Inner-ring Suburbs Research Articles

Unravelling the impact of the Community Reinvestment Act on SBA lending: Insights from a regression discontinuity design analysis

ABSTRACT This study investigates the influence of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) on Small Business Administration (SBA) lending in various U.S. urban areas. Focusing on central cities, inner-ring, and outer-ring suburbs across seven major metropolitan statistical areas, it employs a regression discontinuity design to analyze CRA’s effect on neighborhoods with median family incomes at or below 80% of the area’s median. Results show that CRA significantly increases SBA lending in inner-ring suburbs but not in central cities or outer-ring suburbs, indicating a geographically varied impact. This research underscores the spatial differences in CRA’s effectiveness, suggesting a need for more tailored strategies to improve SBA lending in diverse urban settings.

Racial Diversity and Segregation: Comparing Principal Cities, Inner-Ring Suburbs, Outlying Suburbs, and the Suburban Fringe

This article uses 2020 Census data to document recent trends in suburbanization, ethnoracial diversity, and residential segregation in the United States. It considers variation across inner-ring suburbs, outlying suburbs, and exurban areas at the metropolitan (metro) fringe. Suburbanization has recently continued, albeit more slowly than the 1990s and 2000s. Nearly two-thirds of all metro residents now live in the suburbs, fueled by change among ethnoracial minorities. For the first time, a majority of metro Blacks reside in suburbs. America’s suburbs, especially inner-ring suburbs, have experienced extraordinary increases in racial diversity. Declines continue in metro segregation, and segregation remains lower in the suburbs than principal cities, especially in outlying and fringe areas. For suburban Asians and Hispanics, however, exposure to Whites has declined since 1990. The suburban fringe remains the least diverse component of metro America. The fringe is less segregated than other metro areas, but has experienced patterns (such as growing Black-White segregation) contrary to national trends.

We make us safe: Alternatives to policing in a Latinx immigrant inner-ring suburb

ABSTRACT Inner-ring suburbs have experienced disinvestment, White flight and concentrated poverty alongside increasingly racialized, anti-immigrant policing. Yet scholarship has tended to overlook these neighborhoods as sites of violent policing or models of community safety. In a 4-year collaborative community-based crime reduction project, this case study investigates how uneven development policies and underdevelopment in a low-income Latinx inner-ring suburb gave rise to and supported racialized policing and safety concerns. We also assess the possibilities of addressing community safety by investing in community building and revitalization. The research shows how the legacy of neighborhood disinvestment and deprivation contributed to a lack of quality affordable housing, public spaces, healthcare, employment, and other conditions that support residents’ well-being—and thereby challenged public safety. Activities focused on community building and revitalization offered a positive and impactful alternative to community policing. While activities that invested in community policing demonstrated few successes, efforts focused on strengthening community knowledge, connecting residents to resources, engaging residents in community placemaking, and investing in youth had far better and potentially long-lasting results. The study suggests avenues to improve neighborhood safety in immigrant, Latinx, and declining suburbs without new investments in policing that too often puts residents at risk.

Neighborhood Change in Chicago and Its Suburbs 1990-2019

This research empirically examines neighborhood change, as measured by change in per capita income, for 335 Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs for the period 1990 to 2019. Its purpose is to examine the factors associated with neighborhood change in a metropolitan region anchored by a shrinking central city. Using Geographically Weighted Regression, this research analyzes the spatially varying impacts of explanatory variables commonly found in the urban resurgence literature such as race, ethnicity, education, and nativity. The results show that the areas experiencing the highest change in per capita income were the northern neighborhoods of Chicago as well certain suburbs on the suburban fringe, Conversely, decline in per capita income occurred in the inner-ring suburbs, particularly those to the south and west of Chicago. The results further show that some minority neighborhoods in Chicago experienced income ascent relative to the rest of the metropolitan area, which challenges the findings of some previous studies and provides insights for community and suburban planners.

The suburbanization of poverty and minority populations in the 2000s: Two parallel or interrelated processes?

ABSTRACT Previous research on suburban poverty has found evidence that the population growth of minorities in suburbs is associated with higher poverty rates. However, it has remained unclear whether the changing poverty rates result from a shifting population composition in suburbs, rising poverty rates among one or more groups, or a combination of these processes. Here I estimate the relative strength of these processes for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White populations in the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville metropolitan area using data from the 2000 census and 2008–2012 American Community Survey. The results show that between 67% and 92% of the poverty increase in suburbs is attributable to the increase in poverty and population growth of minorities. Most of the poverty increase is linked to the greater exposure of minorities to the economic effects of the Great Recession rather than their population growth. However, some of the poverty increase in inner-ring suburbs was linked to the population growth of poor minorities, especially Hispanics.

A Google Street View analysis of gentrification: a case study of one census tract in Northside, Cincinnati, USA

Since the 1990s, the gentrification process in the U.S. has diffused down the urban hierarchy and to neighborhoods further from downtown. This paper focuses on one census tract in the inner-ring suburbs of one mid-sized city in the U.S. undergoing gentrification between 2000 and 2016. While the use of census data to measure gentrification has been around for decades, a new tool, Google Street View, can now supplement the measurement of gentrification. Using census data, Google Street View imagery, and Hwang’s (Gentrification, race, and immigration in the changing American city, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2015) gentrification index, I document change in the built environment of the neighborhood of Northside (Tract 74) in the city of Cincinnati. This tract’s accessible location to downtown Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati/Hospital Complex as well as the availability of high-quality, low-cost housing made it a focal point for individual, corporate, and government investment after 2000. By 2014/16, that investment had transformed the built environment of Tract 74. There is no evidence that the Great Recession slowed the gentrification process as Tract 74 transitioned from disinvested in 2011 to early stage gentrification by 2014/16.

The Blossoming of the Library Garden: How One Library Is Engaging Families Outdoors

As twenty-first-century libraries create programming, they are finding innovative ways to engage children and families in lifelong learning through hands-on experiences.Outdoor nature spaces and gardens at public libraries are ideal environments for both formal and informal learning. In underserved, urban communities where greenspace is limited, providing a learning garden as a resource is especially valuable.Using Cuyahoga County Public Library’s (CCPL’s) Warrensville Heights (WVH) branch library as a case study, this article explores how a library in a low-income inner-ring suburb installed a children’s garden that led to numerous positive impacts. In October 2015, Sari Feldman, then executive director of Cuyahoga County Public Library in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, approached the staff of the WVH branch with the idea of developing a children’s garden at the branch. In Warrensville Heights, a community with a population of roughly thirteen thousand, many families live in apartments and lack access to green space. The area is aptly described as a “food desert,” where residents have little access to fresh produce.

Hybrid Urban Borderlands – Redevelopment Efforts and Shifting Boundaries In and Around Downtown San Diego

ABSTRACT In recent years, far-reaching urbanization and gentrification processes have been taking place in and around downtown San Diego. These have been accompanied not just by structural upheavals, but by social changes that still await in-depth analysis. In the context of San Diego’s inner-city redevelopment, urban research can profit from a border-theoretical approach, initiating a geography of urban boundaries focused on change processes and the redrawing, shifting, and dissolution of boundaries. Although urban neighborhoods are particularly characterized by differentiation, ambiguity, and fragmentation, border-theoretical findings have rarely been applied on this level. Against this background, the article traces processes of social “ordering” and “othering,” and the shifting of individual-subjective demarcations in the inner-ring suburbs of San Diego—the former warehouse district East Village and the adjacent Mexican-American community neighborhood Barrio Logan. A methodological triangulation of interviews, participatory observations, and cartographic and photographic visualizations illustrates the outward thrust and adaption of multi-dimensional boundaries between the downtown area and the urbanizing first ring—phenomena of what we have called “hybrid urban borderlands.” Aimed primarily at creating a wider understanding of urbanization processes in San Diego’s inner-ring, our project opens up further differentiations in the field of border studies across its disciplinary boundary to urban research.

The suburbanization of poverty and changes in access to public transportation in the Triangle Region, NC

During the last 50 years, a number of economic forces led to noteworthy changes in the geography of poverty in the US. Employment decentralization and lack of affordable housing have resulted in many low-income households migrating to suburban areas, and as of today, the majority of the low-income population of metropolitan regions resides in the suburbs. Focusing on the Triangle Region, NC, this study systematically explores the changes in the geography of poverty and transit access over time to better understand how accessibility to transit has changed for the low-income residents. Spatial panel data models are also estimated to investigate the relationship between poverty and transit access at the neighborhood level and how it varies spatially and temporally, while accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation. Results indicate that between 1990 and 2015, the outer-ring suburbs experienced the highest increase in both poverty and transit access, although improvements in transit access were lower in the recently urbanized areas within the outer-ring suburbs. Inner-ring suburbs experienced a substantial rise in poverty rate and low-income population, and a comparable increase in transit access. Central cities remained the areas with the highest poverty rate and transit access in the Triangle Region but experienced smaller changes over time compared to suburban areas. The findings of the econometric analysis suggest that poverty rate and transit access are not significantly related at the neighborhood level when time-invariant unobservable characteristics are accounted for.

“Pruitt-Igoe in the Suburbs”: Connecting White Flight, Sprawl, and Climate Change in Metropolitan America

This article explores the connections between racial inequality and fossil fuel-intensive sprawl in the post-civil rights metropolitan landscape, through a case study of the Black Jack housing controversy. In 1970, a local religious group tried to build a low-income housing project in Black Jack, Missouri, a bedroom community four miles northwest of the city of St. Louis. Local residents opposed to the project argued that public housing would bring the crime, poverty, and social disorder of the city to the suburbs. Although they were forced to strip their opposition of overtly racist language, these White suburbanites were part of a nationwide project to racialize, and thus delegitimize, the extension of urban form into American suburbs, including public housing and public transportation. When these efforts failed, as they did in Black Jack, inner-ring suburbs began to desegregate, and in response, Whites again fled, further out, to second-ring suburbs and exurbs. This process, which has played out across American cities from the 1960s until the present day, has had devastating consequences for racial and economic inequality, but also on the global climate. Millions of White Americans, driven by their desire to maintain metropolitan racial segregation, have become hostile to the forms of urban infrastructure that would create less carbon-intensive cities, recreating racist, auto-intensive sprawl farther out into the countryside.

Mi Casa no es Su Casa: The Fight for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development in an Inner-Ring Suburb

Transit-oriented development (TOD) often raises land values and can promote gentrification and the displacement in low-income communities. Little research, however, has shown how communities have organized to fight for more equitable TOD processes and outcomes within particular metropolitan contexts and dynamics of neighborhood change. This case study examines the role of neighborhood-based advocacy and organizing in fighting for equitable TOD and tackling key political and planning challenges in a predominantly Latinx immigrant inner-ring suburb. Their successes show the strengths of community-based, cross-sector coalitions in generating more equitable and inclusive TOD processes, plans, and policies that target conditions of place-based precarity.

A Typology of U.S. Shrinking Cities

The literature on shrinking cities has significantly grown in recent years. Little work, however, has been done toward the development of a shrinking city typology, which could help inform solutions and strategies to address problems associated with population loss. With a focus on central cities, this article identifies 367 shrinking cities within the United States and categorizes them using a geographic information system to identify seven types of shrinking cities in the United States: (1) large shrinking central cities, (2) inner-ring suburbs of shrinking central cities, (3) outer-ring suburbs of shrinking central cities, (4) inner-ring suburbs of growing central cities, (5) outer-ring suburbs of growing central cities, (6) small shrinking central cities in small Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and (7) small shrinking cities in small Micropolitan Statistical Areas. The empirically generated clusters, combined with associated social and demographic information, identify separate but sometimes interrelated shrinking city types and provide a new perspective for addressing the problems faced by U.S. shrinking cities. Key Words: population decline, shrinking cities, typology, urban population.

A resurgence in urban living? Trends in residential location patterns of young and older adults since 2000

ABSTRACTSome have heralded a resurgence of urban living in the U.S., particularly among young adults. Are Americans abandoning suburbs in favor of more urban lifestyles? What is the scope and scale of this urban resurgence? We develop a typology of neighborhoods to analyze the residential location of young and older U.S. adults from 2000 to 2011–15. Census and national travel survey data reveal that suburban population growth continues to outpace that in urban neighborhoods. Although young adults are more likely than older adults to live in urban neighborhoods, recent urban population growth is neither associated with suburban decline, nor being led by young adults. Significant recent population growth in the newest, suburban neighborhoods suggests that greenfield development remains the primary means to increase American housing supply. Shifting metropolitan growth from the suburban fringe would likely require expanding housing supply in urban neighborhoods, and bringing urban amenities to established inner-ring suburbs.

Assessing the Effect of Mansionization on Suburban Single-Family House Sales Prices

Using observed single-family house sales in the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago from 2010 through 2017, this paper uses a multilevel mixed-effects model with crossed random effects to estimate the effect that millennium mansions—new, large single-family houses—have on the sales prices of nearby single-family houses. Controlling for property, sale timing, and surrounding neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics, the study finds that mansionization is associated with an increase in the sales prices of neighboring houses. Long-term residents of a neighborhood undergoing mansionization should not fear a decrease in their house values; however, decreases in neighborhood affordability may result in exclusionary displacement.

Mapping dispossession: Eviction, foreclosure and the multiple geographies of housing instability in Lexington, Kentucky

Housing is increasingly recognized as playing a crucial role in shaping any number of other social processes and domains. But fundamental inequalities in housing mean that the benefits of quality housing accrue unequally to different groups of people. In order to explore how housing works not only to reflect, but also produce, socio-spatial inequality, this paper explores the geographies and temporalities of housing dispossession in Lexington, Kentucky by drawing on an extensive dataset of all evictions and foreclosures in the city from 2005 to 2016. The paper demonstrates that while mortgage foreclosure has tended to dominate discussions of housing dispossession since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, residential evictions are both far more widespread and much more consistent over time. The paper also concludes that while foreclosure rates are much more strongly correlated with variables of racial and class segregation, evictions are more spatially concentrated across multiple scales. The paper demonstrates that many of those places experiencing the most acute forms of housing dispossession are not gentrifying inner-city neighborhoods, but rather persistently or increasingly impoverished inner-ring suburbs. Ultimately, this paper argues that these spatialities are the result not of individual failings, but rather of powerful actors in the local housing market acting in conjunction with broader forces of racialized capitalist urbanization.

A Typology of Mansionization in the Inner-Ring Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, 2000–2015

ABSTRACTMansionization—the process in which original single-family houses are demolished and replaced with larger houses—in the older inner-ring suburbs of U.S. cities is a contentious and important driver of physical, social, and economic neighborhood change, yet little is known about how the mansionization process varies across the diverse inner-ring suburban landscape. With a focus on the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago located in Cook County, Illinois, this study presents a typology of mansionization based upon the housing, population, and household characteristics; economic status; and race and ethnicity of the neighborhoods in which mansionization occurs. Principal components analysis followed by cluster analysis are used to identify five distinct types of mansionization in the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago: highly affluent, upper middle class, postwar ethnoburb, white middle class, and diverse working class. Although mansionization is often perceived as a single process, findings reveal that it occurs in a variety of places and manifests in a variety of ways. The regulatory approaches of municipalities with differing types of suburban mansionization are discussed.

Evolving urban spatial structure and commuting patterns: A case study of Beijing, China

This research investigates how evolving urban spatial structure explains commuting patterns in Beijing, China. To describe the dynamic and multi-dimensional urban spatial evolution, we identify emerging-, persisting-, and non-center areas between 2000 and 2008 in Beijing’s three subregions—the inner city, inner-ring suburbs, and outer-ring suburbs. Based on individual-level commuting data from the 2010 Beijing Household Travel Survey, we estimate workers’ commute distance and time using multi-level regression models with interaction terms that capture the spatial evolution. Results reveal commuting differences among persisting-, emerging-, and non-center areas, and, more importantly, varying differences across the subregions: in the inner city, persisting and emerging center areas induce similarly longer commutes than non-center areas. In the inner-ring suburbs, commutes to emerging centers are shorter than those to persisting centers. In the outer-ring suburbs, emerging center areas incur the longest commutes, while persisting center areas the shortest. The results reflect varying economic and urban functions in different subregions of Beijing and caution us that promoting polycentric urban development may increase commutes and relevant negative externalities in Chinese cities.

Scott W.AllardPlaces in Need: The Changing Geography of PovertyNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $32.50 (pbk.).

Scott W.AllardPlaces in Need: The Changing Geography of PovertyNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $32.50 (pbk.).

Urban / Rural Hybrids: The Urbanisation of Former Suburbs (Urfsurbs)

AbstractIn pace with changing social developments, cities undergo regular processes of transformation. Thus, following a temporary preference for suburban living, the inner city has for some years now been enjoying a residential renaissance. A further, as yet little noticed, trend is the urbanisation of former suburbs. Encompassing urbanisation and gentrification processes found in the inner-ring suburbs, this entails a breaking of established dichotomies and the development of hybrid phenomena that can be encapsulated in the acronym URFSURBS: ‘urbanisation of former suburbs’. Focusing on examples from Southern California and Greater Paris, this article places these developments in context and outlines their implications for future research.

Can new urbanism infill development contribute to social sustainability? The case of Orlando, Florida

The new urbanism promotes preferred design and land use patterns as a means to enhance quality of life through socioeconomic diversity, but many criticise these assertions of causality. Deriving community indicators for social sustainability – including housing affordability and socioeconomic diversity – and from studies assessing new urbanism as an infill development tool, we examine the impact of new urbanism infill development in Parramore, an economically distressed inner city neighbourhood, and Baldwin Park, a brownfield inner-ring suburb, with comparative control neighbourhoods in Orlando, Florida. In Parramore, active new urbanism implementation, including HOPE VI and the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, reflect revitalisation efforts through increased socioeconomic diversity. Meanwhile, the Baldwin Park plan incorporates many new urbanist best practices. The findings from these two distinct cases of infill development indicate that the new urbanism does not necessarily ensure social sustainability, though these principles are often integrated into publicly funded revitalisation initiatives dedicated to doing so through mixed use and mixed income development.