Urban residential integration is often fleeting-a brief snapshot that belies a complex process of racial turnover in many U.S. cities.White Flight/Black Flighttakes readers inside a neighborhood that ...has shifted rapidly and dramatically in race composition over the last two decades. The book presents a portrait of the life of a working-class neighborhood in the aftermath of white flight, illustrating cultural clashes that accompany racial change as well as common values that transcend race, from the perspectives of three different groups who are living it: white stayers, black pioneers, and "second-wave" blacks. Rachael A. Woldoff offers a fresh look at race and neighborhoods by documenting a two-stage process of neighborhood transition and focusing on the perspectives of two understudied groups: newly arriving black residents and whites who have stayed in the neighborhood. Woldoff describes the period of transition when white residents still remain, though in diminishing numbers, and a second, less discussed stage of racial change: black flight. She reveals what happens after white flight is complete: "Pioneer" blacks flee to other neighborhoods or else adjust to their new segregated residential environment by coping with the loss of relationships with their longer-term white neighbors, signs of community decline, and conflicts with the incoming second wave of black neighbors.
Readers will find several surprising and compelling twists to the white flight story related to positive relations between elderly stayers and the striving pioneers, conflict among black residents, and differences in cultural understandings of what constitutes crime and disorder.
Various studies have hypothesized that neighborhood attachment - defined as a multidimensional concept composed of attitudes, neighboring, and problem solving - is linked to local stressors in ways ...that vary by the type of attachment under examination. My study analyzes the effects of four stressors on six dimensions of attachment and shows that social and physical disorder as well as experiences with victimization and crime do not uniformly decrease individual neighborhood attachment. Social disorder has the most widespread negative impact on different types of neighborhood attachment. My results also show that victimization and perceptions of crime affect only problem solving; indeed, they actually increase this form of attachment. This finding suggests that a multidimensional approach to neighborhood attachment is useful, especially when applied to theories of social disorganization and loss of community.
Recent debates question whether assemblage urbanism provides an appropriate framework for addressing the housing question under late capitalism. On one side, proponents note the capacity of ...assemblage to reveal the complex emergence of events, places and processes, whereas critics argue assemblage accounts provide deep empirical detail but avoid engaging with political economy. This paper addresses such criticism through an assemblage account of local activism in the context of ownership changes that threatened the rent-regulated Stuyvesant Town neighbourhood in Manhattan. We adopt an assemblage methodology to examine this case of privileged tenant activism and find that it provides an additive lens for understanding the networks of relations that influenced the community during the mid-2000s. Noting that assemblage and the financial ecologies approach are similar in their attendance to relational thinking, we describe how these approaches can be used in conjunction to better understand the linkages between housing and financialization.
Priced Out Woldoff, Rachael A; Morrison, Lisa M; Glass, Michael R
03/2016
eBook
On an average morning in the tree-lined parks, plazas, and play-areas of Manhattan's Stuyvesant Town housing development, birds chirp as early risers dash off to work, elderly residents enjoy a ...peaceful morning stroll, and flocks of parents usher their children to school. It seems an unlikely location for conflict and strife, yet this eighteen-block area, initially planned as middle-class affordable housing, is the site of an ongoing struggle between long-term, rent-regulated residents, younger, market-rate tenants, and new owners seeking to turn this community into a luxury commodity.Priced Outtakes readers into this heated battle as a transitioning neighborhood wrestles with contemporary capitalist strategies and the struggle to preserve renters' rights. Since the early 2000's, Stuyvesant Town's owners have sought to transform this iconic Manhattan housing development into a luxury destination for those able to afford the higher price tag. Attempting to replace longtime residents with younger, more affluent tenants, they have disrupted native residents' sense of place, community, and their perceived quality of life. Through resident interviews, the authors offer an intimate view into the lives of different groups of tenants involved in this struggle for prime real estate in New York, from students experiencing the city for the first time to baby boomers hanging on to the vestiges of middle-class urban life. A compelling, fascinating account of changing urban landscapes and the struggle for security,Priced Outoffers a comprehensive perspective of a community that, to some, is becoming unrecognizable as it is upgraded and altered.
This study uses interview and focus group data to examine how residents perceive and cope with studentification, disorder, and neighbor conflict in a college town. First, we find that nonstudent ...residents perceive studentification as the cause of neighborhood decline, but mainly blame larger forces and local actors, such as the university, city officials, and local developers, rather than the students. Second, we find that one way that residents adapt to disorder is by using active strategies to defend their neighborhoods, but they believe this role has been forced upon them by the failure of social institutions to address the local problems. Third, given the limited effectiveness of social control efforts and given the structural barriers to fostering order, residents have come to adopt passive strategies that normalize disorder and allow them to avoid further conflict with neighbors.
Previous research has established that racial/ethnic residential inequalities in the United States are due to a combination of resource disadvantage and discrimination. This article builds upon past ...work by using a new dependent variable (census tract median housing value), examining the effects of wealth, and including interactions between race/ethnicity and resources. The authors find that the Black—White gap in neighborhood quality is explained by the combination of Blacks’ relative disadvantage in resources and the smaller benefits they gain from having those resources. In contrast, Latinos who are not recent immigrants are similar to Whites in both neighborhood quality and their ability to translate resources into residential quality.
Community and Crime: Now More than Ever Woldoff, Rachael A.; Uggen, Christopher
City & community,
December 2018, 2018-12-00, 20181201, Letnik:
17, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
To introduce City & Community's symposium on “Community and Crime,” we describe the core connections between urban/community sociology and criminology, highlight the shared history of our scholarly ...traditions and missions, argue for a more collaborative future, and identify priorities for future research. Before, during, and after the early days of Du Bois (1899) and the Chicago School (Park et al. 1925), sociology and criminology productively combined to advance the understanding of the ecological linkages between community and crime. Many academic programs continue to teach the subjects together, and many researchers adopt a sociological approach to examine crime. Nevertheless, there is a longstanding tension between the two areas within and across academic departments, particularly as criminology transitions from an interdisciplinary field to a separate discipline. Now, more than ever—in a time where citizens are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), police abuse of power, mass incarceration, and racist forms of informal and formal social control—urban/community sociologists and criminologists must join forces. Together, we can shed light on some of the most compelling public and scientific questions of our time, questions that appear on the news and social media, and questions that form the substance of conversations within our communities, homes, workplaces, and classrooms. We write in hopes that urban/community sociologists and criminologists will continue to capitalize on our shared traditions, missions, methods, and passions for informing each other and the public about the many structural, political, and agentic connections between place and crime. This selection of new work published in this symposium highlights pieces that are sociological in their orientation to crime and pieces that draw on insights generated from both the criminology and sociology literatures. Using diverse methodologies, the articles approach classic sociological and criminological questions that squarely address contemporary urban and community social problems.
Men's employment is an important predictor of union formation and couples' transitions to marriage, but previous research has not investigated the extent to which the type of men's employment affects ...the likelihood of marriage. To fill this gap, we use multinomial logistic regression and data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,128) to explore whether men's employment in the underground economy inhibits or promotes the transition to marriage among unmarried parents three years after the birth of their child. The results show that underground work is associated with relationship instability and serves as a barrier to marriage. Thus, in fragile families, the type of work that the father does, independent of the amount of income he earns from such employment, drives couples' decisions to marry. Implications for research and policy that stem from the findings are discussed.
Using 20 semistructured interviews with police officers from a rural sheriff's department, we present what we believe is the first in‐depth examination of U.S. rural officers’ views on gun control. ...We find that officers possess complex views about gun control, reflecting their multiple identities as both gun‐oriented rural citizens and police who seek to control the situations they encounter at work. Specifically, we observed that rural police officers: (1) embrace a rural identity that implies support of gun rights over gun control; (2) report that police work experiences have caused them to embrace their police identity and to distance themselves from some gun‐related aspects of rural identity (e.g., they have lost interest in guns over time and have increasingly dissociated from gun‐enthusiast peers); and (3) have learned to incorporate aspects of both identities into their views on gun control, universally advocating for some gun control measures in the name of community safety, but rejecting others as part of rural ideological views about personal freedom. We discuss research and policy implications and suggest that policymakers must better appreciate the nuances and culture of rural places in order to gain rural citizens’ and rural police officers’ support for gun control legislation.
