Metropolitan Inequality Research Articles

Does reducing municipal taxes work to increase revenue and reduce inequality at the metropolitan level? Evidence from Santiago de Chile

AbstractIn the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of fiscal decentralization, there is less evidence on the effect of fiscal autonomy for Latin American metropolises, which are characterized by inequality, low fiscal decentralization and high concentration of population and economic activity. This study asks two questions about the decrease in business taxes in municipalities in Santiago de Chile between 2008 and 2020. The first is about the impact of this measure on local revenue collection, and the second is about the effect of the policy on metropolitan inequality, considering municipalities’ own revenues. The method used is difference‐in‐differences with variation in treatment timing. The results confirm that this measure led to a 35% increase in revenue collection compared with municipalities that do not apply it. In terms of municipal autonomous income inequality, the evidence indicates that, on average, levels are reduced by 0.02 points of the Gini Index per year. These findings confirm that greater fiscal autonomy can contribute to increased resources for local governments and reduce metropolitan disparities, in a context of high centralization and low fiscal autonomy.

Decomposing changes in the geography of metropolitan inequality

ABSTRACT The geography of economic opportunity and residential segregation are important factors driving racial disparities in employment outcomes. We present here the changing landscape of opportunity in large metropolitan areas in the United States to describe how the spatial structure of opportunity is evolving. Using decomposable inequality indices, we break down the spatial inequality of opportunity into two components: inequality within subareas (inner cities, inner suburbs, and outer suburbs) and inequality between subareas. According to our findings, economic opportunity is primarily driven by inequality within subareas. The situation is particularly evident in metropolitan areas where suburban employment is growing concurrently with the suburbanization of Black and Hispanic populations. Our findings suggest that the geography of metropolitan opportunity in the U.S. is changing in ways that will alter our traditional understanding of the relationship between race, space, and economic opportunity.

Exogenous Policy, Racial Avoidance, and the Qualified Relevance of Macroeconomic Change to Metropolitan Inequality

Context: The rich contextualization of educational processes brought about in the pioneering work of Jean Anyon pushed scientists to acknowledge that the education being provided to the least advantaged was shaped by factors with origins beyond school and family environments. Political economic work in education has subsequently argued that an unforgiving economy has lessened the educational fortunes of urban residents. Focus of Study: In response to claims that macroeconomic change created the confinement of educational disadvantage, this article reveals that political economic arguments predicated on macroeconomic change have yet to explain a period of decline on several dimensions of educational inequality from 1970 to 1990. Research Design: Through a juxtaposition of historical population trends and research with the ideas of Anyon and her contemporaries, this analysis considers racial forces emanating from desegregation policy as key to understanding test-score trends and metropolitan restructuring. Descriptive analyses of test-score trends and neighborhood indices of dissimilarities from 1970 to the mid-1990s form the basis of analysis. Conclusions: The analysis demonstrates that not only does desegregation policy align with anomalous educational trends, but that its impact reverberated to other spatial strata through its encouragement of Whites’ school selection decisions intent on racial avoidance. Racial avoidance should therefore be considered as an architect of the racial and economic landscape of the modern metropolis.

Black Gold, White Power: Mapping Oil, Real Estate, and Racial Segregation in the Los Angeles Basin, 1900-1939

In 1923, Southern California produced over twenty percent of the world’s oil. At the epicenter of an oil boom from 1892 to the 1930s, Los Angeles grew into the nation’s fifth largest city. By the end of the rush, it had also become one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Historians have overlooked the relationship between industrialists drilling for oil and real estate developers codifying a racist housing market, namely through “redlining” maps and mortgage lending. While redlining is typically understood as a problem of horizontal territory, this paper argues that the mapping of the underground—the location and volume of subterranean oil fields, in particular—was a crucial technique in underwriting urban apartheid. Mapping technologies linked oil exploitation with restrictive property rights, constructing oil as a resource and vertically engineering a racialized housing market. By focusing on petro-industrialization interlocked with segregationist housing, this article reveals an unexamined chapter in Los Angeles’s history of resource exploitation and racial capitalism. Moreover, it contributes to a growing literature on the social production of resources, extractive technology and political exclusion, and the technoscientific practices used by states and corporations to mine the underground while constructing metropolitan inequality above ground.

The Changing Influence of Educational Policy and Race on Metropolitan Inequality, 1970–2010

Schools do not receive much recognition within urban sociological research for the role they perform in shaping the demographic, structural, and social features of neighborhoods, cities, and metropolitan areas. In contrast, this article links schools, and the racial avoidance that operates through educational policy, to the extreme economic polarization of metropolitan areas. The author considers why the expansion of school choice has not yet produced the decline in economic polarization that research suggested it might.

Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits by Ansley T. Erickson

Reviewed by: Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limitsby Ansley T. Erickson Matthew Delmont Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits. By Ansley T. Erickson. Historical Studies of Urban America. ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 390. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-226-02525-4.) Ansley T. Erickson's Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limitsexamines the history of segregation, desegregation, and educational inequality in Nashville, Tennessee, from the 1950s through the 1990s. Erickson weaves together metropolitan history, educational history, and policy history to show how "inequality shifted form in American education" (p. 4). Erickson concludes, "Nashville navigated desegregation with relative statistical success while remaining unable or unwilling to value all of the district's students, their communities, and their places in the metropolis" (p. 11). Drawing on extensive archival research and over fifty original oral histories, Making the Unequal Metropolisis a deeply researched and analytically sophisticated book that builds on the work of historians of education, politics, and civil rights like Jack Dougherty, Matthew D. Lassiter, and Jeanne Theoharis. Similar to these scholars, Erickson shows how schools play an integral role in the making of cities and suburbs. "[SJchool policy became an actor in [Nashville], embedded in and contributing to the basic structures of metropolitan inequality," Erickson argues (p. 9). She concludes, "As Nashville schools went from formal segregation to statistical desegregation, they demonstrated how deeply education is tied to, and helps construct, the political economy of metropolitan space" (p. 313). Among the many impressive aspects of this book is how Erickson navigates different scales of analysis. She deftly shows how struggles over educational inequality stretched across local, metropolitan, state, and federal levels and how policy choices at each of these levels shaped school segregation and desegregation. In chapter 4, for example, Erickson analyzes how school site selection guidelines prepared by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare revealed "official federal assumptions that quality education should be found in suburban settings," while also setting the "ideological and practical direction for school construction" in Nashville (pp. 123, 128). By repeatedly making these connections among the local, metropolitan, state, and national levels, Making the Unequal Metropolisis both a nuanced case study of educational history and civil rights in Nashville and a nationally relevant study of how "school policy choices continued to distribute resources—material, human, and social—unequally even within policy interventions ostensibly targeting equality" (p. 21). Making the Unequal Metropolisalso covers a longer chronological period than many other histories of postwar urban/suburban development. By tracing this story through the 1980s and 1990s, Erickson is able to show how different people and organizations attempted to articulate and enact visions of [End Page 475]educational equality and how these visions transformed over time. "Black community leaders, from school board members to ministers to parent advocates, struggled to reconcile for themselves how much statistical desegregation was worth: in closures of cherished institutions, in time and distance on the bus, in feelings of alienation at new schools in unfamiliar and sometimes inaccessible areas," Erickson writes (p. 276). While the players in these later chapters are not well known nationally, the social, political, and legal issues Erickson analyzes will resonate for scholars working on metropolitan development and education in other locales. Making the Unequal Metropolisis an important and timely book. Over six decades after Brown v. Board of Education(1954), Erickson's study provides new ways of thinking, talking, and teaching about the history and legacies of school segregation in the United States. Matthew Delmont Arizona State University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Challenging Boundaries, Changing Fate? Metropolitan Inequality and the Legacy of Milliken

Background This article examines the contemporary implications of the Milliken v. Bradley (1974) decision for educational inequality between school districts in U.S. metropolitan areas. We focus upon four metropolitan areas that were highly segregated in the 1970s but which met different fates in court: We first examine Detroit and Philadelphia, where plaintiffs sought but ultimately failed to obtain a metropolitan-wide desegregation ruling. We then examine St. Louis, where a court imposed a metropolitan desegregation remedy. We finally include Jefferson County, where the court order resulted in a merger of city and suburban schools. Objective Through this comparative analysis we seek to tease out the effects of the ruling on patterns of inequity between urban and suburban school districts over time. We specifically examine how districts within these metro areas differed over time in terms of patterns of school segregation, fiscal resources, and academic performance. Research Design We employed qualitative case study methodology. We purposively selected three case study districts within each of the four metro areas (total of 12 school districts) based on their contextual status in 1970, i.e., whether they were in each of these three categories: urban, segregated suburban, or affluent suburban. We compared them along three dimensions: patterns of segregation, academic outcomes, and fiscal resources. Conclusions We found that the segregated and high poverty districts in the three metro areas where courts left districts intact (Detroit, Philadelphia, and St. Louis) have been, since Milliken, increasingly hemmed in by their boundaries: struggling with growing concentrations of need, low resources to meet those needs, and as a result falling into fiscal and academic decline. In contrast, the maintenance of district boundaries by the courts has allowed the affluent suburbs in these contexts, over time, to benefit from a number of policies and practices that allowed them to accrue and protect advantage through exclusionary zoning policies and housing discrimination. Together, these policies have promoted and protected the affluence and advantage in each of these contexts, which has in turn attracted investment and allowed these districts to maintain strong financial standing over time. Our study suggests that socially constructed political boundaries, like school district boundary lines, by carving up political geography along the lines of race and class, can take on an active role in the reproduction of inequality.

Rural Victorian Telestroke project

Intravenous thrombolysis improves functional outcomes in acute ischaemic stroke. However, many rural stroke patients are denied thrombolysis because of a rural neurologist shortage. 'Telestroke' facilitates thrombolysis by providing remote access to neurologists via videoconferencing systems. To develop a safe and feasible Telestroke system in a rural Victorian hospital that facilitates delivery of intravenous thrombolysis to acute ischaemic stroke patients. A pilot videoconferencing Telestroke system was set up between Royal Melbourne Hospital and Northeast Health Wangaratta. Acute stroke patients presenting within 4.5 h of symptom onset without intracranial haemorrhage were eligible for Telestroke. However, eligible patients were excluded from Telestroke if they had haemorrhagic risk factors. Data were collected from intervention (October 2009-September 2010) and control group (October 2008-September 2009) by medical file audit. Primary outcome measure was percentage of patients thrombolysed. Secondary outcome measures included incidence of symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage and door-to-computed tomography time. One hundred and forty-five acute stroke patients presented in control year and 130 patients in intervention year. Fifty-four patients in intervention and 36 patients in control group were eligible for thrombolysis. In intervention group, 24 patients had Telestroke activated and 8 patients underwent thrombolysis. There was no thrombolysis in the control group. There were neither symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhages nor deaths attributable to thrombolysis. Median door-to-computed tomography time did not significantly differ between eligible patients in control and intervention groups. Telestroke has the potential to bridge the gap of rural-metropolitan inequality in acute stroke care. Our Telestroke system successfully introduced safe thrombolysis and early specialist review of acute stroke patients in rural Victoria.

Schools and Housing in Metropolitan History

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the interplay between educational policies and housing markets in metropolitan U.S. history during the twentieth century. A review of the literature in urban/suburban history reveals that most scholars have emphasized the centrality of housing policies and real estate markets in establishing patterns of racial segregation and metropolitan inequality while marginalizing or neglecting the educational policies and public school markets that simultaneously shaped these processes. The evidence in this forum challenges the dominant view that housing policies structured educational outcomes in American cities and suburbs, revealing that school policies often shaped housing outcomes as well.

Going Regional: The Evolution of an Organizing Strategy in Detroit

In contexts of entrenched metropolitan inequality and limited local resources, organizers and community activists often feel a sense of urgency to target higher levels of government. This paper offers one such case from Detroit, of local organizing projects that “scaled up” in the mid–1990s to pursue a regional equity agenda. Drawing on participant observation, archival data, and interviews, the paper examines the process of unification and identifies key shifts in purpose, relational base, approach to leadership, and strategy for empowerment. While scaling up enabled members to engage in more sophisticated actions and influence higher levels of policy making, it also challenged the organization to maintain its member base. This research suggests that the process of scaling up poses tradeoffs for grassroots organizations, between responsiveness to existing members and building a regionally representative organization, capable of transcending divisions of the political environment.

Black Employment, Segregation, and the Social Organization of Metropolitan Labor Markets

This broad analysis of the employment of blacks in metropolitan areas examines the role of residential segregation in comparison with four other key structural explanations for racial metropolitan inequality: industrial composition, minority concentration, immigration, and the racial disparity in skills. The goal of the analysis was to determine whether the spatial configuration of blacks relative to whites in a metropolitan area influences the employment rates of black men and black women in the context of the structural conditions of the local labor market. The study expanded the analysis of space and work beyond an emphasis on the physical distance between black communities and jobs to a broader conceptualization of residential segregation as a structural feature of the entire metropolitan labor market that is representative of its social organization with regard to race. Using a longitudinal data set of the structural characteristics of the 95 largest U.S. cities from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses, the study used a cross-sectional analysis of the cities in 2000 and a fixed-effects analysis to assess the impact of five dimensions of residential segregation and the four other structural factors on the employment of blacks across different labor markets and across time within each labor market. The results revealed that when the other structural characteristics are controlled, the employment rates of blacks are lower in more segregated cities and decrease as cities become more segregated over time. The clustering and evenness dimensions of residential segregation were the most determinative of black employment.

Multicultural Washington, DC: the changing social and economic landscape of a post-industrial metropolis

This article, based on a case-study of Washington, DC, presents an historical-structuralist perspective on the social, political and economic forces that underlie contemporary patterns of US metropolitan inequality. Section one explores the unique history of the DC black population- the largest US urban concentration of African Americans until World War I. Section two discusses the ascendance of Washington, DC, as the international capital of the post World War II era. This period features the rapid expansion of white suburbia together with the growth and increasing concentration of African Americans in the urban core. Section three examines Washington, DC, as an exemplar of the US post-industrial metropolis. These distinguishing characteristics include the emerging 'multicultural majority' of the central city, widening urban/suburban socioeconomic 'divide', and profound shift in immigrant settlement patterns (from city to suburbia). The findings suggest that Washington, DC, may offer instructive insights into the future of multicultural relations in post-industrial US society.

Dual Cities? Sectoral Shifts and Metropolitan Income Inequality, 1980–90

The sectoral shift from manufacturing to services is one of several potential explanations for increasing income inequality in the United States. This article reframes national-level explanations of rising inequality at the level of urban labour markets and assesses their relative contributions to levels and trends in metropolitan income inequality. We find that sectoral shifts, especially the rates of deindustrialisation and employment growth in personal services, significantly affect changes in Gini indices for the largest constant-boundary MSAs between 1980 and 1990. In addition, rising metropolitan inequality is associated with the trend towards self-employment and such supply-side factors as local education levels, changing family structure and immigration. The study provides mixed support for the mismatch and global cities hypotheses.