Underclass Neighborhoods in Temporal and Ecological Perspective

Abstract

This article places the growth of an urban underclass in the broader context of trends in inequality and the stratification of place in global cities. Using Chicago as a case study, we construct a multidimensional typology of urban neighborhoods to illuminate trends in the spatial distribution of opportunity, the impact of immigration on the city's ecological structure, and modal patterns of neighborhood change. Our empirical analysis documents (1) the increasing spatial polarization of Chicago's neighborhoods, fueled by a concentration of both affluence and socioeconomic disadvantage; (2) the erosion of working-class areas as an ecological category; (3) the emergence of Hispanic neighborhoods as a distinct ecological type; and (4) the existence of race-specific patterns of neighborhood upgrading. These trends have broader implications for the study of spatial inequality in advanced industrial cities.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

1. John Kasarda , “Industrial Restructuring and the Changing Location of Jobs,” in State of the Union: America in the 1990s, ed. Reynolds Farley (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995), 1:215-268.

2. William J. Wilson , When Work Disappears (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

3. William Julius Wilson , The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

4. For a noteworthy exception, see Katherine McFate , Roger Lawson , and William Julius Wilson , eds., Poverty Inequality and the Future of Social Policy: Western States in the New World Order (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1995).

5. Wilson , Truly Disadvantaged, p. 56.

6. Ibid., p. 49.

7. Ibid., p. 50.

8. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy Denton , American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9. Paul A. Jargowsky and Mary Jo Bane , “Ghetto Poverty in the United States, 1970-1980,” in The Urban Underclass, ed. Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), p. 261.

10.

10. Ibid., pp. 266-67.

11.

Douglas S. Massey , Andrew A. Gross , and Kumika Shibuya , “Migration, Segregation and the Concentration of Poverty,” American Sociological Review, 59:425-445 (1994).

12.

12. We relied on Ward's minimum variance algorithm to compute the similarity measures. See SAS , SAS/STAT User's Guide, Version 6 (Cary, NC: SAS Institute, 1990).

13.

13. Individual neighborhoods can move through different ecological categories over time because the unit of analysis is not the tract per se but, rather, the tract-year. As a result, the categories themselves can grow or decline in size over time, in terms of the number of neighborhoods that compose them.

14.

14. We also examined how the characteristics of each cluster changed over time, but in the interest of parsimony these tables are not reported.

15.

15. Citywide tabulations do not represent the true mean values for the entire city because they are calculated to reflect average characteristics of census tracts from different time periods and with varying population sizes, and thus they contain aggregation bias.

16.

16. The socioeconomic status index was calculated by first standardizing and then averaging the following set of variables: the poverty rate (-), the percentage of families on public assistance (-), the unemployment rate (-), the percentage of college graduates (+), and the percentage of white-collar workers (+). The resulting index was then standardized to a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1. The residential stability index was computed in the same way as the previous index, using the indicators of owner occupancy (+) and the percentage residing in the same house five years ago (+).