One goal of the U.S. housing voucher program, as an alternative to public housing subsidies, is to help participants gain access to decent neighborhoods. I find that in a typical implementation of the program, participants in the housing voucher program live in better neighborhoods than public housing residents, but in lower-quality neighborhoods compared to unsubsidized households eligible for...

Researchers are increasingly interested in identifying specific aspects of adolescents' lives that are positively or adversely affected by their place of residence. This body of work suggests that it is important to consider neighborhoods when examining their 1) engagement in risk-related behaviors; 2) educational outcomes; 3) physical and mental health; and 4) their integration within social i...

Ethnographic studies of the black middle class focus attention on the ways in which residential environments condition the experiences of different segments of the black class structure. This study places these arguments in a larger demographic context by providing a national analysis of neighborhood inequality and spatial inequality of different racial and ethnic groups in urban America. The f...

OBJECTIVES We evaluated the spatial accessibility of large "chain" supermarkets in relation to neighborhood racial composition and poverty. METHODS We used a geographic information system to measure Manhattan block distance to the nearest supermarket for 869 neighborhoods (census tracts) in metropolitan Detroit. We constructed moving average spatial regression models to adjust for spatial aut...

Residential segregation has been one of the more frequently studied and controversial research and policy issues for urban researchers and policy makers during the last few decades. residential segregation refers to the concentration or uneven distribution of residents from different socio-economic or racial/ ethnic backgrounds across a city or region. Although research on residential segregati...

BACKGROUND Most heat-related deaths occur in cities, and future trends in global climate change and urbanization may amplify this trend. Understanding how neighborhoods affect heat mortality fills an important gap between studies of individual susceptibility to heat and broadly comparative studies of temperature-mortality relationships in cities. OBJECTIVES We estimated neighborhood effects o...

Over 20 years of scholarship suggests that living in America’s poorest and most dangerous communities diminishes the life course development of children and adults. In the 1990s, the dire conditions of some of these neighborhoods, especially those with large public housing developments, prompted significant policy responses. In addition to the demolition and redevelopment of some of the project...