Is it all in the eye of the beholder? Benefits of living in mixed-income neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Scholarly attention to mixed-income neighborhoods has come predominantly from studying the effects of federally funded housing policies, such as Empowerment Zone programs and the HOPE VI Urban Demonstration program, which was replaced by the Choice Neighborhoods program. These programs operate on the assumption that economic integration is beneficial to lower income residents. We believe that it is important to learn more about the already existing mixed-income neighborhoods, for which empirical evidence is lacking. We address 2 research questions: Do mixed-income neighborhoods create a beneficial context? Have mixed-income neighborhoods fared better during the mortgage foreclosure crisis? Applying 2 independent empirical criteria in identifying mixed-income neighborhoods, we find that these communities do create a more advantageous context compared to lower income communities and less advantageous context compared to higher income communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Vesselinov

Elena Vesselinov is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is an urban sociologist with research interests in the areas of social and spatial inequality, residential segregation, housing inequality and policy, environmental justice, and comparative urbanization. Her research has appeared in many peer-reviewed journals, such as Urban Studies, the Journal of Urban Affairs, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and others. Elena’s research has been supported by internal and external funding from sources like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Soros Foundation. She was recognized twice for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement by the City University of New York, serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Affairs, and is an elected Council Member of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Mary Clare Lennon

Mary Clare Lennon is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her current research focuses on issues related to housing, mobility, and neighborhoods. Her most recent project, funded by the NSF, investigates the impact of shared-equity homeownership on residents’ life trajectories. She is also working with colleagues in the UK on a comparative study of childhood residential mobility and is Visiting Professor at University College London’s Institute of Education.

Renaud Le Goix

Renaud Le Goix is a Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the University Paris–Diderot (Paris 7), affiliated with UMR Géographie-cités CNRS joint research unit. His research focuses on metropolitan areas and real estate markets in France and in the United States analyzing the interactions between property values, segregation patterns, and ordinary financialization, with a focus on relationships between developers, property owners’ associations, and local government bodies, with papers with co-author Elena Vesselinov in Urban Studies (2015) and IJURR (2013). His recent book (Sur le front, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016) uncovers the spatial dynamics of suburban markets and segregation patterns in the Los Angeles area. His most recent work focus on the spatial dynamics and inequalities in housing markets, analyzing sellers and buyers and mortgages in the Paris region, funded by the ANR Dynamite Project.