Who Owns the Neighborhood? Ethnoracial Composition of Property Ownership and Neighborhood Trajectories in San Francisco

Abstract

Property owners play pivotal roles in the trajectories of neighborhoods with discretion over upkeep, residential turnover, and affordability. Yet, little is known about how and why the racial composition of ownership changes over time relative to residents within a neighborhood and, in turn, how this relates to the neighborhood’s change and stability. With a self-constructed dataset of all residential transactions in San Francisco from 1990 to 2017, we consider how the ethnoracial composition of ownership differs from that of residents and how this difference relates to neighborhood change. We find that neighborhoods with more non-White residents have greater differences between the ethnoracial compositions of owners and residents, with the largest differences in neighborhoods with more Black residents. An increase in the divergence between these distributions is related to future increases in White and Asian residents and higher socioeconomic status residents and decreases in Black and Hispanic residents, illustrating that neighborhoods where owners are more ethnoracially distinct from the residents are more prone to neighborhood change and residential turnover. Our findings contribute to understandings of inequalities in property ownership and illuminate the role of ownership in neighborhood change in the contemporary city.