Comparing the Impacts of Sorting, Amenities, and Rootedness on the Social Lives of Residents

• In Event: Spatial Mechanisms in Social Life

Abstract

This following research questions frame this study: (1) Does residential sorting translate into local sociality? (2) Do neighborhood amenities override the effects of sorting? (3) After taking account of residents’ background characteristics and available amenities, to what degree does residential rootedness impact sociality and, by extension, the existence of local community? To answer them, I analyze original survey data of Black and White residents from two distinct neighborhoods in Sacramento, California. I aim to provide clarity on the complex set of conditions associated with communing in today’s urban landscape, which is increasingly diverse—that is, the majority of residents are nonwhite (Parker et al. 2018)—and inhabited by four-fifths of the U.S. population (United States Census Bureau 2023). I adjudicate evidence for and against urban planners’ beliefs in the disparate factors driving residential connection. Such evidence is pertinent in light of the profession’s promotion of “equity planning” (American Planning Association 2019; Loh, Caffray, and Maas 2025) and the related proposition that when low-income and racial minorities are able to live in well-resourced and low-poverty neighborhoods, cities improve overall in terms of public health, education, and sociality. I also provide a more comprehensive analysis of community—in terms of who has it and what conditions it—than in previous studies of this nature, by examining multiple behavioral outcomes that, taken together, can assist scholars in determining if a community exists in a place. I find that parents with cohabitating children and older residents possess in their neighborhoods the closest instantiations of what researchers might identify as a community of place. These results suggest that the current planning concern (or charge) with creating communities needs revised theory and, concomitantly, practical strategy. For researchers, the study advances the timely program of understanding who has community and the factors that promote it.

Author

• Christopher J Lawrence, University of California-Davis