A longstanding tradition of research linking neighborhood disadvantage to higher rates of violence is based on the characteristics of where people reside. This Essay argues that we need to look beyond residential neighborhoods to consider flows of movement throughout the wider metropolis. Our basic premise is that a neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but also on the conditions of neighborhoods that its residents visit and are visited by—connections that form through networks of everyday urban mobility. Based on the analysis of large-scale urban-mobility data, we find that while residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods in Chicago travel far and wide, their relative isolation by race and class persists. Among large U.S. cities, Chicago’s level of racially segregated mobility is the second highest. Consistent with our major premise, we further show that mobility-based socioeconomic disadvantage predicts rates of violence in Chicago’s neighborhoods beyond their residence-based disadvantage and other neighborhood characteristics, including during recent years that witnessed surges in violence and other broad social changes. Racial disparities in mobility-based disadvantage are pronounced—more so than residential neighborhood disadvantage. We discuss implications of these findings for theories of neighborhood effects on crime and criminal justice contact, collective efficacy, and racial inequality.
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Triple Disadvantage: Neighborhood Networks of Everyday Urban Mobility and Violence in U.S. Cities
This article develops and assesses the concept of triple neighborhood disadvantage. We argue that a neighborhood’s well-being depends not only on its own socioeconomic conditions but also on the conditions of neighborhoods its residents visit and are visited by, connections that form through networks of everyday urban mobility. We construct measures of mobility-based disadvantage using geocoded patterns of movement estimated from hundreds of millions of tweets sent by nearly 400,000 Twitter users over 18 months. Analyzing nearly 32,000 neighborhoods and 9,700 homicides in 37 of the largest U.S. cities, we show that neighborhood triple disadvantage independently predicts homicides, adjusting for traditional neighborhood correlates of violence, spatial proximity to disadvantage, prior homicides, and city fixed effects. Not only is triple disadvantage a stronger predictor than traditional measures, it accounts for a sizable portion of the association between residential neighborhood disadvantage and homicides. In turn, potential mechanisms such as neighborhood drug activity, interpersonal friction, and gun crime prevalence account for much of the association between triple disadvantage and homicides. These findings implicate structural mobility patterns as an important source of triple (dis)advantage for neighborhoods and have implications for a broad range of phenomena beyond crime, including community capacity, gentrification, transmission in a pandemic, and racial inequality.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1735505
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10292722
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Sociological Review
- Volume:
- 85
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0003-1224
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 925 to 956
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Objective Our goal was to illuminate associations between specific characteristics of under‐resourced neighborhoods (i.e., socioeconomic deprivation, danger) and specific aspects of parenting (e.g., parental praise, parental nurturance, harsh parenting, and parental control).
Background Prior work has highlighted associations between level of neighborhood disadvantage and the parenting of its residents. However, this work has yet to clarify the specific characteristics of the neighborhood or the types of parenting involved.
Method Exhaustive modeling analyses were conducted in a sample of 1030 families of twins (average age 8 years; 51% male, 49% female; the racial composition was 82% White, 10% Black, 1% Asian, 1% Indigenous, 6% multiracial) from the Twin Study of Behavioral and Emotional Development in Children. Neighborhood and parenting were assessed using multiple informants and assessment strategies (neighborhood informants, family informants, administrative data, and videotaped parent–child interactions).
Results Neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation (i.e., limited institutional and economic structural resources) demonstrated small but consistent negative associations with positive parenting behaviors and maternal control, but not with negative parenting behaviors. Neighborhood danger (i.e., recorded crime, fear of crime, exposure to community violence), by contrast, demonstrated weaker associations with parenting that dissipated once we controlled for overlap with socioeconomic deprivation.
Conclusion Danger and socioeconomic deprivation do not function as interchangeable characteristics of under‐resourced neighborhoods, at least in terms of their association with positive parenting. Future studies should identify the specific mechanisms through which neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation is associated with less nurturing parenting.
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Stark ethno-racial differences in reported neighborhood crime are a major facet of contemporary U.S. inequality. However, the most generalizable research on neighborhood inequality in crime across cities is only for 2000. Many of the underpinnings of crime have changed since 2000—increases in socioeconomic segregation, the Great Recession and attendant housing crisis, the continuation of the crime decline, shifting trends in incarceration and other types of social control, and small decreases in racial residential segregation. We provide a much-needed assessment of whether ethno-racial reported neighborhood crime disparities have increased, remained stable, or decreased in the contemporary period. We invoke a racial structural perspective that traces ethno-racial disparities in neighborhood crime to the divergent community conditions emblematic of the U.S. racial hierarchy. Using newly collected data for 8,557 neighborhoods in 71 large U.S. cities for 2010–2013, we demonstrate that violent and property crime is lower in White, African American, Latino, minority, and multiethnic neighborhoods than in 2000. However, smaller relative decreases in African American neighborhoods widened the relative crime gap from other ethno-racial communities. Supporting the racial structural perspective, large ethno-racial inequalities in neighborhood well-being account for most of the crime gaps, with disadvantage and residential lending being most important. This suggests that non-White neighborhoods need economic investments to reduce the harmful and inequitable consequences of neighborhood crime.
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Abstract In
Illinois vs.Wardlow (2000), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presence in a “high‐crime” area is one factor that police can consider when establishing reasonable suspicion to justify a Terry stop. Some legal scholars argue that through this decision the Court propagated inequity in police stops by setting a lower evidentiary standard for establishing reasonable suspicion in neighborhoods with greater numbers Black residents, which are more likely than White neighborhoods to be considered crime hot spots. To assess these claims, I analyze pedestrian stop data from the Chicago Police Department for the years 2016 and 2017. Using spatial regression techniques, I evaluate relationships between neighborhood measures of Black disadvantage, police stop justifications, and “hit rates” of stops. The results suggest that reasonable suspicion is uniquely constructed in disadvantaged Black neighborhoods but that this does not result in significantly different enforcement rates. Based on these results, I argue that policing scholars must reconsider sources of inequity in policing and, in particular, consider the role of the law in shaping these outcomes. -
null (Ed.)Research on crime and neighborhood racial composition establishes that Black neighborhoods with high levels of violent crime will experience an increase in Black residents and concentrated disadvantage—due to the constrained housing choices Black people face. Some studies on the relationship between gentrification and crime, however, show that high-crime neighborhoods can experience reinvestment as well as displacement of Black residents. In Washington, DC, we have seen both trends—concentration of poverty and segregation as well as racial turnover and reinvestment. We employ a spatial analysis using a merged data set including crime data, Census data, and American Community Survey (ACS) data to analyze the relationship between crime and neighborhood change at the Census tract level. Our findings demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between periods of neighborhood decline and ascent, between the effects of property and violent crime, and between racial change and socioeconomic change.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122420972323
