mike bader

Methodological concerns regarding the identification of neighborhood causal effects dominates research on neighborhood spatial health inequality. I contend that the myopic focus on these methodological concerns curtails the theoretical development into the nature of spatial health inequality by attempting to control away, rather than provide an account of, the process of residential mobility that differentially sorts residents by their health risk. Place-based stigma reflect schemas that residents use to evaluate communities that can structure the residential mobility process that contribute to the structuring of spatial health inequality. In this paper, I use unique data from the 2004-5 Chicago Area Study that links individual-level health status with residential preferences for actual communities in a major city to study patterns of residential preferences. Combining these data with health assessments from residents already living in the queried communities using the 2002 Chicago Community Adult Health Study, I examine how much health composition of current residents influences health preferences.I argue population-level avoidance from stigmatized places marked by unhealthy and racial composition rather than individual-level selection structure spatial health inequality.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. Politicians and city boosters extol the virtues of city neighborhoods for providing unique identities to the places where ordinary Chicagoans live their everyday lives, giving a collective sense of belonging as they go about their daily and mundane tasks. And leaders highlight the uniqueness of the city’s neighborhoods and the diversity of experiences one can get by traveling across them. While the mayor and city boosters extol the virtues of the metropolis’ neighborhoods, what they don’t highlight is how little diversity there often is within each of the neighborhoods that make up the city and its surrounding suburbs. Of course, the neighborhoods of Chicago make up only a small part of the communities in the metropolitan area—there are the hundreds of other communities that surround the city that also shape the daily experiences of residents and the lack of diversity within neighborhood becomes even more pronounced in the city’s expanding suburban ring. Chicago has been, and continues to be, one of the most segregated cities within one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country. While one might experience substantial diversity across the neighborhoods and communities in the metropolitan area, it is still true that most residents have neighbors that look very much like themselves. How does this pronounced pattern of segregation come about in the great diversity that exists within the city’s metropolitan population?

In this chapter, we step outside the traditional theoretical traditions related to the causes of residential segregation (economics, preferences, and discrimination) and provide unique insights into the perceptions that residents hold about actual communities and neighborhoods in their metropolis. We view these perceptions as a critical but often-ignored component of the residential sorting process that ultimately either translates into persistent segregation or offers the potential for integration. Drawing on the 2004-2005 Chicago Area Study, a face-to-face area probability survey of just about equal numbers of white (n=278), black (n=233), and Latino (n=232) residents of Cook County, Illinois, we first ask: Where do residents from the Chicago metropolitan area search for housing? In answering this question, we do not speak of abstract ideal types of communities, but ask about 41 different—real—communities. In addition, we explore how the race and ethnicity of the residents searching affects the communities in which they search? After doing so, we then ask where do those same residents would avoid looking to live? Although the two questions may appear to be the flip sides of the same coin, we find that patterns of neighborhood avoidance differ from patterns of neighborhood attraction in ways that help researchers understand how residential mobility and community perceptions perpetuate racial segregation in the city’s neighborhoods. Our results reveal a profoundly racialized character of community reputations that belies the ‘diversity rhetoric’ that public officials embrace and extol to visitors and residents alike.

An overlooked aspect in our understanding of contextual effects on health is the role of spatial sorting through the residential mobility process. I argue that the process of residential sorting that occurs through residential mobility should be investigated as a site of understanding the causes of health disparities. While residential sorting is often used to critique studies finding associations between neighborhood conditions and individual health outcomes, the argument is frequently advanced that we should "control for" sorting. By simply looking to control for residential sorting rather than seeking to explain the role of inequalities in the residential sorting process on the exposure to risks and clustering of outcomes, researchers and policy makers might overlook important aspects regarding the perpetuation of health disparities. For example, aggregate residential mobility patterns could influence where firms locate health-promoting commercial investments like supermarkets. I present preliminary findings that provide avenues to begin exploring how health status is linked to residential preferences and economic and racial disparities that could perpetuate health inequality.

Presented as the keynote address to the Alpha Kappa Delta honorees at the annual Sociology Day events at American University, I discuss the continued role that race plays in the geographic landscape of American cities. Moving from Detroit, to Washington, D.C., and ending up in Chicago I present various aspects of my work that show the continued importance of racial residential segregation on racial disparities, the role of race in the formation of residential preferences, and the emerging intersection of race and class in these processes.

Adolescent obesity is a pressing public health concern. We used data from approximately 142,000 high school students in New York City Public Schools to investigate individual and school-level factors that might contribute to prevalence and disparities in obesity and overweight. Existing research examines the role of social and physical context on obesity in general, and adolescent obesity in particular; however, these studies tend to study an adolescent's residential neighborhood. We extend this research by investigating school composition effects and the environment surrounding schools that could contribute to overall prevalence and disparities in overweight and obesity among urban high school students. We examine school compositional effects of race, percent of students qualifying for a free or reduced price lunch, and foreign born status, as well as characteristics of the built environment surrounding schools, such as the availability of bodegas or corner stores, fast food establishments, and the "walkability" of the neighborhood.

Racial residential and school segregation both reflect a legacy of American racial subjugation; however, their persistence continues to lead to racial disparities in education, health, and employment. Despite the importance of this topic, little research examines how residents go about making decisions that influence this process and that which does tends to focus on only one of residential or school choice. In this paper, we use a mixture of demographic and qualitative approaches to examine the interracial differences in age composition in racially integrated, urban neighborhoods. Our demographic analyses reveal stark interracial differences in age composition that suggest age-dependent mobility among whites in these neighborhoods. In-depth interviews with white, upper middle-class parents in the racially integrated neighborhoods reveal the dramatic influence of racial and economic composition of schools on the formation of residential preferences and intentions to move, despite wanting to cultivate cultural capital in their children through exposure to diverse settings. Writ large, we argue that these patterns lead to ``cycles of denial'' or re-segregation of prestigious elementary schools that do little to promote residential or school integration.

With the growth of research investigating the role of neighborhood effects on health, there is a growing need to develop methods of measuring neighborhood exposures in a systematic and reproducible manner. This paper examines the two most common methods of obtaining independent measures of neighborhood environments, systematic neighborhood audits and georeferenced data. We discuss the advantages of each and suggest reporting standards that. These standards can guide researchers in the collection and use of neighborhood data that will, we argue, improve the rigor of neighborhood data collection methods.

Sociological research identifies racial segregation as a primary factor that perpetuates racial inequality. The continued influence of racial segregation depends on the patterns of neighborhood racial and ethnic change that evolve in the present multicultural, post-Civil Rights era. I argue that exploring the pace of neighborhood change and the places where change occurs links individual-level processes to metropolitan level changes in racial and ethnic segregation. To study the pace and place of emerging types of neighborhood change, I present novel graphical and statistical methods --~ternary plots and growth mixture models~-- that allow me to reduce the complexity of measuring continuous levels of long-term change in composition among multiple groups. Using the Chicago metropolitan area as a case-study, I show that the pace of neighborhood change slows considerably after the 1970s and that contemporary patterns of neighborhood change evolve over multiple decades with specific spatial patterns. Uncovering the location of change in time and space explains the evolution of racial and ethnic segregation through black diffusion from traditionally black neighborhoods, Latino dispersion to new suburban enclaves, and white divergence into gentrifying areas and the distant suburbs.

Sociological research identifies racial segregation as a primary factor that perpetuates racial inequality. The continued influence of racial segregation depends on the patterns of neighborhood racial and ethnic change that evolve in the present multicultural, post-Civil Rights era. I argue that exploring the pace of neighborhood change and the places where change occurs links individual-level processes to metropolitan level changes in racial and ethnic segregation. To study the pace and place of emerging types of neighborhood change, I present novel graphical and statistical methods --~ternary plots and growth mixture models~-- that allow me to reduce the complexity of measuring continuous levels of long-term change in composition among multiple groups. Using the Chicago metropolitan area as a case-study, I show that the pace of neighborhood change slows considerably after the 1970s and that contemporary patterns of neighborhood change evolve over multiple decades with specific spatial patterns. Uncovering the location of change in time and space explains the evolution of racial and ethnic segregation through black diffusion from traditionally black neighborhoods, Latino dispersion to new suburban enclaves, and white divergence into gentrifying areas and the distant suburbs.

The HOPE VI legislation aimed to replace “severely distressed” public housing with lower-density, mixed-income developments; it was conceived as a policy solution to the spatial concentration of poverty. While the policy’s aim was to reduce racial and economic segregation by facilitating relocation from extremely poor neighborhoods, evidence suggests that many residents eventually moved back to their former neighborhoods, or to neighborhoods as poor and segregated. In this paper, we argue that HOPE VI’s limited success stems in large part from the policy’s failure to account for the social organization of public housing residents, who were connected through networks of resource exchange relationships. Using the first full census of public housing residents–including leaseholders, non-leaseholders, and squatters–from three Chicago Housing Authority buildings demolished as part of HOPE VI, we examine how residents’ social organization has affected their geographic mobility over time. We trace where residents have lived, and with whom they have lived, over the decade since their buildings were demolished. We map these relocation patterns, including the number of moves per individual, their exact addresses, their concentration in different Chicago neighborhoods, and the degree of spatial dispersion of the population and subgroups over time. Finally, we investigate the degree to which social relationships, economic ties, and attachment to place affect where they live.

Racial residential segregation is a persistent phenomenon that has been shown to be associated with racial disparities in ehalth in most American metropolitan areas, leading some to propose that racial segregation is a “fundamental cause” of racial health disparities in the United States. To date, research has largely focused on the association between health outcomes and existing racial segregation, but in this project I am exploring how the ongoing process of residential sorting – how people of different races and ethnicities end up living in different neighborhoods – contributes to racial disparities in health. This project uses a variety of methods –experimental design, agent-based models, and qualitative interviews – to examine how people are sorted into the neighborhoods in which they live and how that process might disproportionately affect racial minorities. Three specific mechanisms are considered. First, racial/ethnic minorities might be clustered in the unhealthiest neighborhoods because of economic differences between different racial groups. Second, racially/ethnically-biased residential preferences, particularly among whites, depress the quality of predominantly minority neighborhoods by limiting residential demand. Third, past segregation leads residents of different races/ethnicities, again particularly whites, to know less about or hold misperceptions of neighborhoods where they would be in the minority such that they are less likely to consider those neighborhoods.

The Street View project assesses the feasibility, reliability, and validity of using new technology, freely available online via Google, to measure neighborhood physical disorder and built environment features at a fraction of the cost of field studies. In this paper, we compare the psychometric properties and predictive power of physical disorder subscales that can be captured via Google technology to original physical disorder scales, previously used in analyses of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study (LA FANS) and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Ascertaining the value of Street View-able subscales of physical disorder inventories will establish the potential for Google Street View to replace field studies as a way of contextualizing survey data, at a fraction of the cost of sending people into the field.

Definitions used in studies of neighborhood effects tend to be data driven and although more theoretically-driven definitions have been proposed, little empirical work uses alternative conceptualizations of neighborhood boundaries. This paper examines the effects of neighborhood sociodemographic composition and signs of disorder on residents’ reports of fear using different neighborhood definitions. We compare more commonly used definitions, those based on census boundaries, with distance-based definitions and vary the size of the boundary. We find stronger effects of sociodemographic composition when neighborhoods include larger areas, suggesting that residents’ fear is more strongly influenced by sociodemographic characteristics of the macroenvironment. In contrast, we find weaker effects of disorder with increasing neighborhood size, indicating that localized disorder is more consequential for fear. Although the relationships between neighborhood characteristics and fear are essentially unchanged across neighborhood definitions, the strength of the relationship varies with neighborhood size and the direction depends on the neighborhood process.

Although the process of racial transition or “white flight” was clearly articulated in the work of sociologists following World War II, emerging types of neighborhood change driven by gentrification and immigration challenge the idea that there is a single trajectory of racial and ethnic composition that neighborhoods follow. This paper uses growth mixture models and a dataset of tracts in the greater Chicago metropolitan area that were normalized to their 2000 census tract boundaries to empirically identify patterns of change in neighborhood racial and ethnic composition from 1970 to 2000. The model identifies nine types — or trajectories — of neighborhood racial and ethnic change. These trajectories indicate that racial succession from white to black neighborhoods still occurs, albeit much more slowly in later decades compared to earlier ones, and that Latino growth follows a number of trajectories, including displacement from gentrifying neighborhoods.

Background: Numerous community audit tools (CAT) for measuring neighborhood infrastructure supporting walking and physical activity are available through Active Living Research. This approach, which involves sending auditors into neighborhoods to collect data on the presence or absence of physical features, is similar to methods known as Systematic Social Observation (SSO) which were developed in sociology for measuring neighborhood social and physical disorder. The primary disadvantages to using CAT/SSO approaches are the time and expense of data collection, which usually limit their use to small, geographically-circumscribed study areas. Additionally, there can be concerns about the safety of the street auditors requiring auditors to perform the field work in pairs.

As a way to surmount these limitations we propose that the geo-spatial products, Street View and Earth, developed by Google, Inc., can be used as a platform for implementing CAT/SSO protocols. We propose that these technologies can be used to “virtually” send observers to neighborhoods to implement observational audits of neighborhood characteristics. Google Street View and Earth are components of Google Maps (maps.google.com). Street View is a library of images captured by cars driven down the streets of major urban areas in the United States. The images have been processed to allow users to see panoramic street-level views of city streets, pan 360 degrees, rotate the camera vertically 290 degrees, and zoom in and out. Street View allows the user to navigate forward or backward in streets, as if driving. Google Earth is an online resource of hi-resolution aerial images taken by satellite or airplane.

Objectives: Evaluate whether Google Street View and Earth can be used to implement CAT.

Methods: In the summer of 2007 we physically audited 76 block faces from 38 street segments in New York City with an inventory of environmental features related to neighborhood walkability, safety and aesthetics. In the summer of 2008 we used Google Street View and Earth to virtually return to these street segments and implemented the same inventory. The goal of this initial trial was to identify items from the inventory that could be viewed via Street View and for which it would be worth developing and testing Street View based measurement protocols. In the summer of 2009 five auditors returned to these street segments both physically and via Street View and implemented the Pedestrian Environment Data Scan (PEDS), a CAT used to measure pedestrian infrastructure.

Results: Of the 76 block faces visited by the original field team, 74 were available in Street View. The initial viewing of these block faces showed that Street View could be used to collect data on some indicators of physical disorder, on large, static elements of urban design, and on many elements of pedestrian and traffic infrastructure. Street View could not be used to collect data on small items on the sidewalk such as discarded drug paraphernalia, bottles, and cigarette butts, which have been used as markers of disorder in prior studies. Street View was also of little use for identifying age, gender, or social behavior of pedestrians. Google Earth did not prove useful in visualizing audit elements not otherwise visible via Street View. This work suggested that audit tools for measuring neighborhood walkability could be validly implemented via Street View.

Based on this experience, in the summer of 2009 we developed a Street View based implementation of the PEDS. Thus far, five auditors have each implemented the PEDS on the 74 block faces. Cronbach’s alpha scores across raters ranged from 0.21 to 0.96 for the PEDS items. PEDS items with low alpha scores include; the presence of road oriented lighting (0.21), of obstacles that fully impede walking (0.26), of newspaper stands (0.27) and of people standing or walking (0.43). Items with high agreement include, the presence of trees (0.96), of bike route signs (0.95), of bus stops (0.89), of garbage cans (0.88) and of commercial land uses (0.85). Further statistical analyses of inter-rater reliability will be presented at the conference. The physical implementation of the PEDS is ongoing and analyses comparing the PEDS data from the physical and virtual implementation will be presented, as will comparisons of time and salary costs of the two implementations.

Conclusions: Google Street View appears to be an effective platform for implementing CAT and SSO methodologies to collect data on some neighborhood characteristics. The approach is best for collecting data on large, more temporarily static characteristics of neighborhoods. Street View cannot resolve small items on the sidewalk commonly included in physical disorder SSO tools. Street View is an effective tool for implementing the PEDS measures of neighborhood walkability.

Support: An ARRA Supplement Providing Summer Research Experiences for Students and Science Educators for NIEHS grant 5R01ES014229.

Racial and economic segregation are persistent problems across American cities, though both have declined in recent decades. One possible reason that levels of racial and economic segregation are declining is the redevelopment and gentrification occurring in many American cities. Redevelopment and gentrification have begun to blur the stark boundaries between central cities and surrounding suburbs along which segregation was long-maintained. Little is known, however, about what makes urban neighborhoods popular and the potential for their popularity to create more integrated metropolitan areas. This paper begins to fill the void by examining who would consider living in Chicago neighborhoods among a sample of metropolitan residents. Based on the evaluations of 16 Chicago communities by 756 respondents and an extensive array of community characteristics, I investigate what attributes of urban neighborhoods metropolitan residents find attractive. I also explore whether these preferences present the possibility for greater racial and economic integration.