Neighborhood Watch
Thy Neighbor's Mortgage: Does Living in a Subprime Neighborhood Affect One's Probability of Default?
Sumit Agarwal et al.
Real Estate Economics, Spring 2012, Pages 1-22
Abstract:
This article focuses on the potential externalities associated with subprime mortgage origination activity. Specifically, we examine whether negative spillover effects from subprime mortgage originations result in higher default rates in the surrounding area. Our empirical analysis controls for loan characteristics, house price changes and alternative loan products. Our results indicate that, after controlling for these characteristics, the concentration of subprime lending in a neighborhood does not lead to greater default risks for surrounding borrowers. However, we do find that more aggressive mortgage products (such as hybrid adjustable rate mortgages and low/no-documentation loans) had significant negative spillovers on other borrowers. Stated differently, the aggressive alternative mortgage designs were more toxic to the housing and mortgage market than previously believed.
----------------------
John Hipp & Adam Boessen
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2012, Pages 192-219
Abstract:
This project studied the effect of immigrant in-mobility on the trajectory of socioeconomic change in neighborhoods. The authors suggest that immigrant inflows may impact neighborhoods due to the consequences of residential mobility and the extent to which these new residents differ from the current residents. The authors use Southern California over a nearly 50-year period (1960 to 2007) as a case study to explore the short- and long- term impact of these changes. The authors find no evidence that immigrant inflow has negative consequences for home values, unemployment, or vacancies over this long period of time. Instead, the authors find that a novel measure they develop - a general measure of social distance - is much better at explaining the change in the economic conditions of these neighborhoods. Tracts with higher levels of social distance experienced a larger increase in the vacancy rate over the decade. The effect of social distance on home values changed over the study period: whereas social distance decreased home values during the 1960s, this completely reversed into a positive effect by the 2000s.
----------------------
Robert Sandy et al.
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We study the effects of urban environment on childhood obesity by concentrating on the effects of walking trails and crime close to children's homes on their BMI and obesity status. We use a unique dataset, which combines information on recreational trails in Indianapolis with data on violent crimes and anthropomorphic and diagnostic data from children's clinic visits between 1996 and 2005. We find that having a trail near a home reduces children's weight. However, the effect depends on the amount of nearby violent crimes. Significant reductions occur only in low crime areas and trails could have opposite effects on weight in high crime areas. These effects are primarily among boys, older children, and children who live in higher income neighborhoods. Evaluated at the mean length of trails this effect for older children in no crime areas would be a reduction of two pounds of the body weight. Falsification tests using planned trails instead of existing trails, show that trails are more likely to be located in areas with heavier children, suggesting that our results on effects of trails represent a lower bound.
----------------------
Deirdre Pfeiffer
Journal of Urban Affairs, forthcoming
Abstract:
A wealth of data drawn from cities and their nearby suburbs show that, consistent with place stratification theory, African Americans live in poorer quality communities than similarly affluent members of other racial groups. Yet, few have examined whether these trends are playing out in the rapidly growing exurbs, places that emerged in the post-Civil Rights era. Through a case study of African American migration to Los Angeles's exurban Inland Empire, this article tests the applicability of place stratification theory by triangulating evidence from interviews with 70 movers with U.S. Census and American Community Survey data. Both sources reveal that the gap in neighborhood conditions among similar income racial groups is much narrower in the exurbs than inner city Los Angeles or its nearby suburbs, an outcome that participants attributed to the region's rapid housing construction, relative lack of a history of who lives where, and resulting neighborhood diversity.
----------------------
Barbara Laraia et al.
Social Science & Medicine, April 2012, Pages 1082-1090
Abstract:
While neighborhood deprivation is associated with prevalence of chronic diseases, it is not well understood whether neighborhood deprivation is also associated with cardiometabolic risk factors among adults with chronic disease. Subjects (n = 19,804) from the Diabetes Study of Northern California (DISTANCE) cohort study, an ethnically-stratified, random sample of members of Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), an integrated managed care consortium, with type 2 diabetes who completed a survey between 2005 and 2007 and who lived in a 19 county study area were included in the analyses. We estimated the association between a validated neighborhood deprivation index (NDI) and four cardiometabolic risk factors: body mass index (BMI = kg/m2), glycosylated hemoglobin (A1c), low density lipoproteins (LDL) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) using multi-level models. Outcomes were modeled in their continuous form and as binary indicators of poor control (severe obesity: BMI ≥35, poor glycemic control: A1c ≥9%, hypercholesterolemia: LDL ≥130 mg/dL, and hypertension: SBP ≥140 mmHg). BMI, A1c and SBP increased monotonically across quartiles of NDI (p < 0.001 in each case); however, LDL was significantly associated with NDI only when comparing the most to the least deprived quartile. NDI remained significantly associated with BMI and A1c after adjusting for individual level factors including income and education. A linear trend (p < 0.001) was observed in the relative risk ratios for dichotomous indicators of severe obesity, poor glycemic control, and 2 or more poorly controlled cardiometabolic risk factors across NDI quartile. In adjusted models, higher levels of neighborhood deprivation were positively associated with indicators of cardiometabolic risk among adults with diabetes, suggesting that neighborhood level deprivation may influence individual outcomes. However, longitudinal data are needed to test the causal direction of these relationships.
----------------------
Inactive by Design? Neighborhood Design and Political Participation
Daniel Hopkins & Thad Williamson
Political Behavior, March 2012, Pages 79-101
Abstract:
Critics have long denounced the design of suburban communities for fostering political apathy. We disaggregate the concept of suburban design into four distinct attributes of neighborhoods. We then use tract-level Census data, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, and multilevel models to measure the relationship between these design features and political participation. Certain design aspects common in suburban neighborhoods are powerful predictors of reduced political activity, illustrating a potential link between neighborhood design and politics. Yet low-density environments appear to facilitate some types of participation. Suburban designs vary, and so do their likely impacts on political participation.
----------------------
Zoua Vang
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2012, Pages 220-246
Abstract:
Residential integration with the dominant native-born population is believed to be a crucial stage in immigrants' overall assimilation process. It is argued that without residential integration it would be difficult, if not impossible, for immigrants to achieve full incorporation into the host society. This article compares the sociospatial experiences of African immigrants in the United States and Ireland. Results show that African immigrants in Ireland have achieved spatial integration with Irish nationals, while their counterparts in the United States remain spatially separated from white Americans. The extent to which African immigrants' integration in Ireland can produce other forms of assimilation is questionable, however. Likewise, despite being segregated from whites, African immigrants in the United States have made some modest spatial gains that may facilitate their integration. The cross-national comparison draws into question the generally accepted notion that residential integration is an important intermediary substage in the assimilation process.
----------------------
The role of local food availability in explaining obesity risk among young school-aged children
Helen Lee
Social Science & Medicine, April 2012, Pages 1193-1203
Abstract:
In recent years, research and public policy attention has increasingly focused on understanding whether modifiable aspects of the local food environment - the types and composition of food outlets families have proximate access to - are drivers of and potential solutions to the problem of childhood obesity in the United States. Given that much of the earlier published research has documented greater concentrations of fast-food outlets alongside limited access to large grocery stores in neighborhoods with higher shares of racial/ethnic minority groups and residents living in poverty, differences in retail food contexts may indeed exacerbate notable child obesity disparities along socioeconomic and racial/ethnic lines. This paper examines whether the lack of access to more healthy food retailers and/or the greater availability of "unhealthy" food purveyors in residential neighborhoods explains children's risk of excessive weight gain, and whether differential food availability explains obesity disparities. I do so by analyzing a national survey of U.S. children followed over elementary school (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Kindergarten Cohort) who are linked to detailed, longitudinal food availability measures from a comprehensive business establishment database (the National Establishment Time Series). I find that children who live in residentially poor and minority neighborhoods are indeed more likely to have greater access to fast-food outlets and convenience stores. However, these neighborhoods also have greater access to other food establishments that have not been linked to increased obesity risk, including large-scale grocery stores. When examined in a multi-level modeling framework, differential exposure to food outlets does not independently explain weight gain over time in this sample of elementary school-aged children. Variation in residential food outlet availability also does not explain socioeconomic and racial/ethnic differences. It may thus be important to reconsider whether food access is, in all settings, a salient factor in understanding obesity risk among young children.
----------------------
Céline Ferré, Francisco Ferreira & Peter Lanjouw
World Bank Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to the choice of poverty line. The paper shows, further, that for all eight countries, a majority of the urban poor live in medium, small or very small towns. Moreover, it is shown that the greater incidence and severity of consumption poverty in smaller towns is generally compounded by similarly greater deprivation in terms of access to basic infrastructure services, such as electricity, heating gas, sewerage and solid waste disposal. We illustrate for one country - Morocco - that inequality within large cities is not driven by a severe dichotomy between slum dwellers and others. Robustness checks are performed to assess whether the findings in the paper hinge on a specific definition of "urban area"; are driven by differences in the cost of living across city-size categories; by reliance on an income-based concept of well-being; or by the application of small-area estimation techniques for estimating poverty rates at the town and city level.
----------------------
Housing Booms and City Centers
Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb & Kristina Tobio
NBER Working Paper, March 2012
Abstract:
Popular discussions often treat the great housing boom of the 1996-2006 period as if it were a national phenomenon with similar impacts across locales, but across metropolitan areas, price growth was dramatically higher in warmer, less educated cities with less initial density and higher initial housing values. Within metropolitan areas, price growth was faster in neighborhoods closer to the city center. The centralization of price growth during the boom was particularly dramatic in those metropolitan areas where income is higher away from the city center. We consider four different explanations for why city centers grew more quickly when wealth was more suburbanized: (1) gentrification, which brings rapid price growth, is more common in areas with centralized poverty; (2) areas with centralized poverty had more employment concentration which led to faster centralized price growth; (3) areas with centralized poverty had the weakest supply response to the boom in prices in the city center; and (4) poverty is centralized in cities with assets, like public transit, at the city center that became more valuable over the boom. We find some support for several of these hypotheses, but taken together they explain less than half of the overall connection between centralized poverty and centralized price growth.
----------------------
Tiebout sorting and neighborhood stratification
Patrick Bayer & Robert McMillan
Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income. Typically, urban areas are less than fully stratified, and the question arises how much departures from standard Tiebout assumptions contribute to observed within-neighborhood mixing. This paper quantifies the separate effects of employment geography (via costly commuting) and preferences for housing attributes on neighborhood stratification. It does so using an equilibrium sorting model, estimated with rich Census micro-data. Simulations based on the model and credible preference estimates show that counterfactual reductions in commuting costs lead to marked increases in racial and education segregation and, to a lesser degree, increases in income segregation, given that households now find it easier to locate in neighborhoods with like households. While turning off preferences for housing characteristics increases racial segregation, especially for blacks, doing so reduces income segregation, indicating that heterogeneity in the housing stock serves to stratify households based on ability-to-pay. Further, we show that differences in housing help to accentuate differences in the consumption of local amenities.
----------------------
Irma Corral et al.
Journal of Health Psychology, April 2012, Pages 371-378
Abstract:
We examined the role of residential segregation in 5+ daily fruit/vegetable consumption, exercise, and overweight/obesity among African Americans by linking data on the 11,142 African American adults in the 2000 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to 2000 census data on the segregation of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). Multi-level modeling revealed that after controlling for individual-level variables, MSA Segregation and Poverty contributed to fruit/vegetable consumption, MSA Poverty alone contributed to exercise, and MSA Segregation alone contributed to overweight/obesity. These findings highlight the need for research on the built-environments of the segregated neighborhoods in which most African Americans reside, and suggest that neighborhood disparities may contribute to health disparities.
----------------------
Freedom Hill Is Not for Sale - and Neither Is the Lower Ninth Ward
Brenda Phillips, Patricia Ann Stukes & Pamela Jenkins
Journal of Black Studies, May 2012, Pages 405-426
Abstract:
In 1999, a series of flood and rain events inundated Princeville, North Carolina. This historic community, the first town in the United States founded by African Americans, chose to stay in place rather than to relocate. This article presents the relocation decision within the contexts of history, place attachment, and community connections. Interview, observation, and documentary data reveal themes that led to the decision to remain in place. A Discussion section ties the decision to place attachments and recommends that future research should move beyond the individual level of analysis. Recommendations for policy and practice are included. In particular, how residents are attached to their communities and the ways in which they negotiate the environment relative to that place must be linked to mitigation efforts such as relocation buyouts. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, discourse surrounded areas in New Orleans regarding the future of a location similar in many ways to Princeville, particularly, the Lower Ninth Ward. The article concludes with an examination of that discourse and updates reconstruction progress in both Princeville and New Orleans.
----------------------
Robert Boyd
Urban Studies, March 2012, Pages 845-860
Abstract:
The conventional wisdom on the Black metropolis of the early 20th century holds that urban Black communities in the South lagged far behind their counterparts in the North in terms of providing opportunities for Blacks to enter occupations that were associated with Blacks' socioeconomic progress. Yet, analyses of census data in the present study offer mixed support for this wisdom. The odds of Black participation in art, show business, public service and professions were, as expected, lower in the urban South. Yet surprisingly, the odds of Black participation in most entrepreneurial ventures were approximately similar in the urban South and urban North. The results imply that the conventional wisdom should be modified to indicate that, at the beginning of the Great Migration, the benefits to Blacks of the large Black communities of northern cities were more cultural and political than economic.
----------------------
Mathias Meijer et al.
Social Science & Medicine, April 2012, Pages 1204-1212
Abstract:
There has been increasing interest in investigating whether inhabitants in socially or physically deprived neighborhoods have higher mortality when individual socioeconomic status is adjusted for. Results so far appear ambiguous and the objective of this study was to conduct a systematic literature review of previous studies and to quantify the association between area-level socioeconomic status (ALSES) and all-cause mortality in a meta-analysis. Current guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses were followed. Articles were retrieved from Medline, Embase, Social Sciences Citation Index and PsycInfo and individually evaluated by two researchers. Only peer-reviewed multilevel studies from high-income countries, which analyzed the influence of at least one area-level indicator and which controlled for individual SES, were included. The ALSES estimates in each study were first combined into a single estimate using weighted linear regression. In the meta-analysis we calculated combined estimates with random effects to account for heterogeneity between studies. Out of the 40 studies found eligible for the systematic review 18 studies were included in the meta-analysis. The systematic review suggests that there is an association between social cohesion and mortality but found no evidence for a clear association for area-level income inequality or for social capital. Studies including more than one area level suggest that characteristics on different area levels contribute to individual mortality. In the meta-analysis we found significantly higher mortality among inhabitants living in areas with low ALSES. Associations were stronger for men and younger age groups and in studies analyzing geographical units with fewer inhabitants.
----------------------
Jaana Halonen et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2012
Background: The extent to which neighbourhood characteristics explain accumulation of health behaviours is poorly understood. We examined whether neighbourhood disadvantage was associated with co-occurrence of behaviour-related risk factors, and how much of the neighbourhood differences in the co-occurrence can be explained by individual and neighbourhood level covariates.
Methods: The study population consisted of 60 694 Finnish Public Sector Study participants in 2004 and 2008. Neighbourhood disadvantage was determined using small-area level information on household income, education attainment, and unemployment rate, and linked with individual data using Global Positioning System-coordinates. Associations between neighbourhood disadvantage and co-occurrence of three behaviour-related risk factors (smoking, heavy alcohol use, and physical inactivity), and the extent to which individual and neighbourhood level covariates explain neighbourhood differences in co-occurrence of risk factors were determined with multilevel cumulative logistic regression.
Results: After adjusting for age, sex, marital status, and population density we found a dose-response relationship between neighbourhood disadvantage and co-occurrence of risk factors within each level of individual socioeconomic status. The cumulative odds ratios for the sum of health risks comparing the most to the least disadvantaged neighbourhoods ranged between 1.13 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.03-1.24) and 1.75 (95% CI, 1.54-1.98). Individual socioeconomic characteristics explained 35%, and neighbourhood disadvantage and population density 17% of the neighbourhood differences in the co-occurrence of risk factors.
Conclusions: Co-occurrence of poor health behaviours associated with neighbourhood disadvantage over and above individual's own socioeconomic status. Neighbourhood differences cannot be captured using individual socioeconomic factors alone, but neighbourhood level characteristics should also be considered.
----------------------
Jerker Karlén, Tomas Faresjö & Johnny Ludvigsson
Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, March 2012, Pages 177-182
Aims: The onset and progression of the autoimmune process leading to type 1 diabetes is partly dependent on genetic predisposition and partly on environmental factors. We have implemented a study design where 1-year-old children, from two equally sized, neighbouring but socioeconomically different cities, were compared for the induction of beta-cell autoantibodies.
Methods: This study comprises 2448 newborn infants, all living in the urban parts of the twin cities, followed prospectively with regular biological samples and questionnaires in a major population-based study. Of these, a random sample of 1497 children were tested for tyrosine phosphatase (IA-2A) and 1409 children for glutamic acid decarboxylase (GADA). Other documented risk factors of beta-cell autoimmunity and type 1 diabetes, such as family characteristics, dietary factors, and psychosocial factors were also included in the analysis.
Results: The risk for diabetes-related autoantibodies, both against GADA and IA-2A (>95% cut off), was significantly higher (p<0.0001) among children from the blue-collar than from the white-collar city. This difference persisted still after adjustment for other previously documented risk factors. Some of these previously known risk factors remained significant in the multivariate analysis as independent explanatory factors, in addition to living in a blue-collar city.
Conclusions: Factors in the social environment could trigger the induction of diabetes-related autoantibodies in 1-year-old children. These results point out that our present knowledge of factors influencing the autoimmune process might be widen to also include factors in the social environment of the community.
----------------------
Yet Even More Evidence on the Spatial Size of Cities: Urban Spatial Expansion in the US, 1980 - 2000
Kurt Paulsen
Regional Science and Urban Economics, July 2012, Pages 561-568
Abstract:
This paper expands empirical testing of the predictions of the standard monocentric urban model to examine the size of urban spatial expansion for all US metropolitan regions for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. Until recently, the lack of temporally and spatially-consistently interpreted data on urban extent for U.S. metropolitan areas has limited the ability to estimate panel models of land use change. This paper first describes the creation of a consistent data set on urbanized land area for all U.S. metropolitan areas. It then estimates cross-sectional models of the determinants of urban spatial extent. For purposes of comparison, results are compared to temporally-consistent satellite-derived measures of developed land area from the National Land Cover Database. The paper then presents panel-model estimates of changes in urban land area, finding that both population and income elasticities are substantially less than unity. Tests for the structural stability of urbanized land area determinants across metropolitan size categories and polycentric regions are presented.