Staying Put in Depopulated Neighborhoods: Evidence from a Mixed Methods Study

Abstract

Sociologists have long considered how urban population change affects the social life of communities. From nineteenth-century theorists to contemporary neighborhood effects researchers, scholars have explored the causes and consequences of population change and have revisited the question of how changing population dynamics influence the lives of residents. While reflections about rapid urban population growth emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in recent years, urban depopulation has become an increasing concern of researchers and policymakers. Shrinking U.S. cities like Detroit, Flint, and Cleveland have gained academic, political, and journalistic attention for their fiscal and infrastructural challenges, raising awareness about the various hardships that shrinking cities face. Recent evidence suggests that the number of shrinking cities and rural locations throughout the United States will continue to grow, prompting researchers to consider how depopulation affects the lives of residents who remain.

A long history of community-level studies has explored how living in certain types of places affects the lives of residents. Thirty years ago, William Julius Wilson posited that residing in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty shapes the social processes within neighborhoods and affects the lives of individuals who live in them. Since Wilson presented his hypothesis 30 years ago, researchers have examined what impact, if any, neighborhoods have on residents, and more specifically whether living in a high-poverty neighborhood has an independent impact on residents’ long-term well-being over and above individual-level factors. In these studies of neighborhood effects, researchers have examined a number of neighborhood-level predictors, including concentrated poverty, neighborhood racial and ethnic composition, density, vacancy, the built environment, and crime. However, to date, little attention has been devoted to how neighborhood depopulation affects the lives of residents. In this dissertation, I seek to fill this gap by examining neighborhood depopulation at both a local and national level.

In the following chapters, I examine the social dynamics of depopulated communities and consider how living in such places shapes the residential mobility decisions, social practices, safety strategies, and physical well-being of residents. I draw on qualitative interviews with residents from two depopulated neighborhoods in Detroit to examine why current residents have remained in their depopulated neighborhoods, how they negotiate relationships with their neighbors, and how they manage threats to their safety. I find that residents present multilayered narratives for remaining in their neighborhoods, which include social ties, a desire “to be stable”, and sentiments about their neighborhoods. I also find that neighboring practices of residents vary by residents’ opportunities to socialize with one another and by their perceptions of risk associated with their immediate residential environments. In addition to qualitative interviews, I use national survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the relationship between exposure to depopulated neighborhoods and health outcomes. In line with previous research, I find that residence in high-poverty neighborhoods is associated with obesity and worse self-rated health. I also find that neighborhood poverty is a stronger predictor of health outcomes than neighborhood depopulation. Building on literature from urban sociology, the chapters of this dissertation present a complex portrait of neighborhood depopulation that is often inextricably linked with the struggles endemic to high-poverty neighborhoods.