Neighborhood Stability Research Articles

Neighbourhood preferences, active travel behaviour, and built environment: An exploratory study

In the current study we investigated the extent to which neighbourhood preferences could be used as a base to group people in order to explore their residential and travel choices. The basic idea of this study was that the preferences people would have for their residential and travel choices might be a robust predictor of their actual travel behaviour, and that the neighbourhood preferences might distinguish people in terms of the characteristics of their living environment. We used a moderation model to test whether the effect of built environment on travel behaviour varied in terms of resident’s type. A total of 3403 inhabitants of the city of Tampere in Finland participated in the study. A web-based public participation GIS survey combining the questionnaires with a map (SoftGIS technique) was used to collect the data. We identified two distinct groups of residents in terms of general neighbourhood preferences. The findings showed that clustering residents based on neighbourhood preferences moderated the association between some features of density measures and travel behaviour. We found significant differences between the two clusters in both the frequencies and the distance of pedestrian and bike travel. The findings revealed that inhabitants of neighbourhoods with a larger percentage of green surroundings had a greater perception of neighbourhood stability than did the residents of neighbourhoods with a smaller percentage of green surroundings.

Fewer Vacants, Fewer Crimes? Impacts of Neighborhood Revitalization Policies on Crime

The relationship between neighborhood physical environment and social disorder, particularly crime, is of critical interest to urban economists and sociologists, as well as local governments. Over the past 50 years, various policy interventions to improve physical conditions in distressed neighborhoods have also been heralded for their potential to reduce crime. Urban renewal programs in the mid-20th century and public housing redevelopment in the 1990s both subscribed to the idea that signs of physical disorder invite social disorder. More recently, the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) provided funding for local policymakers to rehabilitate or demolish foreclosed and vacant properties, in order to mitigate negative spillovers--including crime--on surrounding neighborhoods. In this paper, we investigate the impact of NSP investments on localized crime patterns in Cleveland, Chicago and Denver. Results suggest that demolition activity in Cleveland decreased burglary and theft, but do not find measurable impacts of property rehabilitation investments--although the precision of these estimates are limited by the number of rehabilitation activities.

Which Way to Recovery? Housing Market Outcomes and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

Which Way to Recovery? Housing Market Outcomes and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

Have Distressed Neighborhoods Recovered? Evidence from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

Have Distressed Neighborhoods Recovered? Evidence from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

Have Distressed Neighborhoods Recovered? Evidence from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

During the 2007-2009 housing crisis, concentrations of foreclosed and vacant properties created severe blight in many cities and neighborhoods. The federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was established to help mitigate distress in hard-hit areas by funding the rehabilitation or demolition of troubled properties. This paper analyzes housing market changes in areas that received investments during the second round of NSP funding, focusing on seven large urban counties. Grantees used NSP to invest in census tracts with high rates of distressed and vacancy properties, and tracts that had previously received other housing subsidies. The median NSP tract received quite sparse investment, relative to the overall housing stock and the initial levels of distress. Analysis of housing market outcomes indicates the recovery has been uneven across counties and neighborhoods. In a few counties, there is some evidence that NSP2 activity is correlated with improved housing outcomes.

No Escape? The Coordination Problem in Heritage Preservation

Conservation Areas (CAs) are among the most restrictive English planning policies. Designation implies a significant limitation of owners' control over the shape and appearance of their properties. The policy, however, can also be argued to solve a sort of ‘prisoner's dilemma’, in which it might be collectively rational to preserve the character of an area, but an individual homeowner may be tempted to inappropriately alter their property, thus free-riding on nearby properties' character. The net benefit of the policy depends largely on the existence of positive ‘heritage effects’ and acknowledgement from homeowners that policy contributes to neighbourhood stability and the preservation of these positive effects. Our results of a mixed-method analysis of close to 1 million property transactions near to about 8000 CAs and 111 interviews with residents in nine representative CAs in Greater London suggest that positive heritage externalities exist and that residents in CAs tend to value their local environments, acknowledge the need for planning control, and execute their right to object to neighbour's planning request.

Impacts of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program on Neighborhood Housing Turnover

Although the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program has grown into the largest subsidized housing program in the United States, we have limited understanding of how these units affect the neighborhoods in which they are located. This article examines impacts of the LIHTC program on neighborhood stability in the cities of Charlotte and Cleveland. We examine housing turnover before and after the introduction of LIHTC developments into the neighborhood, based on housing sales data from 1996 to 2007. Location data on LIHTC units are merged with parcel-level sales data from Mecklenburg and Cuyahoga Counties. We estimate an extended Cox hazard model with the difference-in-difference specification to determine whether LIHTC units are causing increased turnover of neighborhood housing. We also explore impacts on neighborhood stability from LIHTC developments citywide and in neighborhoods stratified by income. We find significant impacts on the stability of LIHTC developments in both cities. Particularly, in higher-income submarkets, strong spillover effects were observed in Charlotte. Our results suggest that the stability of neighborhoods may be an important factor when considering the siting of LIHTC developments.

The spatial extent of the effect of foreclosures on crime

Although neighborhood stability has long been considered a substantial determinant of crime, foreclosures have not been the subject of concerted research among criminologists until recently. A number of recent studies have examined the linkage between home foreclosures and crime. Though generally finding a significant relationship, studies have used different approaches and units of analysis. This variation led us to examine the spatial extent to which foreclosures affect a relatively small surrounding area. In this paper, we consider the spatial extent of the foreclosure effect on crime by estimating fixed effect negative binomial models using geocoded UCR data for 2003–2008 and foreclosure data to predict crime counts using the number of foreclosures within various small area radii. Results show that, independently and jointly, foreclosures are a predictor of crime up to at least a distance of 2250 feet. Importantly, that effect declines with distance. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of those findings.

On uncertain ground: being at home in the context of public housing redevelopment

The recent global financial crisis increased the volatility of housing markets and furthered the ongoing disinvestment in public sector housing. This disinvestment has been manifest in urban restructuring programmes involving both the privatisation and the wholesale demolition of public/social housing. For example, programmes like HOPE VI in the USA have radically altered the landscape of public housing through the demolition of tens of thousands of housing units nationwide. However, what of the people who occupied this housing, and what of the lives they had built there? In such a context, deliberating on the notion of being at home becomes a pressing task, necessitating serious consideration of the lived experience of place and place attachments among those who have been displaced by such programmes. While research has studied outcomes such as the quality of the new neighbourhood and household economic stability, it does not adequately address the lived experience of place and the disruptions that forced relocation can cause. This paper brings the literature on place attachment into the discussion of urban restructuring programmes and discusses the findings of several empirical studies on place attachment to provide a more complete picture of the impacts of such programmes on poor people. It demonstrates how place attachments in the context of public housing are complicated by poverty, power dynamics, ambivalence, and stigma, underscoring how attachments are formed through the interplay of policy and programme rhetoric, and the active processes of meaning making among residents. Policy implications of considering place attachments in public housing redevelopment efforts are also addressed.

Neighbourhood Turnover and Teenage Attainment

Theories about neighbours' influence on children based on social capital, cohesion and disorganisation stress the importance of neighbourhood stability. However, amongst the vast number of studies on the effect of neighbours on a child's education, none has tested whether neighbourhood stability matters. We fill this gap by estimating the causal effect of residential turnover on student test score gains.We show that high neighbourhood turnover reduces value added for students who stay in their neighbourhood, and this effect is more pronounced in more deprived neighbourhoods. Estimation is based on administrative data on four cohorts of secondary school children in England, allowing us to control for unobserved confounding individual effects, neighbourhood fixed effects and trends, plus school-by-cohort shocks. These main results, coupled with auxiliary findings based on survey data, suggest that neighbourhood turnover damages education through the disruption of local ties and social capital, highlighting a so-far undiscovered externality of mobility.

Which Way to Recovery? Housing Market Outcomes and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

Which Way to Recovery? Housing Market Outcomes and the Neighborhood Stabilization Program

The Social Impact of Home Rehabilitation in Low-Income Neighborhoods

While economists and others have studied the impact of abandoned foreclosed homes on nearby home prices and crime, very few scholars have attempted to understand the impact of abandonment and rehabilitation on neighborhood social conditions. The foreclosure crisis of 2005-2010 led to a concentration of abandoned foreclosed homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods and these neighborhoods became the targets of a policy intervention, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. This study employs a mixed-method longitudinal approach to investigate the impact of this foreclosed home rehabilitation policy on neighborhood social conditions and physical conditions in a highly disadvantaged neighborhood. We compared this to a quasi-control group of similar abandoned, foreclosed neighborhood homes not selected for the program. Results indicated that the rehabilitation of a foreclosed home had marginally significant negative impact on social conditions and no impact on the physical conditions of nearby homes. There were no differences between the program properties and the control properties, except that the control properties were rehabilitated more quickly. To further explore the quantitative findings, we divide the qualitative results into four major themes emerging from the data: indifference to foreclosures, threats to the neighborhood, call for community cohesion, and the importance of homeownership. These results indicate that the affected residents believe that neighborhood stabilization efforts would have benefitted more from programs that aimed to improve homeownership opportunities and increase neighborhood levels of social cohesion and social capital.

Does crime drive housing sales? Evidence from Los Angeles

Crime presents a threat to the residential stability of neighborhoods, and researchers often attempt to measure this indirect cost of crime in terms of the impact on housing values. Some studies have found that violent crime leads to lower home prices, but the associations found between property crime and home values have been more ambiguous. This paper hypothesizes that price-based models likely underestimate the true costs of crime because such models rely on transactions to estimate prices. However, if crime inhibits sales, price indices relying on sales may provide inaccurate measures of changes in housing demand in markets characterized by very low rates of home sales. Similarly, price may be a poor indicator of crime-induced shifts in demand in markets characterized by elastic supply. To address this, we measure the impact of violent, property, and overall crime and changes in crime on the rate of housing transactions across Los Angeles neighborhoods between 1993 and 1997.The results indicate both higher vacancy rates and higher levels of crime in the previous year related to higher rates of housing transactions. The effect of crime inhibiting sales appears primarily due to additional violent crime in neighborhoods with high levels of vacancies and crime.

Making Markets: Think Tank Legislation and Private Property in Detroit

The growing literature on shrinking and declining cities portrays the problems of vacancy and abandonment as symptoms of the absence of capital, while the policy transfer literature views declining cities as unlikely sites for the incubation of neoliberal urban policy. This study examines how declining cities have become key sites for tailored market intervention, focusing on the collapse of Detroit's land market. Long-term decline has been exacerbated by legislative changes orchestrated by think tanks seeking to reinvigorate the market for private property while using homeownership for neighborhood stabilization. Analysis of legislative proceedings, tax foreclosure auction data, and interviews with developers, officials, and activists document the trajectory of these policies of market fundamentalism and indicate that the primary “stabilization” has involved a revitalization of the conditions for predatory capital accumulation in a declining city.

Familification: Family, Neighborhood Change, and Housing Policy

This paper proposes the term familification to describe one type of gentrification: the process of neighborhood change by families moving into a neighborhood. This study, drawing upon in-depth interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic observations, focuses on an urban familification program—one city's attempt to benefit families by restricting participation in its downtown housing programs. The paper first describes the programs and then explores how leaders, program participants, and neighbors understand the programs' intentions and effects. While family is not prominent in the programs' grant proposals, leaders indicated that promoting traditional families was a central objective. Implementing these programs revealed difficulties in defining family and in managing the programs' outcomes. Implications for fair housing laws are considered, and it is argued that fostering diversity in family life course stages may be a compelling government interest to promote neighborhood stability, and an inclusive strategy for urban development.

Social Capital and Homeownership in Low- to Moderate-Income Neighborhoods

Abstract This study examined the relationship between homeownership and social capital among low-and moderate-income (LMI) households. Using data from the Community Advantage Panel Study, the authors used propensity score weighting and regression analyses to explore the relationship between LMI homeownership, neighborhood conditions, and social capital. After controlling for several important individual-and neighborhood-level characteristics, the authors found that homeownership is related to greater access to social resources in general but not to social resources within the neighborhood. Instead, resource generation within the neighborhood is largely predicted by neighborhood stability and perceived neighborhood size. Policy implications are discussed. KEY WORDS: Community Advantage Home Loan Secondary Market Program; homeownership; low-income; resource generation; social capital Homeownership has long played an integral role in wealth and asset accumulation, community growth, and the promotion of positive social outcomes for individuals and families in the United States (Retsinas & Belsky, 2002; Rohe & Stewart, 1996; Shlay, 2006). Since the 1930s, government policies such as tax incentives, subsidy payments, and market regulation have promoted homeownership as a vehicle to stimulate economic growth (Carliner, 1988). Since the 1980s, they have also been used to spur community redevelopment and provide improved housing options for low-income families (Shlay, 2006). In light of economic and racial disparities in homeownership rates (Collins, 2002; Herbert, Haurin, Rosenthal, & Duda, 2005; Williams, Nesiba, & McConnell, 2005), recent economic and social policies have focused on promotion of homeownership as a way to provide long-term economic stability and other benefits to low- and moderate-income (LMI) families who may not have benefited from earlier policies. As a result, the rate of entry into homeownership for low-income and minority households has been increasing faster than that for other groups (Belsky & Duda, 2002). Research has supported the belief that the benefits of homeownership, such as life satisfaction and neighborhood stability, transcend wealth accumulation for both homeowners and communities (Rohe, Van Zandt, & McCarthy, 2002), although this body of research has primarily focused on middle-and high-income populations. It is important to examine whether LMI individuals and families also experience the positive benefits of homeownership found for middle-and higher-income households. Furthermore, the recent housing crisis, which has been blamed in part on the expansion of risky mortgages to LMI borrowers, underscores the need for a careful look at the costs and benefits of LMI homeownership. This study focused on one perceived benefit of homeownership: its potential impact on access to social capital. Specifically, using data from the 2007 Community Advantage Program (CAP) panel survey and the 2000 U.S. Census, this study examined the differences in the level of access to social resources between LMI homeowners and LMI renters and what role neighborhood economic and social conditions play in the relationship between resource generation (RG) and homeownership. LITERATURE REVIEW Research has sought to identify externalities of homeownership and the potential social benefits that help determine the overall impacts of promotion of homeownership. Rohe et al., (2002) conducted a critical assessment of the research on the costs and benefits of homeownership and concluded there is evidence of positive benefits of homeownership, but they also cautioned that the potential negative impacts should be investigated further. Numerous studies lend support to the belief that homeownership is related to increased involvement in local organizations, neighborhood stability, local problem solving, and satisfaction (DiPasquale & Glaeser, 1999; Rohe & Stegman, 1994b; Rohe & Stewart, 1996). …

Treatment Facility Neighborhood Environment and Outpatient Treatment Completion

The current study focuses on three dimensions of treatment neighborhood environments that may influence treatment retention: neighborhood disadvantage, stability, and concentrated immigration. We examined treatment outcomes for a total of 9,319 individuals who were admitted for initial treatment in 56 outpatient clinics in Cook County, Illinois. Census-tract-level data were used to measure facility neighborhood environment. We found that neighborhood disadvantage was unrelated to individual treatment completion. Immigrant concentration was found to increase the likelihood of substance abuse treatment completion, although it was attenuated after controlling for patient problem severity and referral sources. Neighborhood stability was found to be positively related to treatment completion. These results suggest that knowledge of neighborhood context should be an important consideration when making placement decisions of new treatment facilities. Knowledge of neighborhood impact on treatment attrition should also be considered essential information to be used for client placement, treatment program design, and discharge protocols.

Lessons Learned from the Largest Tenure Mix Operation in the World: Right to Buy in the United Kingdom

In the past few decades, urban regeneration policies have taken firm root in many Western European countries. Underlying these regeneration policies is a strong belief in the negative neighborhood effects of living in areas of concentrated poverty, often neighborhoods with a large share of social housing. In Europe, great importance is attached to creating a more diverse housing stock (in terms of tenure and dwelling types) as a means to establishing a more socially mixed neighborhood population. Mixed-housing strategies are embraced explicitly by governments in Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The idea is that mixing homeowners with social renters will create a more diverse socioeconomic mix in neighborhoods, removing the potential of negative neighborhood effects. By far the largest tenure-mixing operation in Europe is the Right to Buy (RTB) scheme in the United Kingdom. Since the 1970s, more than 2.7 million socially rented houses have sold at large discounts, mainly to sitting tenants. In this article, we synthesize the outcomes of RTB with regard to neighborhood effects: residualization, neighborhood stability, tenure and social mix, social interactions, and dwelling maintenance. Although we acknowledge substantial socioeconomic benefits of RTB for many individual residents, we find that the neighborhood outcomes of RTB are by no means solely beneficial.

Corporately Sponsored Redevelopment Campaigns and the Demographic Stability of Urban Neighborhoods: St. Louis Re-Revisited

ABSTRACT:Much popular speculation and scientific thinking continues to hold that inner-city neighborhoods cannot be redeveloped in a manner that is congenial to a broad array of interests and people. Lower income and minority citizens are not supposed to find a permanent place in redeveloped neighborhoods, especially, perhaps, when the rebuilding process is influenced strongly by corporations with a stake in the area being rehabilitated. This reassessment of five redevelopment campaigns in Saint Louis affirms that rebuilding sponsored by businesses and nonprofit institutions and aided by government agencies can attract and hold persons from different backgrounds, stages of life, and social classes. Maintaining a racial mix of people that is proportionate to their representation in the general population much less skewed toward becoming whiter is difficult, however.

Explaining the Pace of Foreclosed Home Sales during the US Foreclosure Crisis: Evidence from Atlanta

As the US foreclosure crisis approached its climax in 2007 and 2008, the buildup of lender-owned homes had been building for some time. Around this time, however, lenders began selling homes, especially low-value properties, at a much faster pace, releasing them into local housing markets. This paper examines the sales of foreclosed single-family homes into the Atlanta market from January 2005 through early 2009. A primary goal is to understand the drivers of such sales. A proportional hazards model is used to identify factors affecting the time that homes spend as ‘real estate owned’ properties, with a special focus on low-value properties. We find that the pace of sales of low-value properties accelerated during 2007 and, especially, in late 2008 and early 2009, and the rate varied based on lender type, neighborhood characteristics, and submarket location. These findings have implications not simply for understanding real estate markets more broadly, but especially for housing market recovery and neighborhood stabilization policies.