O n May 4, 2015, a headline above the fold on The New York Times front page announced, “Change of Address Offers a Pathway Out of Poverty.” The article described powerful new research showing how growing up in specific places altered the economic fortunes of children, for better or for worse. Then, close to a year later, the Times published an article about new research showing that children whose families left the worst housing projects of Chicago ended up earning more money than children from families that did not move. The column was titled, “Growing Up in a Bad Neighborhood Does More Harm Than We Thought.”
In this special report, we look at the role urban universities play — for better and worse — in their communities, new insights into the history and future of cities, and the barriers that get in the way of good research.
Although the findings from the new studies were novel and compelling, the idea that neighborhoods matter for children’s long-term trajectories is not shocking to anyone who has thought long and hard about where to raise their own children. More surprising was that the research had been done by economists: Stanford’s Raj Chetty, Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren and Larry Katz, and Eric Chyn, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. Justin Wolfers, a well-known economist at Michigan, wrote about the research in two of his occasional columns in the Times, under the heading “Economic View.”
The coverage reflects a remarkable shift in the way that economists think about and talk about neighborhood inequality. For the past few decades, as sociologists produced a tremendous amount of research illuminating the ways that residential environments influence our lives, economists (and some sociologists as well) expressed doubt and skepticism. In his column, Wolfers argued that the debate had tilted toward the perspective of sociologists. “The relentless accumulation of evidence is now so compelling that I believe it will sustain a new consensus,” he wrote. “That consensus, simply stated, is that place matters.”
Wolfers suggested that the new research should put “the issue of fixing our failing neighborhoods squarely on the political agenda,” a goal many sociologists have long been arguing for. But a crucially important question remains: Why was there such disagreement over the past 25 years? The answer exposes troubling tendencies and serious flaws of both sociologists and economists. Those haven’t gone away — and they threaten to undermine the next generation of research and policy on urban inequality.
S tudying neighborhoods is natural for sociologists. Throughout the history of the discipline, many of the great sociologists have focused their attention on how our residential environments influence our mind-set, our daily experiences, and the direction of our lives. Those questions receded to the background in the 1960s and 1970s, however, as surveys with representative samples of the population became more common, quantitative methods improved, and computing technology made it faster to analyze data on hundreds or thousands of individuals. The ascendance of quantitative survey research made it seem as if society was made up of millions of individuals, traveling the world on their own, isolated from one another.
In the late 1980s, the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson altered this perspective. He observed how the confluence of economic, demographic, and social forces had led to a new form of poverty in U.S. cities. In the period after the civil-rights movement, poor, segregated neighborhoods lost jobs and middle-class residents, and the set of social institutions that form the foundation of community life began to deteriorate. Many predominantly black central-city neighborhoods began to fall apart.
Why was there such disagreement over the past 25 years? The answer exposes serious flaws of both sociologists and economists.
The consequences of poverty, according to Wilson, were amplified because the poor had become isolated in their own communities, separate from the rest of the city. The “truly disadvantaged” did not suffer just from the effects of poverty, but also from concentration effects.
Wilson’s theory inspired some of the best work done by sociologists in the years since. Elijah Anderson conducted fieldwork in Philadelphia’s ghetto to document how the threat of violence began to structure daily interactions in the early 1990s, leading parents to alter their caregiving practices and children to adopt a set of behaviors designed to ward off victimization while maintaining status. To capture the ways that poverty, race, and ethnicity affect trust among neighbors, social cohesion, and rates of violence, Robert Sampson and a team of researchers collected video of every city block in Chicago and carried out surveys asking residents whether their neighbors would intervene if children were spray-painting graffiti on a wall or being disrespectful to an adult. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton traced the history of informal and formal efforts to create and preserve racially segregated neighborhoods, and used simulations to show how segregation by race allowed poverty to become concentrated in space.
Sociological research focused on the interplay between the individual and the environment, shedding light on the ways in which social contexts affect individuals’ narratives about their lives and the meaning attached to their decisions. Mary Pattillo lived in a black middle-class neighborhood and learned how proximity to the schools, the violence, the drugs, and the gangs of the urban ghetto changed the meaning of middle-class status for African-Americans, making it more difficult to pass on their hard-fought economic progress to the next generation. Kathryn Edin and her colleagues talked with low-income women (and later men) to understand the meaning of parenthood for individuals with minimal resources available to raise children, and Sudhir Venkatesh immersed himself in Chicago’s poorest housing developments to document the informal set of interactions and relationships that dominated economic life in the projects and yet were “off the books.”
This is some of the research that has guided sociologists’ thinking about neighborhoods for the past 25 years. It comes from in-depth ethnography, from large-scale social theory, and from novel approaches to measuring social life in progress. This body of research reflects the unique nature of sociology, a discipline that is driven as much by ideas as by methods. The freedom to examine social problems and puzzles, unbound by the narrow questions of public policy or the rigid constraints of a single methodological approach, is what makes for great sociology.
But it also can make for poor sociology. While all of this work was being produced, thousands of quantitative studies were published purporting to estimate “neighborhood effects” using methods that compared children living in neighborhoods with high and low poverty rates. The studies usually controlled for family characteristics but ignored the possibility that something we can’t capture in a survey might lead one family into a poor neighborhood while another family decides to live elsewhere.
Since the first quantitative studies of “neighborhood effects,” critics — the loudest of them economists — focused their attention on the weaknesses of the methods used to identify the impact of neighborhoods. They argued, correctly, that quantitative studies cannot capture the effect of neighborhoods without adequately dealing with the fact that people choose their neighborhoods for reasons that are difficult for a researcher to observe.
The methodological critique was not the only reason that sociologists’ research on neighborhoods was often dismissed. Sociologists have a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for being driven not only by evidence but also by ideology, and their research is not seen as particularly relevant to Wall Street or to policy makers whose primary concern is economic growth. Although Wilson’s work had placed the study of neighborhoods on the national policy agenda, most sociological research was designed to advance our understanding of how our residential environments work rather than to inform public policy. With some exceptions, most sociologists were reluctant to alter their research questions to make them more relevant to policy makers. So the debates went on without them.
The voices of the skeptics slowly drowned out the arguments in sociological journals and books. The rich tradition of sociological research exploring how residential contexts influence the lives of residents faded into the background, the most powerful ethnographic work was ignored, and attention shifted to the narrower question: “Do neighborhoods matter?”
The Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, or MTO, program was designed to answer that question. Created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, MTO was a large-scale social experiment that randomly assigned housing vouchers to families in public housing. The vouchers could be used only in low-poverty neighborhoods. Because it used random assignment, MTO came to be seen as the solution to the fundamental problem with the neighborhood-effects literature. The grand sociological questions about how our environments influence our lives were whittled down even further, to a new question: How does a restricted housing voucher affect the outcomes of very-low-income families in five cities?
The answer was simply confusing. In some sites, more than half of the families who received a voucher never used it. The families who did move drifted back into neighborhoods similar to those of families in the control group. Parents who were given the chance to move to low-poverty neighborhoods showed remarkable improvements in health and happiness but no improvements in employment or income. Girls seemed to do much better in new, low-poverty environments, but boys did the same or worse. And the results varied widely across the five sites.
The experimental conditions of the program bore little resemblance to the real-life decisions made by low-income families, and its goal of moving families “to opportunity” was overwhelmed by the reality of racial, ethnic, and economic segregation in U.S. cities. Further, MTO was carried out during a period of the mid-1990s when the nation was experiencing an economic boom, violent crime in central cities was beginning to plummet, and welfare reform was pushing thousands of low-income women into the work force. Sociologists argued that MTO provided valuable information about a fascinating social-policy experiment carried out at a unique time in the nation’s urban history, but they cautioned against making broader conclusions about the impact of neighborhoods on families’ lives.
But the conflicting, complex findings were downplayed by the group of researchers, mostly economists, reporting them. The details of the published research documented the experiment’s complex results, but public summaries glossed over the fact that results varied over time as well as by outcome, gender, and city. Instead of acknowledging this complexity and noting the surprising ways in which families’ lives improved against all odds, a series of influential studies made broad conclusions suggesting that the experiment was a failure. As the authors of one prominent study concluded, “Interventions focused exclusively on neighborhoods rather than on factors directly related to the child, family, and school are unable to solve the myriad problems of children growing up in poverty.”
The old consensus, shared among most economists throughout the 1990s and 2000s, reduced Wilson’s theory about the new urban poverty into a single, precise question: Do neighborhoods matter? It ignored years of urban research and relied exclusively on the findings of economists analyzing the results of a housing-voucher experiment. And it condensed the complex results from the experiment to reach a clear conclusion: Neighborhoods don’t matter very much.
The new consensus is that, in fact, they do. And although the idea that sociologists have been vindicated by the new results is appealing to those of us whose research had been met with skepticism, a problem remains.
Just as the old consensus was based almost entirely on a single experiment, the new consensus has been driven by only a few studies. It ignores the evidence that has been building over decades, which shows that the impact of neighborhoods accumulates over time, that violence appears to be the crucial mechanism explaining why high-poverty neighborhoods are so damaging to children, that cultural beliefs and cultural heterogeneity help account for children’s behavior and their investment in school, and that growing problems with the low-rent housing market have made escaping the ghetto far more difficult.
In his two columns about the new consensus on neighborhood effects, Justin Wolfers focused on three studies, all three of which were written by economists. He ventured beyond the quasi-experimental and experimental research of Chyn and Chetty to mention a single qualitative study, but not one written by any of the sociologists who are rigorously trained in ethnographic research and who often spend months or years of their lives immersed in the communities they study. Instead, Wolfers cited a study conducted by labor economists involved in the MTO research; it is an excellent paper, but it may be the only qualitative study carried out by an economist in the past few decades of research on urban poverty. His selection suggests that the person who has perhaps written the most about neighborhood-effects research in one of the nation’s most widely read newspapers hasn’t read any of the research published outside his own discipline.
Finally, and perhaps most important, to reach the single conclusion that, as Wolfers puts it, “place matters” requires ignoring the inconsistencies and conflicting findings that are present even in the few studies he cites. The central finding in Chetty’s reanalysis of data from MTO, for instance, is that the intervention was beneficial only for children who moved at a young age and spent most of their childhoods in new neighborhoods. Chetty and his research team found that older children actually fared worse if they moved to low-poverty neighborhoods. But Chyn’s results, like most of the literature on neighborhood effects, showed no differences in the impact of residential moves for families with younger or older children. Similarly, the research that Wolfers covers reaches entirely different conclusions about whether the effects of moving vary depending on whether or not a family’s move is voluntary. These are puzzles to be solved with theory and more evidence, not trivial details to be swept under the rug.
To understand what makes the residential environment so important to families’ lives, and to guide the formulation of social policy, it is the details that are important. Those details come from years and years of research from multiple disciplines using a range of approaches, and they lead to a perspective on policy that is very different from the new consensus.
The accumulated body of research on neighborhoods reveals that if policy makers developed a large-scale program providing vouchers to low-income families with young children, and sending them out into the private market on their own, it is equally possible that the program would harm or benefit families. We know that most families who would be eligible would not volunteer for the program, and that around half of those who did volunteer would not use their voucher at all. Most families who used the voucher would move into new homes near their original neighborhoods, and most would enter neighborhoods on the decline — places where poverty was rising. Over time, most of the families in the program would move back into communities similar to those in which they started. And if the program were put into effect on a large scale, it would probably lead to a process of neighborhood transition, undermining the effort to provide a change in families’ environments, and generating political opposition among the large segment of the population that wants poor people to stay where they are.
If policy makers are interested in developing a program that has a better chance of helping families, they might pay closer attention to a broader set of findings. They might invest in strong community-based organizations that provide work support for parents, intensive tutoring, after-school programs, and summer-job programs that have been shown to stabilize community life, improve students’ performance in school, and reduce crime and violence. If they are intent on funding programs to improve housing mobility, they might focus on building attractive and affordable housing for the poor in middle- and upper-income communities, take steps to ensure that children are placed in diverse, high-performing schools when they move, make a concerted effort to support people making long-range moves that cross city, county, and state lines, or follow existing models and begin by finding units for families in neighborhoods that offer safe streets, public transportation, high-quality schools, and decent housing. They might devote substantial resources to supporting the families in their new communities, providing transportation to job interviews and counseling to deal with school searches and financial management.
Those are the lessons from the past few decades of research, in multiple disciplines, on neighborhoods and urban inequality. They are lessons that fade into the background, however, when sociologists watch public debates from the sidelines of academia or when economists dismiss good research if it is generated using different empirical approaches — or if it is generated by someone other than a fellow economist.
Fortunately, there are signs of a turning point in the relationship between researchers studying urban poverty and inequality from these two core disciplines of the social sciences. Raj Chetty, whose groundbreaking work has played the greatest role in changing people’s minds about the importance of neighborhoods, has engaged with a wide array of social scientists from multiple disciplines as he has pursued his research agenda. Collaborative, interdisciplinary efforts have developed to advance the literature and reconcile conflicting results in studies on the impact of neighborhood poverty. Sociologists have begun to get more creative in their efforts to generate causal evidence on the impact of neighborhoods, and as I’ve already noted, a few economists have even delved into the methodological tool kit of sociologists, using qualitative interviews to form hypotheses and guide the collection of experimental data on neighborhood effects. (Their conclusion: “It is hard to imagine any other data collection strategy that would have led us to these insights.”)
For 25 years, the tendencies and flaws of researchers from both economics and sociology have led to a distorted, biased perspective on the ways that neighborhoods affect individuals’ lives and the range of possible policy responses. The new consensus on neighborhood effects hasn’t corrected these flaws, but the hints of change among both sociologists and economists provide hope that we won’t repeat the same mistakes for the next 25 years.
Patrick Sharkey is a professor of sociology at New York University and the author of the forthcoming Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (W.W. Norton).