1 WHY GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS?

The Idea of the Good Neighborhood

The good neighborhood is not a monolithic, one-size-fits-all concept. Whether a neighborhood is good is determined not by any objective standard but instead by the people who live there. Different people need and want different things from their neighborhood, which vary with the social and economic condition of the neighborhood and the individuals who make it up. To the extent that neighborhood support systems are an important part of the good neighborhood, those systems may be seen as relatively unimportant by many affluent people whose personal support networks, such as they may be, are more widely dispersed geographically. For many others, though, neighbors are an essential part of a web of mutual support that sustains them in their lives. As sociologist Suzanne Keller has written, “the neighbor is the helper in times of need who is expected to step in when other resources fail.”¹ Lower-income people generally have more geographically confined social networks and are more likely to live in proximity to their family members. Their economic and even physical survival may depend on a network of reciprocal neighboring or neighborhood-based kinship relationships. Ironically, the affluent few, who rely on neighborly relations the least in their daily lives, are the ones increasingly reaping the benefits of strong neighborhoods with rising home prices.

The roles that neighborhoods play also vary from one historical period to the next. Neighborhoods in American cities have lost much of the central role they played in people’s lives a hundred years ago, when many neighborhoods were virtually self-sufficient units. A great deal of mischief indeed has been made by people pining for the days of the urban ethnic neighborhood or the close-knit suburbs of the 1950s. We need to avoid that form of nostalgia and acknowledge the ambiguity and complexity of America’s neighborhood heritage. Those tightly knit neighborhoods were highly gendered and racialized. Much has changed since then. Women are far more likely to work than stay home raising children, and racial boundaries, although still present, are far more porous than they once were. These are all positive changes.

The social relations nurtured by twenty-first-century neighborhoods are far less all-encompassing than in previous generations. People’s social networks as well as their work, shopping, and entertainment destinations are dispersed over a wider landscape; in recent years, they have increasingly become virtual through the internet and social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. But this does not mean that neighborhoods are unimportant. Indeed, in the age of digital connections and social fragmentation, the bridging social ties nurtured in good neighborhoods are more important than ever. If we needed reminding, the COVID-19 pandemic served that purpose.

Good neighborhoods promote diversity and tolerance without undermining group cohesion or solidarity. To be sure, many neighborhoods today are highly segregated and exclusionary. While most Americans would not want to live in a neighborhood where everybody is alike, few would want to live in a neighborhood where residents have almost nothing in common and where life in the neighborhood is a constant clash of conflicting values and lifestyles. Finding the balance between diversity and cohesion in a neighborhood is difficult. While condemning racism and exclusion, we should be careful not to elevate an abstract ideal of diversity to an ultimate value at the price of other neighborhood values.² While research has shown that greater diversity can make building community cohesion more difficult, the research is also clear that racially diverse neighborhoods can reduce racial conflict and tension, especially when people of different races and ethnicities but similar socioeconomic status work toward shared goals.³

How are good neighborhoods able to reconcile the competing values of diversity and solidarity? A key to the answer lies in recognizing that neighborhoods do not have to be all things to all people, intense hubs of social interaction or, as William Holly Whyte put it in The Organization Man, “hotbeds of Participation.”⁴ Neighborhoods don’t have to be Good in some abstract, Platonic sense; they just have to be good enough. Neighborhood ties do not need to be all-encompassing; they just need to work for the people who live there. The informal limited ties that good neighborhoods nurture are part of the formula for successful diverse neighborhoods.

Much frustration has been created by expecting too much of neighborly relations. Although good when it happens, it is unrealistic as a general proposition to expect people from widely varying racial, social, and economic backgrounds to become close friends, invite each other over for dinner, and share the intimate details of their lives. And indeed, none of that is necessary for a neighborhood to be a good neighborhood. It is both desirable and realistic, however, for diverse groups of people to mingle in neighborhoods, share public spaces, appreciate each other’s cultures, and learn to get along with one another.

Although neighborhoods no longer play as prominent a role in people’s lives as they did in earlier times, they still perform crucial functions. Perhaps counterintuitively, we argue, in an age of digital connections, social fragmentation, and increasing diversity and partisan polarization, the weak ties nurtured in neighborhoods are more important than ever. Neighborhoods can help people get ahead in life and get along with others. Good neighborhoods both build community and foster better individual life outcomes.

Good Neighborhoods Nurture Community

Human beings are social animals. We may grudgingly admire people who choose to live off the grid or survive by foraging in the wilds of Alaska, but few of us will ever choose to emulate them. Our human relationships are part and parcel of our being and run the gamut from the friendly but casual nod we give the barista at our regular café when she says “the usual?” to the most intense bonds of friendship, kinship, and love. We are individuals, but rarely by choice are we isolated individuals. We want both privacy and community. As Jane Jacobs wrote, “a good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around.”⁵

Good neighborhoods help to reconcile the tension between individualism and community. Good neighborhoods generate norms of “generalized reciprocity,” as anthropologists say. Those norms prompt me to watch my neighbors’ homes when they are out of town on the expectation that they will do the same for me in the future or reciprocate with some other favor, such as helping push my car out of a snowdrift. Those connections enhance my individual well-being, acting like social savings accounts. As Robert Putnam puts it, “An effective norm of generalized reciprocity enables the reconciliation of self-interest and good neighborliness.”⁶ It is not that people who live in good neighborhoods have put aside self-interest in the name of community. Rather, they have embraced what Alexis de Tocqueville memorably called “self-interest rightly understood.”⁷

Philosopher Nancy Rosenblum posits an ethic of neighborliness grounded in sharing a common space and recognizing the value of reciprocity between neighbors.⁸ In a good neighborhood, residents act out of a sense of community connection, not just individual well-being. Communities vary in the degree to which residents are willing to engage in altruistic actions and pursue what is right or good for the community. Sociologist Robert Sampson found, for example, that the willingness to conduct cardiopulmonary resuscitation on a stranger or intervene in public to address threats to civic order or even conduct such mundane tasks as picking up a letter from the ground and putting it in a mailbox varied significantly across Chicago neighborhoods.⁹

Neighborly relations form a crucial middle ground in our network of social ties, less intense than the bonds that link us to friends and family but often more significant than the casual connections we make between ourselves and casual acquaintances, including most coworkers. They are a middle ground not only geographically but also in the web of human relationships that tie us together. They are rarely people’s most important relationships. Neighbors are not friends as such, although some may become friends. Nevertheless, they are important; as Rosenblum writes, “neighbors are not just people living nearby. Neighbors are our environment.”¹⁰

In many ways, the low intensity and informality of neighborly relations is what makes them function as neighborhood glue. Neighborhood relationships are part of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties,” as distinct from the “strong ties” of close friendship and kinship networks.¹¹ Weak ties do not involve substantial obligations or intimacy. But neighborly relations play a crucial role in our array of human connections. It is through those weak ties that neighborhoods become repositories of social capital. Robert Putnam, who did not invent the term but has popularized it through his writings, describes social capital as “the collective value of all ‘social networks’ [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other [‘norms of reciprocity’].… When a group of neighbors informally keep an eye on one another’s homes, that’s social capital in action.”¹²

A related concept, developed by Robert Sampson and his colleagues, is collective efficacy, which can be defined as the ability of people in a neighborhood to establish norms and enforce them through informal social controls.¹³ Collective efficacy goes beyond social capital in the important sense that while starting with the existence of a social network and a body of neighbors motivated to support one another, it adds two critical dimensions: those neighbors share a body of norms about what constitutes proper neighboring behavior and are willing to enforce them through informal means. In many respects, this is what the overused phrase “it takes a village” is about. Sampson and others have found that crime rates and other levels of disorder are lower in neighborhoods with high levels of collective efficacy.¹⁴

Social capital and collective efficacy combine two basic concepts: the existence of a social network connecting people and the ways in which that network motivates people to behave in mutually supportive ways. As a distinct form of social capital, neighborly relations are primarily what Putnam calls bridging social capital as opposed to bonding social capital.¹⁵ Bonding social capital is demanding and inward-looking; it is often found among homogeneous groups sharing a kinship, ethnicity, or religious affiliation. Bridging social capital cuts across these identities. People can bridge social divides when they live in the same neighborhood and develop a sense of reciprocal responsibility for a shared space. It is partly because of the casual, even weak nature of neighborly relations that it is possible for people of different religions, economic backgrounds, and ethnicities or races to mingle and get along.

Paradoxically, it may seem that strong ties, such as intimate friendship and kinship relations, can hinder the effective workings of neighborhood social capital, undermining the weaker connections that are needed to bind the neighborhood together across social groups. Tight neighborhood subunits, whether one calls them cliques, clans, families, or gangs organized along the lines of kinship, race, religion, or other strong ties, can fragment the community and weaken neighborhood-level social capital. In his study of Boston’s West End, Herbert Gans found that the community was unable to form an organization to fight against urban renewal, which ultimately destroyed the community even though it boasted tight social and extended family connections.¹⁶ To Granovetter, this can be explained by the fact that the West End was organized into tight “cliques” and lacked the weak ties that could form bridges across the entire community to organize community-wide action.¹⁷ Similarly, it explains how some low-income neighborhoods, which many struggling families value because they offer a strong familial support network, can also be areas of sustained crime and drug activity, taking place in the gaps between those networks created by the absence of weak ties.

How people perceive themselves and are perceived by others is interwoven with their and others’ perception of their neighborhoods. Neighborhoods have identities based on fact, rumor, reputation, or all of the above that affect how residents of the city perceive them and the associations they have with them. If you move to a different neighborhood that has a different image, while you may think of yourself as unchanged, other people’s perceptions of you may change. Moving may also challenge or even change your own self-image. For many people who have moved into changing urban neighborhoods in recent years, whether to see oneself as a gentrifier and if so how one should behave as a result have become highly charged questions involving not only behavioral but also ethical choices. At the other end of the economic spectrum, both comparative poverty and levels of neighborhood disorder have been found to have a negative effect on individuals’ self-esteem.¹⁸

Neighborhood characteristics affect not only the quantity but the quality of civic participation. Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed that “town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within people’s reach; they teach people how to use and enjoy it.”¹⁹ By “liberty” Tocqueville meant the ability of citizens to govern their public and private lives. Many Americans experience politics first in their neighborhood, where they attend meetings and acquire the skills necessary for effective political engagement. Participation in neighborhood organizations is especially valuable because at that level one can more readily see the connection between individual and community well-being, Tocqueville’s self-interest “rightly understood.”

Neighborhoods that may appear to lack connections may actually have powerful latent organizational strength. We say “latent” because many healthy neighborhoods, particularly middle-class and affluent ones, may have no visible, ongoing neighborhood organizations to speak of. Yet, when something arises such as a proposal for a noxious land use or a change in local land use regulations that appears to threaten the neighborhood’s character, organizations form within what seems like milliseconds, petitions are circulated, meetings are held, and local officials are bombarded with opposition to the proposal. Weak ties form the building blocks of latent as well as visible neighborhood civic capacity. Informal interactions and relationships, more than close friendships or family ties, are the means by which neighbors organize to fight for and fend off threats to their community.

Good Neighborhoods Improve Life Outcomes

At the same time that good neighborhoods promote social ties, they also promote individual success, often in ways their inhabitants may be unaware of. A growing and compelling body of research has demonstrated that the features of a person’s neighborhood, after controlling for individual characteristics, exert a profound influence over their physical and mental health, economic success, and quality of life. It may even affect their identity and self-image in ways that individuals may not consciously realize.

While it has long been believed that that the neighborhood one grows up in affects one’s future success, until recently the data was not available to measure the magnitude of this effect. In recent years, Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have developed data sets that make it possible to measure the impact that growing up in different neighborhoods has on economic mobility.²⁰ By linking tax returns with individual-level data from the US Census Bureau, they mapped children born between 1978 and 1983 by census tract and then followed them into adulthood to see how they fared economically. After controlling for the race and income of parents, they found that the neighborhood children grow up in has a huge impact on their future economic mobility. For example, a Black man growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in a poor family in Atlanta might on average be earning today anything from $5,000 or less to over $40,000, depending on which census tract he grew up in. Low-income Black men who grew up in one neighborhood in the city of Compton, just outside Los Angeles, made three times as much as comparable Black men growing up in different circumstances in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Where we grow up and where we live powerfully affect our life trajectories.²¹

Equally powerful have been the findings about the relationship between neighborhoods and health. In Mercer County, a small New Jersey county bookended by struggling Trenton and wealthy Princeton, average life expectancy is over ninety years in Princeton but only seventy-two years in an impoverished neighborhood of Trenton, only ten miles away.²² Researchers studying the vast socioeconomic disparities in life expectancy in the United States have concluded that only 10 percent of the variation is attributable to differences in access to medical care, with another 20 percent attributable to genetic factors.²³ The balance is a function of environmental factors, that is, lifestyle and behavioral factors, all of which are powerfully influenced by neighborhood conditions. Among the most powerful behavioral factors is chronic stress; an Atlanta-based study found that the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among low-income Black residents was closely associated with higher levels of neighborhood disorder. High levels of community cohesion, however, reduced this association.²⁴ Neighborhoods can be either beneficial or hazardous to your health.

Living in a disadvantaged neighborhood can be especially detrimental to children. Researchers in Chicago found out that simply living in proximity to a violent crime can affect brain functioning. Research by Patrick Sharkey found that “children do substantially worse on standard tests of cognitive skills … when there has been a homicide near their home.” “Local violence does not make children less intelligent.… Rather, it occupies their minds.”²⁵ These effects can be cumulative and difficult to reverse.

As the above examples suggest, most of the research in this area has been done in low-income neighborhoods. Yet, whether with respect to economic mobility, life expectancy, or childhood development, it is not about the neighborhood being low-income as such but instead about how well the neighborhood functions. Chetty and his colleagues found many low-income neighborhoods where children were growing up successfully and who as adults were earning substantially more than their cohorts from relatively more affluent neighborhoods. In his book Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg tells the story of how Chicago’s neighborhoods coped with the scorching heat wave of 1995. As temperatures and humidity reached unprecedented levels, deaths soared; in one week in July, 739 more people than expected died in the city of Chicago. Klinenberg found that eight of the ten community areas with the highest death rates were predominantly African American, with high levels of poverty and violent crime. At the same time, three of the ten neighborhoods with the lowest heat deaths were also predominantly African American, poor, and crime-ridden.²⁶ Those neighborhoods had social ties that protected the elderly from social isolation and death. What all this tells us is that a neighborhood’s social and interpersonal dynamics can make a vast difference in the lives of the people who live there.

None of this should be taken to mean that external factors, such as concentrated poverty, racial segregation and discrimination, physical isolation, environmental contamination, and vacant dilapidated houses do not matter. They matter deeply, and the more pervasive they are, the more obstacles they put in the path of a neighborhood’s chances of being or becoming a good neighborhood. Many people assume, however, that they are the only things that matter. The less tangible social dynamics of the neighborhood also matter and in the best cases can undo much of the damage done by negative external factors affecting the neighborhood. Neighboring, in all its manifold meanings, is an essential part of what makes a neighborhood a good neighborhood.

It is crucial to understand that the ability of families to access good neighborhoods is powerfully impacted by racial discrimination. African American children are seven times more likely than non-Hispanic white children to grow up in concentrated poverty neighborhoods.²⁷ Even when middle-class Black families are able to move into better low-poverty neighborhoods, those neighborhoods are often located in a broader geography of disadvantage that negatively impacts them.²⁸

Neighborhoods also affect residents’ ability to build wealth. For most American families, particularly those who are not in the top 10 or 20 percent by wealth and income, equity in their home is far and away their largest financial asset. Not quite two-thirds of American families are homeowners, and a still larger percentage have been homeowners at one point or another in their lives. Arguably, the most important economic decision, which is also a personal and emotional decision, that most families make during their lifetime is where to buy a home.²⁹ Where they buy that home, in turn, affects whether or not it appreciates after they purchase it. While the features of the house itself obviously matter, they matter less than the location or neighborhood; as the popular real estate saw goes, the three most important rules of real estate are “location, location, location.”

Homeownership is far from a guaranteed path to wealth building, as millions of families learned during the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, but for most American families it is the only option, as few families without significant capital to invest have realistic alternative paths to gain wealth. Moreover, homeownership usually works. Although families who bought at the height of the bubble often saw their equity disappear, homeowner equity has grown steadily over most time periods during the past half century or more.³⁰

Black families have accumulated less household wealth through homeownership than white families, primarily because of the neighborhoods they have been historically relegated to by racial discrimination. In 2019, white median income was 1.65 times Black median income, but median white household wealth was over 7.8 times that of Black households ($188,200 vs. $24,100).³¹ More than anything else, this disparity is the result of different rates of homeownership and home appreciation of Blacks compared to whites, reflecting in turn the long history of neighborhood segregation. Prior to the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, African Americans were routinely barred from most neighborhoods by private practices reinforced by public policies, a subject we discuss in chapter 8. Discrimination by real estate agents and mortgage lenders was all but universal. While that has largely changed, the effects of that racist history of exclusion perpetuate and exacerbate racial inequities to this day. Without accumulated wealth, African Americans are less able to afford college, start a business, or help their children buy a home in a good neighborhood to build their own wealth. At the same time, while it is generally known that Black homeowners were hit hardest by the mortgage crisis, it is less well known that Black home buyers who have bought homes after the crisis have widely seen significant appreciation in their value.³²

One further neighborhood effect may seem counterintuitive, yet it is significant and another example of the strength of weak ties. More than half of all job opportunities come through word of mouth.³³ Most people who find jobs this way do so not through their strong ties, such as friends and relatives, but instead through their weak ties, casual acquaintances, and neighbors. The reasons for this have been widely explored since Granovetter first pointed this out, but the implications for neighborhoods are profound.³⁴ If you move to a neighborhood where people are well connected to the local labor market, your job and career options are likely to be greater than if you move into a neighborhood where fewer people have jobs or where they mostly work in fields remote from your skills and interests.

The Decline of Good Neighborhoods

Many Americans miss the close-knit neighborhoods that flourished in the early twentieth century, although some of them might find them less appealing in reality than in hazy retrospect. In 1999, National Public Radio host Ray Suarez wrote a book titled The Old Neighborhood, which laments the great white suburban flight that “left the very idea of ‘neighborhoods’ behind.”³⁵ According to Suarez, people “yearn for the closeness, the coherence, that an old urban neighborhood gave their lives,” for a time when “we never had to lock our doors.” Interest has recently revived in Fred Rogers, the creator and star of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, which aired nationally on public television from 1968 to 2001. Creating a simulacrum of the community in which he grew up in 1930s Latrobe, Pennsylvania, his show was for decades a comforting presence for millions of children. Rogers’s biographer suggests that at a time when “the geographical concept of the neighborhood in the United States is vastly diminished,” Mr. Rogers “pointed to the way back to the neighborhood.”³⁶ We would suggest, rather, that he offered a beguiling nostalgic perspective on a version of neighborhood that few of us experience today.

Putting nostalgia aside, however, there is compelling evidence that the supply of good neighborhoods in American towns and cities is shrinking. Compelling research shows that neighborhoods no longer perform as well as they once did with respect to two of their key historical roles: promoting social mobility and fostering social cohesion and trust.

The geographical sorting of the American population is a major contributor to the decline of good neighborhoods. While racial segregation in American cities has steadily, if slowly, declined since the 1960s, economic segregation has increased significantly. Increasingly, rich and poor live in different neighborhoods, and the number of middle-income and economically mixed neighborhoods has fallen. As researchers Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff sum up their findings for the period 1970–2009, “high- and low-income families have become increasingly less likely to live near one another. Mixed-income neighborhoods have grown rarer, while affluent and poor neighborhoods have grown much more common.”³⁷ Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi found that the number of high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States tripled between 1970 and 2010.³⁸ With some exceptions, neighborhoods with high rates of poverty or housing abandonment reduce the likelihood of individual success whether in school or the job market and, as we noted, undermine physical and mental health. Few such neighborhoods are good enough for the people who live in them.

The shift away from mixed-income neighborhoods has been even more pronounced among African Americans. As Reardon and Bischoff document, predominantly Black neighborhoods were more economically mixed than white neighborhoods in 1970, but by 2010 predominantly Black neighborhoods had become less economically diverse than their white counterparts. Increasingly, middle-class and low-income Blacks live in separate neighborhoods. Millions of low-income families, disproportionately African American, are, in Patrick Sharkey’s words, “stuck in place,” trapped in neighborhoods that reinforce multigenerational poverty. “A mountain of research,” Sharkey asserts, “has demonstrated the ways in which neighborhood structural disadvantage and social organization affect individual and collective social outcomes.”³⁹

Besides the loss of individual mobility and interaction across economic lines, considerable evidence supports the conclusion that many neighborhoods are doing a poorer job of promoting social cohesion and community. As we discussed earlier, social cohesion and individual success can be mutually reinforcing. Through the cluster of neighborly behaviors and relationships, good neighborhoods provide children with role models and mentors, connect them to job opportunities, and support success in school. The evidence, however, points strongly toward a decline of neighboring. In The Upswing, Putnam and Garrett update the analysis that Putnam began in Bowling Alone of the decline of community in the United States. Mining many different data sources, they conclude that “active involvement in local organizations fell by more than half in the last several decades of the twentieth century.”⁴⁰

Drawing from the General Social Survey, Joe Cortright reports that since the 1970s the percentage of Americans who report spending time with a neighbor at least twice weekly fell from 30 percent to about 20 percent.⁴¹ Turnout in local elections is also down. According to one study, local voting turnout in thirty-eight cities declined 20 percent between 1978 and 2003. Only about one in four eligible voters turns out in local elections.⁴² In ten of America’s thirty largest cities, voter turnout for mayoral elections was less than 15 percent.⁴³ As Putnam puts it, “Declining electoral participation is merely the most visible symptom of a broader disengagement from community life.”⁴⁴ Despite increasing affluence and steady improvement in housing quality, there is considerable evidence that the supply of good neighborhoods has fallen.

What Has Caused the Decline of Good Neighborhoods?

Many factors have caused the decline of good neighborhoods. Economic, technological, and demographic trends that threaten good neighborhoods have become entrenched and will be difficult if not impossible to alter. The hollowing out of the middle class, continued job and housing sprawl, and the rise first of television and then the internet, along with striking changes to the American family, all present challenges for traditional neighborhoods. This does not mean that good neighborhoods will disappear. Many people continue to seek out good neighborhoods in one fashion or another, while the nation’s growing immigrant population and the movement of young people to the cities have created new pathways for creating good neighborhoods, both reviving older forms of neighborhood and building new kinds of good neighborhoods. Still, the forces and trends working against them are powerful. While we discuss many of them in detail in later chapters, it is useful to provide an overview here.

Technology has played an important role. Even if nothing else had changed, the technologies that have emerged since World War II would have undermined face-to-face neighborly relations. With the spread of air conditioning, fewer people sat on front porches on sultry nights greeting their neighbors as they walked by. In 2000, Putnam estimated that about 25 percent of the decline of social capital in the United States could be accounted for by the spread of electronic entertainment, largely television.⁴⁵ The internet has further disconnected people from their physical surroundings. No longer do people have to live close to one another to stay connected, which they can now do on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Ecommerce means that people can shop almost effortlessly online, usually at Amazon, rather than patronize local stores. These trends accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and the spread of remote working and Zoom-based social interactions. Some of this is likely to persist beyond the pandemic even after it is totally safe to engage in face-to-face relations.

Technology can support place-based communities as well but only up to a point. Some scholars argue that the internet can be used as a tool to further face-to-face connections and facilitate neighborhood connections.⁴⁶ Nextdoor.com is a social networking service where information is posted that is distributed only within the neighborhood. Residents use it to keep up with neighborhood news, exchange recommendations for service providers, and sell or exchange goods. That and similar services may be valuable tools, but the experience of millions during the pandemic has made it abundantly clear that a Zoom call is not the same as sitting next to someone and that online connections can never fully replace face-to-face relationships.

So-called third places, such as coffee shops, farmers markets, and even, despite Amazon, independent bookstores, have proliferated.⁴⁷ While these all testify to the importance of direct experience in the internet age, in many cases their connection to the idea of neighborhood is tenuous, and where they are part of a neighborhood fabric, the economics of such places dictates that they tend to be disproportionately clustered in neighborhoods largely populated by high-earning college graduates. This suggests a further point to which we will often return: the extent to which access to good neighborhoods has increasingly become associated with affluence rather than being a common good available to all segments of society.

While technology can undermine neighborhood connections, it is not as serious a threat to good neighborhoods as the hollowing out of the middle class. As we noted earlier, the number of middle-income neighborhoods with middle-class residents or a mix of people of different incomes has declined steadily for decades. If we define the middle class as families earning between 75 percent and 150 percent of the national median family income, then 43 percent of all families fell into that class in 1960. Today it is 34 percent.⁴⁸ We have many more rich and poor families and fewer middle-class families than in the past. This reflects many changes, including the shift from well-paying industrial jobs to lower-wage service jobs, the decline of unions, and the growing earnings disparity between college graduates and those without a college degree. Increasingly the top 10 or 20 percent, and even more the top 1 percent (or 0.1 percent), have pulled away from the rest of society. Rising income inequality is a major reason why we are losing so many of the neighborhoods in the middle, neighborhoods that have historically been the backbone of America’s cities.

Economic changes have been paralleled by demographic changes. In the 1950 and 1960s we were a nation of families, more specifically, a nation of married-couple families with children. In 1960, 75 percent of American households were married couples, with almost 60 percent of them raising children under age eighteen.⁴⁹ Most of the rest were probably planning to have children or had finally pushed the last one out of the family home. It is not necessary to glorify the traditional American family to recognize that married couples raising children were the fundamental building block of both the postwar suburbs and earlier urban neighborhoods. Between 1960 and 2020, the percentage of US households composed of a married couple with children fell from 44 percent to 19 percent.⁵⁰ Cities in particular have fewer families with children and have become populated by young people, singles, and nontraditional households. While the number of child-rearing married couples has declined across the United States, it has plummeted further in central cities. Such families make up 19 percent of all households in the United States today but only 11 percent of households in Washington, D.C., and 9 percent in Pittsburgh. Nearly half of the households in both cities are single individuals living alone. As the number of single individuals and others in informal relationships grows, however, they may be inventing their own versions of good neighborhoods, often in areas such as downtowns and former industrial areas that had never before been residential neighborhoods.

Along with the preponderance of married couples in the 1950s and 1960s, stay-at-home wives and mothers were the backbone of that era’s good neighborhoods. In 1955, only one out of six women in married couples with children under age six was in the labor force, rising to only one out of three for women with children ages six to seventeen. Mothers watched the children play, nurtured local connections, and took action to repel neighborhood threats. As Alan Ehrenhalt writes about a neighborhood in southwest Chicago, its “streets were being monitored during all the waking hours of the day by the informal law enforcement system of the neighborhood, the at-home mothers who devoted much of their time to keeping it glued together.”⁵¹

This is no longer the case. Whether single or married and with or without children, women are now overwhelmingly part of the labor force. In 2019 the labor force participation rate, the share of the adult population working or looking for work, for women with children under age eighteen was 72.3 percent.⁵² There was little difference between mothers in married couples and single mothers. We would not want to go back to the days when women were discriminated against and systematically excluded from many jobs. The entry of women into the workforce, however, has not been completely voluntary. A solid middle-class way of life today is increasingly difficult for all but a few families without two wage earners. Single mothers, of course, usually lack even the illusion of choice.

As we stress throughout the book, neighborhoods do not just reflect societal trends; they are active players in those trends. The decline of good neighborhoods is both a product of the pressures on the middle class and a contributor to those pressures. Causation runs in both directions. Neighborhood change is part of the story of the plight of the middle class. Elizabeth Warren (now Senator Warren) and Amelia Tyagi argued that many women have felt compelled to work to supplement the family’s income so they could afford a house in a better neighborhood, usually defined as a place with low crime and good schools. Warren and Tyagi wrote, “But as families saw urban centers as increasingly unattractive places to live, the range of desirable housing options began to shrink and parents’ desires to escape from failing schools began to take on a sense of urgency.”⁵³ As the supply of good neighborhoods has shrunk, the competition for them has intensified, driving up prices. This drives more women into the workforce and also requires both men and women to undertake longer commutes to be able to afford a home in what they consider a good neighborhood.

Older urban neighborhoods were especially hard hit by demographic and economic trends, including changes in family structure, the suburbanization of much of the white middle class, and the loss of well-paying industrial jobs. While some urban middle neighborhoods became home to the Black middle class and remained strong neighborhoods, many did not, triggering the growth of the concentrated poverty neighborhoods that persist to this day in America’s cities. While under the right circumstances a high-poverty neighborhood can be a good neighborhood, providing support and a decent quality of life for its residents, it is a difficult proposition, as we discuss in chapter 12. Moreover, as we noted earlier, even after controlling for individual characteristics, including poverty itself, people who live in high-poverty neighborhoods have worse outcomes than those who live elsewhere.

Economic classes have increasingly sorted into different neighborhoods, something Robert Reich called the “secession of the successful.”⁵⁴ The fragmented nature of American land-use powers enabled suburban governments to pass exclusionary zoning laws that facilitated them to become enclaves of affluence and whiteness. When resource-rich households fled to the suburbs, the neighborhoods they left behind faced stagnating property values, falling retail opportunities, and rising crime. Notwithstanding the much-heralded urban revival, the effects of the urban crisis that began in the 1960s, with its white flight, disinvestment, and housing abandonment, persist in large swaths of American cities today, destroying good neighborhoods.

For many neighborhoods already struggling with the manifold challenges of demographic change, economic decline, and an aging housing stock, the crushing blow was the decade that began with the onset of subprime or predatory lending in the late 1990s, reaching its climax a decade later with the foreclosure crisis and the Great Recession. Predatory lending did not markedly affect the areas that were already disinvested and abandoned, but it did great damage to areas that still retained much of the physical and social fabric of the good neighborhood, including large parts of cities such as Detroit and Cleveland that had been sustained by middle-class Black families after the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s.

Subprime lending was particularly devastating for African American neighborhoods, both in the central cities and in the inner-ring suburbs around them. These neighborhoods, as has become widely known, were targeted by lenders for high-cost, so-called exotic loans, often with the knowing or unwitting collaboration of prominent neighborhood figures.⁵⁵ In Cleveland, three out of every five home purchase loans in neighborhoods that were more than 80 percent Black in 2005 were subprime or high-cost mortgages, compared to one out of three in neighborhoods that were less than 20 percent Black.⁵⁶ With thousands of borrowers receiving mortgage loans that they had no realistic prospect of paying back, the outcome was predictable.

By 2007, waves of mortgage foreclosures were sweeping through these neighborhoods at the same time that the Great Recession was triggering massive job losses. Home prices plummeted, while vacant and abandoned houses began to appear on once-pristine blocks. Homeownership rates collapsed as lenders sold thousands of foreclosed properties to investors, triggering new waves of instability. As neighborhoods destabilized, many of the remaining homeowners decamped to the suburbs. A decade after the Great Recession, many of these neighborhoods have not recovered. They are still neighborhoods at least in the physical sense, but they provide less of the social fabric of neighboring and the springboard to opportunity that makes a geographic space a good neighborhood.

At the same time, the media increasingly presented our times as an age of urban revival, promoting a narrative in which the central urban problem today is not the flight of the middle class or the decline of urban neighborhoods but rather the invasion by the affluent of the neighborhoods of the poor, forcing them out of their homes. While gentrification as a phenomenon of neighborhood change is real, it is also a hot-button issue not only in neighborhood change but also as a shorthand for a variety of social, cultural, ideological, and political battles. As we discuss in detail in chapter 10 it is not the whole story, though.

The reality is that our age of urban revival is simultaneously an age of urban crisis in what we call the “layering” of different historical periods and forces. Modern American urban history can be seen as a shifting balance between forces of reurbanization and de-urbanization, something that varies over time as well as within and between cities. Over the past roughly forty years, the United States has diverged spatially. The predominantly coastal winner-take-all and strong market metros such as Boston and San Francisco have drawn the great majority of the jobs and investment in the new technology economy, while many other metros, especially smaller metros in the middle of the country, have fallen further and further behind.

Affluent in-migrants bid prices up in hot markets, while thousands of homes sit vacant and abandoned in weak markets. This disparity can be seen even within the overlapping metropolitan areas of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., where bricks from demolished row houses in Baltimore are trucked forty miles down the road to give a faux-historic aura to million-dollar condos in gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhoods.⁵⁷ Both extremes undermine neighborhood stability, whether by creating too much demand that overheats prices or too little demand that leaves abandoned houses behind.

Spatial inequality is also widening across neighborhoods within metropolitan areas. Since the 1990s, young well-educated single individuals and nontraditional households have sought out urban neighborhoods for their density, diversity, and lively youth-oriented social scene. Those people, sometimes referred to as the millennial generation, are the driving force of what is often referred to as gentrification. That phenomenon plays out differently, however, in different settings. Cities with rapidly growing technology-based economies, high levels of both immigration and in-migration, and severe constraints on new housing construction, such as restrictive zoning laws and physical barriers imposed by oceans and mountains, have few neighborhoods with weak housing markets. In distressed neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., where household incomes are barely $30,000, developers are buying and rehabilitating houses that go on the market for nearly $600,000.⁵⁸ In these cities, the primary threat to good neighborhoods comes not from blight but instead from hyperprosperity. Good neighborhoods for working- and middle-class households are disappearing.

Gentrification has become a dirty word in many circles—something that needs to be stopped in its tracks. This is unrealistic. Gentrification is not an isolated phenomenon but is part of the broader dynamic of neighborhood change that has operated ever since neighborhoods have existed, and it is not going to disappear. Moreover, while gentrification brings both harms and benefits, neighborhood decline brings little but harm. Neighborhoods are going to change; the question is whether the benefits of that change can be spread more broadly benefit only a few. How gentrification plays out depends on the context, on whether local policy decisions exacerbate its potentially destructive tendencies or manage them for the benefit of the entire community.

In all likelihood, more metros in the United States have weak housing markets than strong ones. Even with the real estate price rises triggered by the pandemic, as of June 30, 2021, two-thirds of the two hundred largest regions in the country had median house values under $300,000.⁵⁹ In many weak market metro areas such as Cleveland and St. Louis, gentrification is creating pockets of reinvestment in older industrial cities that have suffered from decades of disinvestment. In many ways that is a welcome trend in those cities, replenishing the tax base and in some respects building good neighborhoods that are often much more diverse racially and economically than is widely believed. These neighborhoods are emerging in and near the downtowns of older cities, from eastern Nashville to Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood and in neighborhoods adjacent to major universities or medical centers, such as Hampden in Baltimore and St. Louis’s Central West End. But the number of in-migrants and would-be gentrifiers in these cities is relatively small, and as a group they are too few to sustain more than a handful of healthy neighborhoods. The greater problem in most older cities is not gentrification but rather its opposite, the continued flight of middle- and working-class families, who today are as or more likely to be Black or Latinx than non-Latinx white, from older urban neighborhoods.

Context Matters

Good urban and suburban neighborhoods still perform an important function in American society by providing settings within which it is possible to reconcile or balance individualism and community, a central challenge of our times. Good neighborhoods are not the solution to the problems of unbridled individualism and declining community, but they can be part of the solution. The weak ties and informal relations in good neighborhoods form bridging social capital that is especially important in an increasingly diverse and divided nation. Yet, with the decline of good neighborhoods, fewer and fewer are performing those functions.

Neighborhood change is closely tied to the national crisis of widening economic inequality and the shrinking middle class. Trends in the broader political economy that are driving increased polarization of both income and wealth put stress on good neighborhoods, while at the same time neighborhood change is itself part of the story of rising inequality. Concentrated poverty neighborhoods create poverty traps especially for African Americans, whose long exclusion from opportunity still resonates in the racial and economic distribution of American neighborhoods today. Affluent neighborhoods hoard opportunities and the social ties that help people access opportunity. The good neighborhoods in the middle that provided generations of average Americans with a shot at the American dream are shrinking. Good neighborhoods are in danger of becoming a luxury good.

There is no simple solution to the decline of good neighborhoods. Broad social and economic forces are buffeting neighborhoods, but they play out in varied ways on the ground. Context is powerful, as economic, social, and political forces interact to produce neighborhood change. As powerful a force as race is, for example, it cannot be understood apart from economic class. How race and class affect neighborhood change will be different in strong housing markets compared to weak ones and in metropolitan areas with high immigration and multiple or overlapping racial and ethnic identities compared to areas with a binary opposition of Black and white racial identities.

Not only does the larger context in which neighborhoods exist matter, but each neighborhood also creates its own context based on its unique history, identity, and the constellation of people, organizations, and networks that animate it. Local knowledge is not just important; it is essential. Every neighborhood is constantly changing but in a direction defined by its distinct context and character. And any efforts to intervene in that process of change need to be adapted to that context and character. In the next chapter, we explore how to think about and understand the process of neighborhood change.