Spatial and Temporal Contexts of Neighborhood Environments in Metropolitan Chicago.

Abstract

Debates regarding the profound rise of urban poverty renewed interest in the influence of neighborhood environments on the lives of individuals by focusing attention on the structural constraints neighborhood environments impose on residents. This renewed interest has led to the expansion in both volume and diversity of outcomes researchers have examined for associations with neighborhood context. As this research has expanded, however, insufficient attention has been focused on characterizing the nature and specific aspects of neighborhood environments thought to influence individuals. This dissertation expands current understanding of residential contexts by studying three aspects of neighborhood environments in and around Chicago. The first study examines the trajectories of racial and ethnic change in neighborhoods across the Chicago metropolitan area. I find that, on the whole, metropolitan Chicago neighborhoods are becoming more diverse and that there are nine different latent trajectories of racial and ethnic change. Evidence from these trajectories suggest that diverse neighborhoods, those integrated between at least two groups, are more common now and are more likely to be persistently integrated than many were in the 1970s and 1980s. The second study then focuses on redevelopment as a major catalyst to neighborhood change in urban environments and examines the characteristics associated with metropolitan residents that lead them to consider moving to a redeveloped neighborhood in Chicago. The results show different patterns of preferences between homeowners and renters with the formers’ preferences influenced by whether they live in Chicago or a surrounding suburb and the latter’s heavily influenced by the race of the respondent. The final study shifts attention from studying the temporal context of neighborhood environments to studying the spatial context of neighborhood environments. Most studies use administratively defined ecological units to measure neighborhood context that can miss important small-scale variability in residential environments. I adapt methods from environmental sciences to develop spatially-based measures of the residential environment and find that physical disorder affects fear in areas proximate to a resident’s home, but social and economic predictors have larger effects as geographic area increases. I conclude by summarizing the main findings and highlighting implications for future studies of residential contexts.