Race and Population Change: A Longitudinal Look at Cleveland Neighborhoods

This paper investigates the relationship of racial composition to neighborhood population change from 1910 to 1990 in the Cleveland metropolitan area. To better understand the long-term dynamics of urban neighborhood change, we focus our analysis upon the longitudinal relationship of race, socioeconomic status, and life cycle stage to changes in neighborhood population densities. First, we find that the more established neighborhoods of the African-American community have experienced dramatic declines in population since 1950, a pattern that represents a clear change from the earlier part of the twentieth century. Second, population loss is experienced through a variety of mechanisms, including the demolition of dwellings, the increase in housing vacancy, and the decline of household size. Third, much of this population loss should be interpreted within the context of high economic distress, occurring most frequently in older African-American communities. Over time, economic distress appears to be more important than race in and of itself in leading to the loss of neighborhood populations.     

Livin’ for the city: African American ethnogenesis and depression era migration

Urban ethnogenesis is a process by which a group creates and maintains social networks and communication patterns as the basis for institutional and communal life in urban areas. Ethnogenesis is a foundation upon which most historical, urbanward migrations have been built, including the “Great Migration” of African Americans during the first half of this century. Although a period of decreased migration, the Depression was marked by sizeable movement in which nearly 10% of the total African American population moved interregionally. Ethnogenic measures such as NAACP activism, the number of community newspapers directed at African Americans, and the longevity of a chapter of the National Urban League significantly increased migration flows.     

THE URBAN CONTEXT OF HISTORICAL ACTIVISM:

This article examines the contextual determinants of two types of NAACP activism between 1930 and 1939. They are the justice-oriented outreach of insurgency (e.g., a civil rights rally), and chapter-building activities (e.g., electing committee chairpersons). Activism is analyzed using a more diverse set of factors than previous research on the sociopolitical context of social movements. Specifically, I examine historical urbanization and prior racial institutional development in 136 urban counties of the United States, about 95% of the 1930 African American urban system. WLS regression is used to provide a strong statistical basis for understanding the structural power and liberation context of these two distinct types of activism during the uniquely constrained Depression Era. Both insurgency and chapter-building activities increased due to the expanding non-southern location of African Americans and the effects of WWI-era declines in the population of foreign-born hites. They declined as a result of extreme racial-occupational segregation in the local area and being distant from a predominantly African American county. The factors shaping the two types of activism were not equal, in part due to both shared and non-shared determinants. A particularly instructive finding was that wage growth served as a lever of social control, being negatively related to insurgency. Viewed together, the findings clearly point to the joint influence of economic and noneconomic factors in shaping NAACP activism during the 1930s, and enhance our understanding of the broader determinants of Africans activism generally.     

NEIGHBORHOOD DISORDER AND INDIVIDUAL COMMUNITY CAPACITY: HOW INCIVILITIES INFORM THREE DOMAINS OF PSYCHOSOCIAL ASSESSMENT

This article examines contextual models to bring together the disorder and community capacity perspectives, since both are grounded in social (dis)organization theory and cumulative causation. We analyze how individual and neighborhood characteristics, social and physical disorder, and crime affect three individual community capacity outcomes: city quality of life, neighborhood safety, and household moving intentions. The “broken windows” downward spiral suggests that neighborhood incivilities may decrease multiple psychosocial assessments, or, individual community capacities. Consistent with prior research, we find that social and physical disorder decreases all three outcomes. Second, we find that both disorders also mediate neighborhood effects, including socioeconomic status and residential stability. Third, these direct and indirect disorder effects are not altered by prior victimization or neighborhood crime rates. Reducing disorder will, in turn, improve three distinct domains and geographic scales of individual community capacity, and can also reduce the adverse effects of other local area capacity deficits.