Social Capital in the Shadow of Redevelopment: Navigating Education in Changing Neighborhoods

• In Event: Leveraging Housing Policy to Reduce Educational Inequality

Abstract

In highly segregated and under-resourced neighborhoods, one way that educational inequality persists is through inequitable access to resources and information through social networks. Social networks—one's relationships and connections with others—provide social resources, or social capital (Adler & Kwon, 2000) and can foster access to opportunity (Graham et al., 2014; Hallinan & Williams, 1989; Mani & Riley, 2019; Mishra, 2020). Conditions in high-poverty neighborhoods can make it challenging to form and deepen these connections due to lower levels of social cohesion and housing layouts that limit social interaction (Free, 2009; Kantor, 2007; Kephart, 2022; Lownsbrough & Beunderman, 2007).

Research consistently shows that desegregated contexts improve academic outcomes (Johnson, 2015; Reardon, 2016). Compelling evidence suggests that at least one reason why this is the case is because of the cross-class and cross-race connections that form in such contexts—examples of cross-type connectedness or bridging ties, those that connect people from different backgrounds (Calvó-Armengol & Jackson, 2004; Chetty et al., 2022a, 2022b; Loury, 1976; J. D. Montgomery, 1991; Putnam, 2016; Sacerdote, 2011; Small et al., 2010). Recent studies using ‘big data’ to measure students’ friendship networks have found that, when low-income children grow up with more cross-class connections, they have more equal opportunities and experience upward mobility (Chetty et al., 2022a, 2022b). 

We study how families’ social networks support their children’s education in a mixed-income Detroit neighborhood experiencing dramatic change amid the implementation of a HUD-funded housing transformation program called the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI). We document the mechanisms through which social networks support educational outcomes and the potential for housing policy to transform social networks in ways that benefit low-income youth. 

We answer the following research questions:
1. Who supports families' educational experiences in a mixed-income neighborhood?
2. How do families' social ties shape their children’s educational experiences?
3. How do these experiences vary by race/ethnicity, class, and position in the neighborhood’s housing transformation initiative?

We draw on critical network analysis (e.g., Finnigan & Jabbar, 2023) as a methodological tool to center asset-based views of social capital. Our data include surveys and repeated interviews with families, once in early 2024 before many of the neighborhood changes had been implemented and once in Spring 2025, after new housing had been built and many residents were temporarily relocated. We surveyed families in 2024 to measure their baseline social network ties, in and outside the neighborhood. We used semi-structured in-depth in-person interviews to learn more information about their social ties and the ways those ties contributed to their children’s educational development, achievement, or opportunity. We asked about changes in those ties and the mechanisms of social support in follow-up interviews. We include interviews from 46 families with school-aged children, including 35 Black low-income families (the majority of whom were living in the subsidized housing at the center of the CNI project) and 11 other families in the neighborhood, most of whom were white and middle-income. Our findings illuminate how social ties support educational experiences through financial help, in-kind support, information, influence, and emotional support.

Authors

• Margaret Dawson-Amoah, University of Southern California
  Presenting Author

• Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Huriya Jabbar, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Ayana Cheyenne Colvin, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Kara Finnigan, University of Michigan Ann Arbor
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• DeMarcus Antonio Jenkins, University of Pennsylvania
  Non-Presenting Co-Author