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The process of neighborhood change, to date, has not been analyzed from a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective. As consensus grows that one's neighborhood plays a large role in determining access to education, employment, and an improved quality of life (Anderson 1991; Galster and Hill 1992;Wilson 1987), it is unfortunate that our understanding of neighborhood change remains a prisoner of intellectual parochialism. A review of the literature indicates that scholars of neighborhood change tend to focus on variables which are easily analyzed within a single discipline's paradigm (Birch 1971; Bond and Coulson 1989;Hoover and Vernon 1959;Muth 1973). Economists, for example, often concentrate on the declining amount of capital stock embedded in a housing unit over time (Henderson 1985). Sociologists often stress a neighborhood's changing functional role within a larger urban area's system (Berry and Kasarda 1977). Geographers model neighborhood change as a spatial process, and so study border effects and other spatially related phenomena (Bailey 1959, Deskin 1981. Although separate disciplines have made significant contributions to our understanding of neighborhood change, calls for a multidisciplinary approach (Schwab 1987) have largely gone unheeded.Our goals, then, are to present a synthetic model of neighborhood change and to explore the implications of that model for neighborhood stabilization, upgrading, and deconcentration policies. Throughout this paper we assume a rather broad definition of neighborhood change which encompasses a variety of objectively measurable changes to a neighborhood's physical and social environment. Unlike previous models of neighborhood change, the theoretical framework developed here demonstrates how neighborhood change is not the result of seemingly inexorable ecological forces, nor is it solely a function of economically motivated individuals and institutions acting either alone or in concert. Over a given period of time, neighborhoods within a single city can follow one of three trajectories: stability, decline, or upgrading. We argue that a neighborhood's trajectory results from its ability to position itself favorably with external sources of financial, political, and social resources and that this ability is largely dependent on the physical, social, and locational characteristics of the community. Consequently, neighborhood stabilization policies that exclusively concentrate on the physical characteristics of a community (housing stock, commercial establishments, etc.) are likely to be ineffective, as they do not enhance a neighborhood's access to the resources needed to maintain a stable and attractive residential environment. Similarly, efforts designed to strengthen a community's political power via promoting either horizontal and/or vertical integration (Rohe and Mouw 1991 ; Warren and Warren 1977) may not be enough to forestall neighborhood decline if physical deterioration is an everyday concern of neighborhood residents. ABSTRACTTheories of neighborhood change have...

Between 1992 and 1996 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settled a number of legal cases involving housing authorities and agreed to take remedial action as part of court-enforced consent decrees entered into with plaintiffs. These housing authorities faced significant obstacles that impaired their ability to comply swiftly and fully with all of the elements in the desegregation consent decrees. The obstacles fell into two broad categories: contextual obstacles (racial composition of waiting lists and resident populations, lack of affordable rental housing, and inadequate public transportation), and capacity and coordination obstacles (conflict among implementing agencies and ineffective monitoring by HUD). Findings presented here highlight the sizable potential delay between the time a legal remedy is imposed and when plaintiffs in public housing segregation disputes realize any benefits. They also reinforce the argument that implementation problems will be legion when policies impose a significant scope of required changes on a large number of actors who must collaborate, yet are not uniformly capable or sympathetic to the goals being promoted. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Shared equity initiatives provide homeownership opportunities to low-and moderateincome families who buy homes at below-market prices. The appreciation that can be earned by resellers is limited to preserve the homes' affordability at resale. This article analyses affordability, personal wealth, security of tenure, and mobility outcomes for seven shared equity programs across the USA. Homebuyers earned returns that were competitive with what they would have received if they had invested in stocks or bonds. In addition, homes remained affordable to lower income buyers over time as the homes were resold. Homeownership under these programs was sustainable: there were very low delinquency and foreclosure rates and many families who sold their homes were able to use their sales' proceeds to purchase market-rate homes. Owners also showed little evidence of being locked in place, and moved to new homes at rates near the national average.

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The authors contribute to the development of empirical methods for measuring the impacts of place-based local development strategies by introducing the adjusted interrupted time-series (AITS) approach. It estimates a more precise counterfactual scenario, thus offering a stronger basis for drawing causal inferences about impacts. The authors applied the AITS approach to three community development initiatives using single-family home prices as the outcome indicator and found that it could measure impacts on both the base level of prices and the rate of price appreciation. The authors also found a situation in which the method appears unreliable, however. The AITS approach benefits from more recurrent data on outcomes during the pre-and post-intervention periods, with an intertemporal pattern that avoids great volatility. The AITS approach to measuring effects of community development initiatives holds strong promise, with caveats.

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