Opportunity for Whom? The Diverse Definitions of Neighborhood Opportunity in Baltimore

Abstract

Across the United States, communities are increasingly interested in the spatial structure of opportunity. Recently, several federal programs have promulgated opportunity mapping as a tool to help increase disadvantaged communities' access to neighborhood opportunity. The increasing institutionalization of opportunity mapping raises questions about how opportunity is defined and by whom. This paper analyzes data from community engagement events held for a regional planning process throughout the Baltimore metropolitan area. During these events, over 100 residents were asked what it means to live in neighborhoods that provide opportunity. The results showed similarities as well as remarkable differences in residents' definitions of opportunity across race, income, and geography. Racial and ethnic minorities, low-income groups, and those living in distressed neighborhoods were more likely to identify job accessibility, employment, and job training as key components of and pathways to opportunity, whereas White, higher income groups, and wealthier neighborhoods placed a stronger emphasis on a sense of community, freedom of choice, education, and retirement savings. These differences challenge urban policymakers and planners to consider how greater flexibility in mapping tools, qualitative data, and community-engaged processes might better reflect the diversity in the ways that residents view and experience opportunity in their everyday lives.

Measuring and mapping neighborhood opportunity: A comparison of opportunity indices in California

“…Furthermore, because we find general disagreement in the designation of low opportunity, some neighborhoods will be labeled as low opportunity under one set of criteria when they have overlooked assets that actually make them higher in opportunity using another set of criteria. This is particularly problematic for low income, communities of color, which tend to be painted by opportunity maps through a deficit-based lens (Lung-Amam, et al, 2018). More work is needed to either construct indices that can better capture the opportunity structure within a region, emphasize the multidimensional nature of opportunity by creating appropriate subdomains and favoring them over an overall index, or move away from the binning of neighborhoods into low and high opportunity categories and towards a continuous and non-linear representation of opportunity.…”

“…Viewing neighborhood opportunity as a latent variable implies that from a quantitative perspective, it can only be measured indirectly through statistical procedures. However, precisely what constitutes neighborhood opportunity is still up for debate, and thus there is little consensus regarding what constitutes or characterizes high and low opportunity neighborhoods (Lung-Amam et al, 2018). A typical approach to measuring neighborhood opportunity is to use a single socioeconomic variable such as median household income or the poverty rate (Brazil and Portier, 2022).…”

Mapping opportunity in time and space: An inductive approach

“…Lung-Amam et al (2018) even raised the question about "opportunity for whom" and conducted a study which aimed to capture residents' definitions of opportunity. However, the research design placed the survey after a discussion on neighborhood revitalization (Lung-Amam et al, 2018, p. 641), generating answers limited to the scope of basic urban services, environmental qualities and social structure.…”