Neighborhood selection in large cities - how does selective mobility create neighborhood outcomes?

Bill Clark

University of California, Los Angeles

Neighborhoods and communities are seen as central to the organization of our cities, and to our lives within them. Indeed we are often defined by where we live and marketing groups are adept at using demographic characteristics of particular areas to sell goods and services. Clearly, our cities are divided by socio-economic status and that division is summarized in neighborhood variation. A question which is now central to understanding the evolution of our cities is whether change in neighborhoods is driven more by internal change - changes to the households and families in the neighborhood, or as a result of differential movements into and out of the neighborhood. The current presentation reviews the literature on neighborhood effects to outline the contextual references on neighborhoods, and then uses data from detailed surveys in New Zealand and the US, to examine the impacts of different movements across neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, the changes in neighborhoods are driven by complex cross currents including internal residential change and differential mobility. Clearly, however, the marginal inability of some households to escape very poor neighborhoods has long term affects on both the neighborhoods and the families who are marginalized within those neighborhoods.