CityReads│It Is the Best and the Worse of Urban Eras

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It Is the Best and the Worse of Urban Eras

Robert Sampson analyzes the persistence and change in urban inequality in American cities from the theoretical perspective of neighborhood effects.

Robert J Sampson, 2019. Neighborhood effects and beyond: Explaining the paradoxes of inequality in the changing American metropolis, Urban Studies, Vol. 56(1) 3–32.

Sources: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098018795363

https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/USJ/USJ795363_Translated.pdf

Picture source: https://www.google.com/search?q=Robert+Sampson&tbm=isch&source

In his groundbreaking book published in 2012, Great AmericanCity: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Prof. Robert J Sampson at Harvard University systematically developed a theory and methodology of neighborhood effects, arguing that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live (Read more at CityReads | You Are Where You Live). Building on this book, Prof.Sampson recently updated the recent findings and debates on neighborhood effects and contemplated the paradoxes of inequality in the changing American metropolis in the annual lecture paper of Urban Studies. He zoom in on stability and change in the contemporary American metropolis from the theoretical perspective of neighborhood effects, with afocus on racial inequality at several levels of urban organization.

The core argument of his paper is that neighborhood structures are a persistent feature of urban systems that exert causal effects on a wide variety of everyday life, that neighborhoods mediate and are mediated by both macro structures (e.g. political, economic,legal) and micro processes (e.g. perception and choice), and that without effective policy intervention, neighborhoods will perpetuate structural inequality.

This paper is organized around three themes: (1) neighborhood inequality as an important driver and mediator of urban transformation; (2) racial disparities across the life course in terms of compounded deprivation, ‘poisoned development’, and intergenerational mobility; and (3) how everyday spatial mobility beyond the local neighborhood produces a largely unrecognized form of social isolation and higher-order segregation by race and class.

Urban inequality paradox of contemporary American society

The contemporary urban scene is depicted by clashing narratives. On the one hand, the mood is grim among those whom we might call the prophets of urban doom. Culprits include rising inequality, the austerity of neoliberalism, nativism, segregation, mass incarceration, and globalization. Although urbanists in this camp disagree on the biggest threat, there is consensus that a negative transformation is rupturing the American city and engulfing urban areas far beyond the USA. Segregation and spatial isolation of the poor are increasing in Europe; the migration crisis spans the globe; and income inequality has risen sharply around the world. The sustainability of the urban environment has also emerged as a defining challenge of our time as urbanization continues its seemingly inexorable global increase.

On the other hand, we have the prophets of urban rebirth. Steven Pinker has declared a ‘New Enlightenment’, highlighting the diverse and dramatic improvements in health,wealth, peace, the environment, safety, terrorism, and our overall quality oflife. Focusing more directly on the urban, the demographers Samuel Preston and Irma Elo describe the ‘Anatomy of a municipal triumph: New York City’s up surgein life expectancy’. Over the period 1990-2010, the increase in life expectancy for males in New York City was 6.0 years greater than for males in the United States. The female relative gain was 3.9 years. More generally, Ed Glaeser pitches The Triumph of the City, in which city dwellers everywhere are happier, healthier, greener, and smarter than ever. Patrick Sharkey advocates a more guarded optimism in Uneasy Peace, but a positive story emerges nonetheless. Violence has plummeted dramatically since the 1990s, and Sharkey shows that some of the biggest beneficiaries have been low-income and minority residents of American cities. Mortality rates have decreased most dramatically for blackmen, for example, with most of the cause traced to declines in violence. Sharkey also argues that while gentrification is widely criticized, it has brought unrecognized benefits to the poor in many cities.

There is truth in both of these positions, and therein lies the real paradox of urban inequality. If we set aside author hyperbole on both sides, along with the tendency to conflate moral evaluation with analysis, it is undeniable that cities are simultaneously better and worse off today than they were at the height of the urban crisis in the 1970s and 1980s that Wilson wrote about.

The most dramatic example of this is what Sampson has labelled the three eras of crime and criminalizationin the last half century. The figure below shows that violence and incarceration rates began at similar levels in Era I, but the dramatic upswingin violence in the 1960s and early 1970s, with no discernible policy response involving the prison system, was a defining turning point in cities. If anything, incarceration declined slightly, with lower levels in 1975 than 1960. In Era 2, violence continued its steep rise, but incarceration rose dramatically as well, almost in tandem. Suddenly, starting in the 1990s, violence dropped dramatically, paving the way for the resurgence of cities, and important gains in the life expectancy of African Americans. Immigration boomed from around the world, transforming the American urban landscape, and cities became the engine of innovation and growth while violence plummeted. Despite public perceptions, the current homicide rate in the USA is now at 1950s levels, marking an extraordinary turn around from previous eras. New York City, a poster child for urban apocalypse in the 1970s and early 1980s, is now perhaps the safest large city in the world, and certainly one of its most thriving. Nationally, the poor today have the same risk of victimization by violence as the rich did in the early 1990s.

Three Eras of crime and criminalisation in the USA in the last half-century.

An optimistic assessment of Era 3 is tempered, however, by the fact that America still leads the modern world in incarceration and imprisons many more residents than it did at the height of the violence epidemic. Although incarceration is declining and once again converging with the violent crime rate, the consequences of the sheer magnitude of this criminalization will be felt for decades. Police killings have also risen, with a disproportionate toll inflicted on African Americans; distrust in criminal justice institutions has increased; and the fear of crimeand terrorism remains high. More generally, racial disparities in economic mobility are stubbornly persistent; income segregation has deepened the neighborhood divide in cities across the country; and politically, polarization is at a modern high.

Rre we confronting a new urban opportunity or a new urban crisis? Cities have always been characterized by a Dickensian best of times/worst of times paradox, but many of the recent transformations are historically unique.

Neighborhood income mobility and gentrification

From 2000 to 2010, over 75% of low-income neighborhoods in America at the beginning of the decade remained so at the end. For the rich, there was virtually no change in the probability that affluent neighborhoods retained their status (an approximately 80% retention rate). Hence there is little upward or downward neighborhood mobility through time, despite widespread reports of gentrification in recent decades. The relative lack of income mobility at the neighborhood level across the USA challenges the narrative of rampant gentrification.

Furthermore, gentrificationis systematically structured by neighborhood racial inequality. The pace of gentrification in Chicago was negatively associated with the concentration of blacks and Hispanics in neighborhoods that either showed signs of gentrification or were adjacent and still disinvested in earlier years. Racial composition had a threshold effect, however, attenuating gentrification only when the share of blacks in a neighborhood was greater than 40%; apparently, there is a limit to stated preference for diversity among gentrifiers.

Race and the crime decline

African Americans may have benefited the most from the decline in violence, yielding significant improvements in life expectancy. This finding poses further questions: did the racial gap in violence change as well? Did the causes of violence change?

While all groups are nowexposed to considerably less violence than in the 1990s, racial disparities in neighborhood violence, even if somewhat narrowed, remain large and persistent. Race is not a direct cause of violence, but is rather a marker for the cluster of social and material disadvantages that both follow from and constitute racial status in America.

Racial disparities over the life course: compounded deprivation, poisoned development and Intergenerational mobility

Compounded deprivation

Blacks were anywhere from 10 to 16 times more likely than whites or Latinos to experience compounded poverty (defined as having an individual income in the bottom fifth and living in a neighborhood with greater than 30% poverty) during adolescence and the transition to young adulthood. Notably, this large disparity persisted despite controlling for the individual differences in cognitive capacity  and noncognitive skills in human capital attainment, along with controlling for baseline differences in poverty and family structure.

Poisoned development

Black and Hispanic neighborhoods exhibited extraordinarily high rates of lead toxicity compared with white neighborhoods, in some cases with prevalence rates topping 90% of the child population. The racial ecology of what we called ‘toxic inequality’ is partially attributable to socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and education, and to housing-related factors, such as unit age, vacancy, and dilapidation. However, controlling for these factors, neighborhood lead poisoning remains closely linked to racial and ethnic segregation. Lead toxicity is a pathway through which racial inequality literally gets into the body and transmits social disadvantage over the life course.

Intergenerational mobility

How far America in 2018 has progressed from the America in which Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for equality?

Intergenerational racial inequality in mobility remains stubbornly low. Black children born to parentsin the bottom household income quintile have a 2.5% chance of rising to the top quintile of household income, compared with 10.6% for whites. American Indian and black children also have much higher rates of downward mobility than other groups.

Urban mobility and higher-order inequality

Sampson and his collaborators leveraged fine-grained dynamic data on the everyday movement of residents by applying machine learning techniques to over 650 million geocoded Twitter messages. They estimated the home locations and travel to neighborhoods throughout a city’s entire commuting zone of almost 400,000 residents of America’s 50 largest cities over 18 months.

Their findings show surprisingly high consistency across neighborhoods of different race and income characteristics in the average travel distances and the numbers of unique neighborhoods visited in the metropolitan region. However, they uncove rednotable differences in the race and class composition of neighborhoods visited. More specifically, residents of primarily black and Hispanic neighborhoods –whether poor or not – are far less exposed to either non-poor or white middle-class neighborhoods than residents of primarily white neighborhoods. Racial segregation thus manifests itself not only where people live, but also where they travel throughout a city and to whom they are exposed by visits from others. Although the USA is becoming increasingly diverse, interactions across race and class groups that ultimately contribute to societal integration are apparently not taking place.

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