Integrated or isolated? The impact of public housing redevelopment on social network homophily
Section snippets
Personal social networks and homophily
A social network consists of individuals connected through personal relationships; those personal relationships imply some sort of interaction or contact between individual members. Furthermore, personal relationships tend toward homophily. As McPherson et al. (2001) summarize in their comprehensive review of the literature, homophily is perhaps the most fundamental structure of personal social networks. Patterns of homophily – of similar people sharing ties more frequently than those who are
Site and data
To investigate this relationship between neighbourhood social distance and patterns of homophily, this paper employs data collected as part of longitudinal evaluation of the High Point HOPE VI public housing redevelopment site in Seattle, WA, USA. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) a HOPE VI grant of $35 million to support the redevelopment of the High Point public housing community in June of 2000, with an eventual redevelopment
Methodology
We have three basic questions: has mixing has changed from before redevelopment to after, is moving to the new mixed-income neighbourhood is associated with changes in levels of mixing, and do Vietnamese speakers differ from English speakers in how their mixing changes over time? Therefore, we examine two broad issues: how mixing differs between groups and how baseline levels of mixing change after redevelopment. For each question we consider job ties and social ties separately.
In order to
Results
To begin our analysis, we first examine descriptively how mixing has changed over time (Hypothesis 1). Fig. 1 shows the average IQV by alter characteristic for social ties and job ties, comparing before and after redevelopment levels of mixing. For both tie types there are few real differences in mixing overall from before to after redevelopment. Only in the case of job ties do respondents have more homogeneity among alters but only with regard to employment. In general, most alters are
Discussion
This research focuses on whether public housing redevelopment brings about changes in the structure of social ties of low-income people that would indicate less isolation and more mixing. Echoing a conversation in the literature, does living in mixed-income housing influence social ties – those that people depend for getting along – or job ties – those people depend on to get ahead? Given that social networks tend toward homogeneity, and that even among neighbours relationships tend to be based
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Seattle Housing Authority and Neighborhood House staff for their support and help throughout this research, especially Denise Sharify, Jennifer Calleja, James Krieger, Lin Song, Mark Beach, Willard Brown, Editha Costales, John Forsyth, Andria Lazaga, Al Levine, Tina Narr, and Tom Phillips and others too numerous to name. Research assistants supported this work over 8 years: thank you to Jennifer Allison, Allegra Abramo, Jay Berman, Catrina Lucero, Colin Smith,
References (55)
Bridging ties at the neighborhood level
Social Networks
(1982)- et al.
Neighborhood resources, racial segregation, and economic mobility: results from the Gautreaux program
Social Science Research
(2006) - et al.
Statistical analysis of qualitative variation
The Nature of Prejudice
(1979)Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community
(1992)Moving up versus moving out: researching and interpreting neighborhood effects in housing mobility programs
Housing Policy Debate
(1997)Brown kids in white suburbs: housing mobility and the many faces of social capital
Housing Policy Debate
(1998)Range
- et al.
Sources of personal neighbor networks: social integration, need, or time?
Social Forces
(1992) HOPE VI relocation: moving to new neighborhoods and building new ties
Housing Policy Debate
(2004)
Moving over or moving up? Short-term gains and losses for relocated HOPE VI household
Cityscape
No more ‘bois ball—the effect of relocation from public housing on adolescents
Journal of Adolescent Research
Draining or gaining? The social networks of public housing movers in Boston
Journal of Social Ties and Personal Relationships
Occupational Prestige Ratings from the 1989 General Social Survey
Does neighborhood matter? Assessing recent evidence
Housing Policy Debate
A note on the friendship ties of black urbanites
Social Forces
To Dwell Among Friends
The contours of mixed-income living in the music city
The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community
Planning as social life: friendship and neighbor relations in suburban communities
Choosing a Better Life: Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment
The simultaneous effect of social distance and physical distance on the formation of neighborhood ties
City & Community
Scattered-Site Housing: Characteristics and Consequences
Social networks and social capital in extreme environments
“[U]Nited and Actuated by Some Common Impulse of Passion”: challenging the dispersal consensus in American Housing Policy Research
Journal of Urban Affairs
The social consequences of growing up in a poor neighborhood
Cited by (0)
- 1
Tel.: + 1 212 998 5407.