Neighborhood Déjà Vu: Classification in Metropolitan Cleveland, 1970-2000

Abstract

The classification of 40 years of neighborhood data for the Cleveland, OH, region reveals five types of neighborhoods—Struggling, Struggling African American, Stability, New Starts, and Suburbia. The way in which these neighborhoods appear, disappear, and reappear in different locations throughout the region and throughout the study period gives rise to the term neighborhood déjà vu. It aptly describes how a changing neighborhood may seem to transition to something entirely different, but in reality is simply becoming another established type of neighborhood. Cluster analysis acts upon demographic, economic, and housing data for census tracts from 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 to identify these neighborhood types. What makes this analysis unique is that the clustering procedure operates on each tract in each of the census years. Thus, each neighborhood is treated as four individual observations: one for each of the census years. By defining each variable relative to its census year mean, the data are comparable across census years, allowing for neighborhoods of one time period to cluster with neighborhoods from another time period. Thus, the five neighborhood types are spread not only throughout the region, but also throughout the study period. This yields the ability to trace through time and space the rise (or fall) or concentration (or diffusion) of any of the resulting neighborhoods. Of particular concern is that spatially, traditional Suburbia neighborhoods are migrating farther and farther from the urban core, and that numerically, they are disappearing from the region altogether—as of 2000, only 55% of 1970's Suburbia neighborhoods remained.