TY - JOUR
T1 - The presence of organizational resources in poor urban neighborhoods
T2 - An analysis of average and contextual effects
AU - Small, Mario Luis
AU - McDermott, Monica
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Paul DiMaggio, Mitchell Duneier, Scott Lynch, Noah Mark, Susan Olzak, German Rodriguez, the summer workshop of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the editor and reviewers of Social Forces for comments or conversations that have improved this manuscript. Judith Miller read the manuscript and caught many errors. We thank Wangyal Shawa of the Princeton University Geosciences and Map Library for his assistance with GIS software. Support was provided by a faculty research grant from Princeton University. Direct correspondence to Mario L. Small, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544. E-mail: msmall@princeton.edu.
PY - 2006/3
Y1 - 2006/3
N2 - Wilson (1987) and others argue that poor neighborhoods lack important organizational resources the middle class takes for granted, such as childcare centers, grocery stores and pharmacies. However, this approach does not distinguish poor neighborhoods from segregated neighborhoods, ignores immigration and neglects city differences. Using Department of Commerce and 2000 Census data for zip codes in 331 MSA/PMSAs, we estimate HGLM models predicting the number of each of 10 organizational resources. We find that, (1) on average, as the poverty rate of a neighborhood increases, the number of establishments increases slightly; (2) as the proportion of blacks increases, the number of establishments decreases; (3) as the proportion of foreign-born increases, so does the number of establishments. Finally (4), metropolitan context matters: poor neighborhoods have more establishments in cities with low poverty rates, and in cities in the South and West, than in other parts of the country. Findings suggest reevaluating the de-institutionalized ghetto perspective as a theory of the effects of black segregation and depopulation, rather than poverty concentration, and approaching neighborhood poverty from a conditional perspective.
AB - Wilson (1987) and others argue that poor neighborhoods lack important organizational resources the middle class takes for granted, such as childcare centers, grocery stores and pharmacies. However, this approach does not distinguish poor neighborhoods from segregated neighborhoods, ignores immigration and neglects city differences. Using Department of Commerce and 2000 Census data for zip codes in 331 MSA/PMSAs, we estimate HGLM models predicting the number of each of 10 organizational resources. We find that, (1) on average, as the poverty rate of a neighborhood increases, the number of establishments increases slightly; (2) as the proportion of blacks increases, the number of establishments decreases; (3) as the proportion of foreign-born increases, so does the number of establishments. Finally (4), metropolitan context matters: poor neighborhoods have more establishments in cities with low poverty rates, and in cities in the South and West, than in other parts of the country. Findings suggest reevaluating the de-institutionalized ghetto perspective as a theory of the effects of black segregation and depopulation, rather than poverty concentration, and approaching neighborhood poverty from a conditional perspective.
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U2 - 10.1353/sof.2006.0067
DO - 10.1353/sof.2006.0067
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33645951682
SN - 0037-7732
VL - 84
SP - 1697
EP - 1724
JO - Social Forces
JF - Social Forces
IS - 3
ER -