City and Community

Schmidt, Steven

2024 City and Community

doi: 10.1177/15356841231223684

Structural racism and individual discrimination contribute to racial inequalities in poor housing conditions in the United States. Less is known about whether and how structural racism and individual discrimination shape a parallel, but distinct, process that is also consequential for family wellbeing: experiencing housing unit maintenance delays. Maintenance delays transform acute problems into chronic stressors and increase exposure to physical hazards over time. Using the 2013 American Housing Survey, I examine racial/ethnic disparities in maintenance delays across non-Hispanic White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian/Alaska Native renters. Given that 2.3 million low-income households rent using Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs), a federal housing assistance program with requirements around repair timing, I also examine how renting with a voucher shapes maintenance delays. There are three principal findings. First, White renters are more likely to report timely repairs than either Black or Hispanic renters. Second, for Black renters, both structural racism experienced in rental markets and individual discrimination drive this disparity, whereas Hispanic renters’ diverging maintenance experiences are largely explained by pathways impacted by structural racism. Third, renting with an HCV is not associated with repair timeliness for any racial/ethnic group. Taken together, the findings suggest that racial/ethnic disparities in substandard housing emerge not only through unequal exposure to housing quality problems but also through unequal responses to these issues.

Luhr, Sigrid

2024 City and Community

doi: 10.1177/15356841241231492

Over the past decade, housing prices in many regions of the United States have increased precipitously. This is especially true in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region that has experienced an influx of highly paid tech workers and a tightening of the housing market. Against this backdrop, this article examines the strategies and compromises that a racially and socioeconomically diverse group of Bay Area residents use to maintain housing. Drawing on survey and interview data, the article finds that both homeowners and nonhomeowners described feeling “stuck in place” as prices rose around them. Yet nonhomeowners made greater compromises to maintain housing, including (1) living in structurally inadequate housing; (2) moving in with friends and relatives; and (3) accepting legally precarious living arrangements. Although research on housing often focuses on why families move, this article reconfigures immobility as a deliberate process, documenting the trade-offs families make to keep their homes.

Beck, Kevin; Martin, Isaac William

2024 City and Community

doi: 10.1177/15356841241264266

Recent quantitative studies on the relationship between gentrification and residential displacement have produced inconsistent findings. We examine whether these differences may be attributed to variation in the conceptualization and measurement of gentrification by testing a variety of different operational definitions of gentrification while holding data sources and other methodological decisions fixed. We treat gentrification as a family of related phenomena, estimate a family of operational measures of gentrification from Census data, and, for each measure in the family, test the association between gentrification and displacement in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that several relationships between gentrification and residential displacement are robust to the choice of measure from the family of gentrification measures we consider. In particular, we find no evidence that gentrification increases the probability of displacement for renters or homeowners, regardless of how gentrification is defined and operationalized. However, consistent with recent studies of particular metro areas, we find evidence that homeowners who live in gentrifying neighborhoods are less likely to be displaced than homeowners in comparable neighborhoods that are not gentrifying.

Dahir, Nima; Hwang, Jackelyn

2024 City and Community

doi: 10.1177/15356841241260036

Property owners play pivotal roles in the trajectories of neighborhoods with discretion over upkeep, residential turnover, and affordability. Yet, little is known about how and why the racial composition of ownership changes over time relative to residents within a neighborhood and, in turn, how this relates to the neighborhood’s change and stability. With a self-constructed dataset of all residential transactions in San Francisco from 1990 to 2017, we consider how the ethnoracial composition of ownership differs from that of residents and how this difference relates to neighborhood change. We find that neighborhoods with more non-White residents have greater differences between the ethnoracial compositions of owners and residents, with the largest differences in neighborhoods with more Black residents. An increase in the divergence between these distributions is related to future increases in White and Asian residents and higher socioeconomic status residents and decreases in Black and Hispanic residents, illustrating that neighborhoods where owners are more ethnoracially distinct from the residents are more prone to neighborhood change and residential turnover. Our findings contribute to understandings of inequalities in property ownership and illuminate the role of ownership in neighborhood change in the contemporary city.

Chun, Yung; Jabbari, Jason; Foell, Andrew; Nandan, Pranav; Chen, Yi; Grinstein-Weiss, Michal

2024 City and Community

doi: 10.1177/15356841241260046

Leveraging novel case management data, we present the first comprehensive investigation into the role of case management services in housing relocation and return decisions within the framework of the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI), the current place-based public housing revitalization program. Our study employs multinomial logistic (MNL) regression models to demonstrate that a higher level of involvement in case management services is correlated with an increased probability of moving to a higher-income neighborhood during the redevelopment process, as well as a greater likelihood of returning to the revitalized neighborhood afterward. By achieving these outcomes, case management services play a crucial role in enhancing the chances for original CNI residents to reap the benefits of neighborhood redevelopment—a matter of enduring concern among social scientists. These findings are contextualized with both sociodemographic and neighborhood characteristics associated with relocation and return decisions.

Hwang, Jackelyn; Zhang, Iris H.

2024 City & Community

doi: 10.1177/15356841241276390

Despite recent theoretical advances in explaining the persistence of segregation in the United States through structural sorting processes, how the spread and intensification of gentrification intersects with these processes is less clear. Drawing on the 2000–2017 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and fixed effects logistic and linear regression models, we examine gentrification’s relationship with residential mobility patterns and whether this relationship is racially stratified. We do not find evidence that living in gentrifying neighborhoods is associated with higher rates of moving for lower-income respondents compared to those living in nongentrifying neighborhoods nor does this differ by race. However, we find starkly different locational outcomes between Black and White movers across the income spectrum, rather than the gentrification status of one’s neighborhood. We argue that processes of racial stratification in the housing market largely govern residential outcomes, regardless of gentrification.