Finding
The author should be applauded for undertaking the significant data merging and cleaning required for these analyses.
Paper
Residential Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Chicago
Citations: 0
Full textAbstract
In this article, the author explores how residential mobility and neighborhood-level change are connected over time. In particular, he asks whether and how neighborhood change trajectories in Chicago, Illinois and the surrounding suburbs influence residential mobility pathways at the household level. I think the questions this study addresses are among the most pressing in the field of urban policy today. Thirty years of research documents the important role that neighborhoods play in the life chances of children and families (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, & Aber, 1997; Chetty et al., 2016; Sampson, 2012; Wilson, 1987). Therefore, we need to know how people end up living where they do. To understand the processes underlying residential attainment, we must simultaneously find out why people move to specific neighborhoods and also how communities themselves change in ways that shape whether people leave them or stay. Whereas the question of why people move has been given significant treatment in the interdisciplinary literature on residential mobility, the question of why they move where they do has only recently been explored—and it is this particular angle that makes the Greenlee article so important. As the author makes clear, the processes underlying metropolitan-level spatial demography involve more than just individual households making decisions about where to live. These decisions are made in a dynamic geographic landscape where neighborhoods themselves evolve, some seeing significant reinvestment, others languishing without sufficient resources and population. We cannot study these processes in isolation, and one of the strengths of the current article is that it combines both of them. These questions matter for the fate of children as well as the fate of cities. The article itself is based on an impressive amount of data preparation and analysis at both the census tract level and the household level. The author should be applauded for undertaking the significant data merging and cleaning required for these analyses. Building off previous research on neighborhood change, the author uses census data over five periods to develop seven crosssectional neighborhood typologies for Cook County, Illinois (which includes the city of Chicago and adjacent suburbs). From there he creates longitudinal sequences of neighborhood types for each census tract, which allows for the grouping and comparison of neighborhood trajectories over time. In tandem with the census tract analyses, the author uses a longitudinal database of individual households to examine patterns of mobility between these different neighborhood types, as well as the factors that predict propensity to move. One of the primary benefits of pairing these neighborhood change trajectories with the longitudinal household mobility data is that it allows the author not only to describe neighborhood change in terms of incumbent upgrading, but also to identify the extent to which changing demographics are attributable to the characteristics of households who move in and those who leave (cf. Coulton, Theodos, & Turner, 2012). There are a number of takeaway findings from the article. First, in line with previous literature, the article shows that people tend to move between similar neighborhoods. Second, where there are differences in origin and destination neighborhood flows, they tend to be between what he deems as gentrifying neighborhoods and working-class neighborhoods. In an interesting
Authors
S. Deluca
Journal
Housing Policy Debate