Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Neighborhoods, Gentrification, Housing, and Educational and Health Outcomes

(Housing, Community Development, and Urban Policy)

The neighborhoods in which people live shape a range of outcomes throughout the lifecourse including access to schools, exposure to violence, access to employment opportunities, and earnings. This panel brings together three longitudinal studies to explore how gentrification impacts poverty levels in other census tracts, whether housing assistance provides families with access to more racially and economically integrated neighborhoods, and how the connection between neighborhoods and educational outcomes have changed over time.

 

The first paper uses data from the Census and the American Community Survey to explore spillover effects of gentrification: whether gentrification in one area impacts poverty concentration in other areas.

 

The second paper uses nearly four decades of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the PSID’s restricted-use Assisted Housing Database, and the Longitudinal Tract Database to explore the neighborhoods to which families receiving public housing and housing vouchers have access. Findings from conservative fixed effects models suggest that neither type of assistance helps families access neighborhoods that are less racially and economically segregated than when they did not receive assistance.

 

The final paper examines how neighborhood effects on educational outcomes have changed over time, and explores whether this is because schools are increasingly not a neighborhood institution. This paper uses robust data from several data sources: Census/American Community Survey data for neighborhoods, National Center for Education Statistics data for schools, with data on two successive generational cohorts of children from the PSID Child Development Supplements I (CDS97) and II (CDS14). 

 

Taken together, these papers can help us gain a better understanding of how larger poverty dynamics may affect neighborhoods, how housing assistance can shape the neighborhoods to which children have access, and how the ties between neighborhoods and educational outcomes have changed over time. These papers can help inform development and housing assistance policy.