2007
Abstract:
Urban economics and sociology offer many narratives to explain the evolution of
urban America since the Second World War. These stories include the rise and fall of
segregation, the inexorable march of the middle class to the suburbs, the ¯ltering of
aging housing stock from one class to the next, deindustrialization and the accompa-
nying loss of jobs for blue-collar workers, \tipping" models, and others. Where there
may be empirical support for their existence in some aggregate sense, their ability to
explain the evolution of urban areas appears to be greatly enhanced through their
interaction along several of the dimensions by which neighborhoods are de¯ned. We
argue that the post-War metropolis is a highly dynamic environment in which waves
of people move through places with their own dynamic. We ask: how do places and
people interact? We work systematically with three dimensions of census tract data
from Los Angeles County over a 60-year sample period { race/ethnicity, human capi-
tal, and ground rent. Our initial ¯ndings show the great importance of understanding
neighborhood characteristics in the metropolitan and historical contexts. And while
we use census tract data like most other urban social scientists, we argue that the true
object of inquiry is the neighborhood. Neighborhoods, like census tracts, never change
location. But neighborhood types do change locations in various times, and we have
to make a clear distinction between the neighborhoods (unique, immobile) and the
types (general, mobile). Using case studies of segregation and tipping, we find that the
received wisdom about both can be significantly augmented by our approach.
