reason, residents of low-income neighborhoods feel that they are largely powerless to shape the future of their neighborhoods. Not long ago in the days of urban renewal and highway building, the coercive power of the state was used to displace hundreds of thousands of African American families. Based on both lived experience and the discourse that surrounds them today, they have good reason to doubt that any change will result in a socially and economically mixed neighborhood with a place for them.
As Andrew Volmert and his colleagues at the FrameWorks Institute, who have studied the neighborhood change discourse, write, “The idea of encouraging socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods is largely absent from public thinking: It is a ‘cognitive hole’ which, empty of a robust concept, is filled in with miscellaneous detritus of discourse,” adding that “in the public definition of gentrification, affluent people are the ‘winners’ and low-income people are the ‘losers.’ ”18 It is crucial to move the gentrification discourse away from an inside-out version of the Chicago School’s invasion-succession model looming over a city’s neighborhoods. Such a discourse polarizes and paralyzes policy deliberations. While it is essential to frame the conversation about mixed-income neighborhoods so they are perceived as both desirable and possible and not only a matter of winners and losers, it is also important to remember that actually creating successful mixed-income neighborhoods is a far more complicated process requiring both political will and broad-based commitment. It also necessitates engaging with the residents of lower-income communities and ensuring that they have a strong say in the future of heir neighborhood.
Low-Income Neighborhoods: Succeeding Despite the Market
The rigid gentrification discourse has often made the work of local officials, CDCs, and others to improve concentrated poverty neighborhoods more difficult, with some arguing that any improvement to such neighborhoods—from new housing to community gardens and the removal of environmental nuisances—is a harbinger of gentrification.19 That stance, while it might have some basis in isolated cases, is more often badly misplaced. Moreover, it offers no alternative way to approach the well-documented negative effects of living or growing up in concentrated poverty neighborhoods and the equally well-documented reality that the number of people living in such areas has increased significantly over the past decades. Under those circumstances, undermining people’s efforts to create a better quality of life for themselves on such questionable grounds is far from harmless.
Creating a better quality of life does not necessarily mean creating a mixed-income neighborhood. In many cases, that goal may be out of reach. If the pool of middle-income families is not even large enough to replace the turnover in struggling middle neighborhoods, as is often the case, it is hard to make a credible case that enough such families can be found to turn concentrated poverty neighborhoods into mixed-income ones. And while some concentrated poverty neighborhoods may gentrify in hot market cities such as Seattle, that outcome is remote for most such neighborhoods elsewhere. This brings us to the question posed earlier: Is it possible to create good neighborhoods without building strong market demand?
We believe, first, that the answer is a qualified yes and, second, that whatever the risks and uncertainties, creating good neighborhoods is too important not to be pursued. Some would argue that it makes more sense to help the residents move to high-opportunity areas rather than attempt the difficult, if not impossible, effort to revitalize concentrated poverty neighborhoods. The problem with this line of thinking is that high-poverty neighborhoods do not go away; they are the housing of last resort for people at the bottom of the economic order. The likelihood that enough affordable housing will be available in high-opportunity areas in the foreseeable future to make a significant dent in the population of concentrated poverty neighborhoods is remote in the extreme. To abandon those neighborhoods, as the triage model of policymaking would suggest, is immoral. Moreover, smart interventions can make a difference even when market conditions remain unchanged. Improving a neighborhood does not change the poverty of the people who live there, but it can meaningfully alter the conditions under which they live. That in turn is likely to have a significant effect on their life chances and those of their children. As George Galster concluded, while “good neighborhoods alone will be insufficient to ending poverty and inequality, I hasten to add that they are necessary.”20
Turning a concentrated poverty neighborhood into a good neighborhood requires a three-pronged strategy that can be justified on both moral grounds and the public benefits to society. First, it requires a decent level of public safety. The pattern of militarized overpolicing of low-income minority neighborhoods needs to change. Respectful policing, coordinated with mental health professionals, other social service providers, and neighborhood organizations, can improve safety in poor neighborhoods. Second, decent housing and the removal of environmentally noxious uses are essential. The tools needed to ensure that low-income families can live securely in environments that are not hazardous to their health and safety are well known and well understood. They include effective code enforcement, adequate funds for home repairs, an entitlement housing allowance, and the removal of environmental pollutants as well as remediation of contaminated brownfield sites. Moreover, the social benefits of such investments are equally widely recognized, whether it is reduced energy consumption or fewer hospital admissions through improved indoor air quality.21 Finally, we need to invest in good schools in poor neighborhoods beginning with early childhood education, which itself has shown to have a significant social return on investment. Nobel Laureate James Heckman writes that “the rate of return for investment in quality early education for disadvantaged children is 7 to 10 percent per annum through better outcomes in education, health, sociability, economic productivity and reduced crime.”22
All of these changes are feasible whatever the level of market demand a neighborhood commands. Low-income neighborhoods that have safe streets, decent housing, and good schools can nurture the kinds of weak ties that support neighborhood organizing efforts to build stronger social cohesion and collective efficacy. The realities of their physical setting dictates that such neighborhoods will not be manicured or elegant places. But they can be decent places to live that do not foster trauma or consign their residents to multigenerational poverty.
Building the Market in Middle Neighborhoods
In between gentrification and concentrated poverty lie middle neighborhoods. Despite the erosion of the middle class and the rise of economic sorting, they are home to 25–40 percent of the residents of most older cities and a larger share of the inner-ring suburban population. Middle neighborhoods fall into a blind spot, receiving far less attention from scholars, media, or policymakers than gentrifying neighborhoods and areas of concentrated poverty. Many federal policies are means-tested, restricting eligibility to either lower-income individuals or low-income communities. People appear to have assumed that middle neighborhoods will take care of themselves and have only belatedly begun to realize that these neighborhoods, particularly those predominantly populated by Black households, are in crisis today, threatening not only their survival as good neighborhoods but also the survival of the urban middle class as a counterweight to the polarization of American cities into rich and poor.
In chapter 11 we described both the importance of middle neighborhoods and the extent to which they are threatened. While we believe that middle neighborhoods generally are worth saving, we suggest that policymakers and practitioners need to focus particularly on Black middle neighborhoods, which are disproportionately at risk of decline compared to their largely white and racially mixed counterparts. Black middle neighborhoods were hammered by the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession and are now suffering from the collapse of home buyer demand since then, triggered by the increasing suburbanization of Black home buyers over the past decade. Widespread, albeit anecdotal, reports suggest that many of those home buyers would move into older Black middle neighborhoods if those neighborhoods met their needs for reasonably safe communities with good schools and homes in move-in condition or requiring only modest repairs.
Middle neighborhoods are places where historically most middle-class households, broadly defined, have made their homes. The future of these neighborhoods, particularly Black middle neighborhoods, will depend on their ability to capture enough middle-class demand to replace aging homeowners and sustain high levels of homeownership. Much of that depends on the public sector providing these neighborhoods with the public goods they need: good schools, effective policing, and a well-maintained public realm of streets, sidewalks, and public open spaces. Beyond supportive public policies, it is equally a matter of building confidence not only that the neighborhood is a good neighborhood but also that it is likely to remain a good neighborhood rather than one on an inevitable downward trajectory.23
Sustaining homeownership is an important part of sustaining middle neighborhoods. Providing greater access to mortgages for Black home buyers is valuable, but it is important to recognize that the continued homeownership gap between Black and white households is as much if not more a function of the greater instability of Black homeownership tenure than a shortfall in the number of Black home buyers. Shorter homeownership spells reflect not only many households’ economic instability and susceptibility to economic shocks but also the effects of more expensive mortgages, disproportionately higher property taxes, and frequently higher insurance costs. Efforts to increase mortgage access need to be paralleled by greater efforts to foster stable homeownership and reduce the risk that once becoming homeowners, families will lose their homes. As Donald Haurin and Stuart Rosenthal point out, “policies that lengthen existing ownership spells will also raise the ownership rate, even if the rate of attaining first-time … ownership is not affected.”24
The survival of Black middle neighborhood as good neighborhoods is subject to the same demand constraints that we discussed earlier. The emergence of large numbers of Black middle neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with a unique period in history characterized by large-scale family formation and massive pent-up homeownership demand and accumulated savings by Black households previously barred from most homeownership opportunities. From 1960 to 1980 the number of Black homeowners in the United States more than doubled, with much if not most of that increase taking place in emerging Black middle neighborhoods. Today the pool of Black home buyers, even if it can be expanded to some extent, is smaller, while the alternatives available to them are far greater.
Thus, as long as the racialized nature of the home-buying market means that white buyers will rarely buy homes in Black neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods dependent on the smaller pool of Black buyers, many Black middle neighborhoods may be unable to generate enough demand to sustain or regain an adequate number of homeowners. What this suggests is a concerted strategy to encourage more non-Black households to buy in Black neighborhoods. Given the pervasive nature of racialized behavior, however, such an approach would be difficult to implement and might well provoke considerable opposition from some Black residents who would see such a strategy as tantamount to gentrification.
In the final analysis, the key to the survival of middle neighborhoods may be less dependent on concrete strategies and physical improvements than on building confidence in the neighborhood and its future. If residents have confidence in their neighborhood, landlords as well as homeowners, even those of modest means, will invest in their properties. Homeowners and perhaps some renters will become more engaged with their neighborhood, building community social capital. Without such confidence, property owners will invest progressively less in their properties and engage less with the community, withdrawing into the defensive private sphere of family and friends or leaving the neighborhood entirely. This is indeed what has been taking place in many middle neighborhoods over the past two decades. More than anything else, the central task of revival, to paraphrase Michael Schubert, is to build not just new structures but also a new neighborhood narrative, creating an environment in which people believe in the neighborhood and replace a vicious cycle of decline with a virtuous circle of renewal.25
Ultimately, neighborhood and community are a function of the meaning that people give them. Each individual action we take as part of a community reflects the meaning we give it, and even the most modest action, from helping a neighbor push her car out of a snowdrift to taking a plot in a community garden, helps build community. The number of different factors that can influence a neighborhood’s trajectory, from the regional economy to whether the streetlights work, are innumerable, and they all matter. Yet in the final analysis, their effect is mediated through the perceptions of those who live in, work in, and otherwise influence the course of the neighborhood by their behavior. And through those perceptions we define our environment and give it meaning.