This article provides a comprehensive review of research on the effects of neighborhood residence on child and adolescent well-being. The first section reviews key methodological issues. The following section considers links between neighborhood characteristics and child outcomes and suggests the importance of high socioeconomic status (SES) for achievement and low SES and residential instabili...

Residential segregation, by definition, leads to racial and socioeconomic disparities in neighborhood conditions. These disparities may in turn produce inequality in social and economic opportunities and outcomes. Because racial and socioeconomic segregation are not independent of each other, however, any analysis of their causes, patterns, and effects must rest on an understanding of the joint...

Written by a former mayor of Seattle, this Article describes the “smart growth” movement as a way to sustain the livability of large urban centers in the twenty-first strategy. It describes some of the problems facing urban areas experiencing population growth, namely traffic, rising housing prices and a scarcity of open space. The ”smart growth” movement seeks to address these problems in a co...

The idea of using law to change the built environment in ways that reduce opportunities to commit crimes has a long history. Unfortunately, this idea has received relatively little attention in the legal academy and only limited rigorous empirical scrutiny. In this Article, we review the considerable literature on the relationship between zoning, the built environment, and crime. We then report...

I am pleased to have the chance to respond to David Imbroscio’s critique of urban policy. He gives the readers of the Journal of Urban Affairs a chance to think about the significance of communities we often devalue and the potential costs of urban policy that favors residential mobility—specifically extra-urban “moves to opportunity.” To be clear, however, he does this by implying a futuristic...

Objectives. This study examines which of five neighborhood conditions help account for racial differences in social networks. Methods. The data set is the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey, a survey of blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans clustered in Chicago Census tracts, matched to 1990 Census data. I estimate HGLM models predicting five indicators of social isolation and five indi...

BACKGROUND Sufficient sleep is needed for the healthy development of youth. However, only a small minority of adolescents obtain adequate amounts of sleep. Although individual-level correlates of sleep have been identified, studies investigating the influence of the environment on sleep are warranted. METHODS By using cross-sectional data collected from 1878 urban adolescents living in 38 nei...

OBJECTIVE Ebola media coverage directed public attention to potential disease carriers: residents or travelers from West Africa. We investigated the role of neighborhood population factors (i.e., the concentration of West African foreigners, non-West African foreigners, non-Hispanic Blacks) on individual responses to the Ebola outbreak in the United States. The role of these community-level fac...

This article develops a method to estimate the impact of change in a particular social setting, the residential neighborhood, that is designed to address nonrandom selection into a neighborhood and nonrandom selection out of a neighborhood. Utilizing matching to confront selection into neighborhood environments and instrumental variables to confront selection out of changing neighborhoods, the ...