mike bader

In the commotion of moving and starting my new job, I neglected to post about two articles that came out last month that I worked on for quite a while. The first, Reassessing Residential Preferences for Redevelopment, was published in City & Community last month in a special issue on gentrification. My paper argues that much of our public policy and debate regarding changing residential preferences for gentrification occurs without actually measuring preferences in the population. Using the 2004-5 Chicago Area Study, I do just that to show that preferences break down along groups defined by home ownership. Home owners in the city of Chicago, regardless of race, are much more likely than their suburban counterparts to consider a redeveloped neighborhood. Meanwhile, race tends to unify preferences among renters in that blacks -- regardless of whether they live in Chicago or suburban Cook County -- would consider redeveloped neighborhood much more than their white renting counterparts, with Latino renters in between. I also find that traditional reasons middle-class people prefer redeveloped neighborhoods touted by gentrification and creative class proponents only really apply among whites while black home owners prefer access to city services and Latinos prioritize access to employment.

To the extent that cities hold developers accountable to mixed-income plans, these results suggest that redevelopment might help integrate communities economically and racially. Of course, this means actually holding developers accountable, which is sometimes difficult to do. Overall, the debate regarding who would prefer to live in redeveloped neighborhoods needs to be more nuanced and not based on where people do live.

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This week I gave two presentations on my work exploring the consequences of neighborhood change for the evolution of contemporary metropolitan racial and ethnic segregation. The first was at the University of Pennsylvania Sociology Colloquium, which focused slightly more on the substantive conclusions, and the second was presented at the Quantitative Methods in the Social Science seminar series at Columbia University and focused more on the methodological components of the work.

I did not publish the slides for these talks because I will likely be giving the talk again (no spoilers!); however, feel free to contact me if you would like more information about them.

The American Prospect has a very interesting article this week by Courtney Martin entitled "Architecture's Diversity Problem" that describes a new building constructed by architect Jeanne Gang in Chicago. The building is constructed to look like undulating waves that echo the waves in Lake Michigan just to the east but reach skyward for 80 stories. Architecturally, the building is very interesting and, though I have to admit I wasn't too keen when I saw the The Prospect's photo photo, is very impressive when seen from a distance for how successfully it creates this illusion from both the form and the materials used. What is more amazing than the quality of Gang's architecture, as Smith points out, is the fact that such a large building was designed by a woman.

The article, highlighting the lack of diversity, recalled my own journey to sociology so it particularly close to home.

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