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Abstract
Talen and Koschinsky demonstrate that Chicago's walkable, dense, mixed-use neighborhoods score poorly on measures of health, accessibility, safety, and social interaction. This comment raises and discusses several questions: How good a frame is ``sustainable'' for describing the urban form the authors measure? What are the connections between ``sustainable urban form'' (SUF) and good outcomes for assisted tenants in Chicago? Do SUF neighborhoods provide better conditions for assisted housing tenants? How does the scale at which we investigate this question influence the answer? More broadly, how do we expect SUF to work for assisted housing tenants and other low-income people? Finally, to what extent is SUF a necessary and sufficient condition for ensuring long-term income diversity through investment in affordable housing? The answers to all these questions are still open, making this is a promising time for more fine grained research supporting efforts to bring greater social justice to the city.
Notes
1Since many Chicago Public School students do not attend neighborhood schools, the importance of proximity to good or bad schools remains a matter for considerable future research.
2Also, Chicago allows parents and guardians to choose their children's schools, complicating the importance of the quality of the neighborhood school.
3Popkin, Levy, and Buron (2009) summarize the research on what happened to people who were relocated, sometimes against their will, because of HOPE VI, in which local housing authorities demolished some of the worst public housing in the US and replaced it with mixed-income developments. Most of the residents reported truly horrific conditions before their relocations from the targeted public housing projects and better conditions afterward, especially those who moved to mixed-income developments and (through housing vouchers) privately owned housing. Those relocated felt freer from violence and drug dealing than those who remained in public housing, markedly improving their perceived quality of life. Hence this study supports the idea that when very low income households move from terrible neighborhoods into developments and neighborhoods with a broader mix of incomes, their lives will improve subjectively. It does not, however, explore the role of urban form in maintaining more income diversity. Turner and Berube (2009) summarize research suggesting that low-income children attain better measured educational outcomes when they study in the same classrooms with middle- and upper-income children. Such diversity is difficult, they contend, in metropolitan contexts where school assignment and choices allow higher-income households to find residential neighborhoods in attendance areas and school districts that low-income children cannot attain. They cite examples of schools in low-income neighborhoods that nonetheless attract households with mixed incomes and recommend a series of measures that HUD and the Department of Education might take to ensure that school reform at the site and district level accompany future developments and redevelopments in low-income neighborhoods. They also suggest, however, further efforts to ensure the construction of more affordable housing in non-poor neighborhoods. Again, there is no support in this paper for claims about urban form. The Charter of the Congress of the New Urbanism (CNU 1999) and The Death and Life of Great American Cities, persuasive and intuitively appealing though they may be, are not based on systematic enough measurement of diversity to tell us enough about what kind of diversity matters, for whom, and at what scales.
4Again, we sidestep the question of whether diversity can change behavior by recalling that many low-income people may be inhibited by their built environment from living as they would prefer.