Diversity,Poverty, and Resources: The Role of Incentives and Capacity in the Presence of Highly Resourced Neighborhood Associations

Highly resourced neighborhood associations are not spread evenly across U.S. urban neighborhoods. It is not the neediest or the wealthiest neighborhoods that have these associations but those that have needs-based incentives and the capacity to act upon them, leaving those that most lack capacity without these valuable resources. The incentives and capacities needed for highly resourced neighborhood associations are rooted in the composition of the neighborhood. Diverse and impoverished neighborhoods have the requisite incentives to organize, but only neighborhoods with individual and organizational resources have the capacity to act on these incentives. It is the interaction between incentives and capacities that enable large neighborhood associations to locate in a neighborhood. This argument finds support in statistical analyses of census-tract-level variation in the presence of highly-resourced neighborhood associations in the 100 most populated metropolitan statistical areas in 2009.