Interlocking Spatial Structures and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality

• In Event: 189 - Section on Community and Urban Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 04. Gentrification and Neighborhood Change

Abstract

A long, rich tradition within urban sociology has probed spatial inequality through the prism of neighborhoods. However, a growing body of work suggests that other ecological units in which the neighborhood is nested may condition neighborhood characteristics and the durability of these characteristics over time. In building toward a spatial inequality paradigm that expands its analytical orientation from the neighborhood to interlocking spatial units, this paper asks: are poor neighborhoods more likely to remain disadvantaged in some city contexts than in others? And if so, what city-level factors, net of neighborhood-level characteristics, might account for variation in neighborhood poverty’s temporal durability? Using U.S. Census 2000 and American Community Survey (ACS) 2008-2012 data, aggregated by tract and metropolitan statistical area (MSA), I build a multilevel logit change model predicting the likelihood that a given neighborhood starting the 2000s at the bottom of the national socioeconomic distribution remained there by decade’s end. Findings confirm that rates of neighborhood poverty durability, while high in the aggregate, vary considerably across cities and that a broad range of baseline MSA-level factors account for this variation, even when controlling for neighborhood-level characteristics. Contrary to extant literature, MSA-level racial segregation does not appear to drive neighborhood poverty’s entrenchment; cities’ economic vitality, housing markets, political orientations and human capital distributions loom larger in this process, shaping neighborhood trajectories in unexpected ways. These findings - robust to multiple model specifications - reinforce the complex, multilayered character of spatial stratification processes within the twenty-first century American city.

Author

• Jared Nathan Schachner, Harvard University