The Disparate Neighborhood Impacts of the Great Recession: Evidence from Chicago

Abstract

We advance scholarship about how macroeconomic forces differentially manifest themselves across local spaces by developing a holistic conceptual framework and empirical analyses involving multilevel change modeling. Unlike prior work, we examine differential rates of change in neighborhood indicators. We illustrate our approach with Chicago data measuring the crime, housing, and economic domains of neighborhood qualityof-life over the 2000-2009 period. We find that the local dynamic manifestations of macroeconomic cycles were far more nuanced than have been previously observed. Neighborhood indicators moved along distinct trajectories, sometimes but not necessarily tracking each other or the overall business cycle, and they changed with varied intensities. The Great Recession of 2006-2009 had disparate negative impacts on lower-income and minority-occupied neighborhoods' local job opportunities, home prices, and home foreclosures, though this was not true for credit or crime indicators. Credit indicators performed geographically much differently than in the prior Chicago recession.

Race and uneven recovery: neighborhood home value trajectories in Atlanta before and after the housing crisis

“…They found that households in low-income neighborhoods were more vulnerable to economic recession in terms of relative incomes, jobs, and home values. Williams et al (2013) had similar results in examining the disparate impacts of the 2000-2009 economic cycles on neighborhoods in the city of Chicago. They found that lower income and minority neighborhoods were susceptible to the Great Recession in terms of jobs, home values, and home foreclosures.…”

Differentiating pathways of neighborhood change in 50 U.S. metropolitan areas

“…The absence of trajectories of socioeconomic ascent out of high poverty black, Hispanic and mixed black and Hispanic neighborhoods was conspicuous. Prior research has indicated that disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to undergo more volatile changes coinciding with the ebbs and flows of business cycles Hincks, 2015;Williams et al, 2013). These short-term changes may register as improvements or declines when analyzing neighborhood dynamics from one time period to the next via transition matrices, but when viewing the full longitudinal sequences, a clear pathway of ascent fails to register as a predominant trajectory during this 30-year time frame.…”

Neighborhood Economic Changes After the Great Recession and Home Food Environments

“…Neighborhood economic changes after the Great Recession were shown to be concentrated in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods (Allen, 2013; Delmelle & Thill, 2014; Hyra & Rugh, 2016; A. Owens & Sampson, 2013; Solari, 2012; Williams et al, 2013). This study showed a similar pattern in that neighborhoods with a high concentration of poverty had smaller increases in household median income and median housing values and a larger increase in proportions of vacant housing units between 2000 and 2009-2013 than those with a low concentration of poverty (see Figure 1).…”

“…Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 2012). A housing market collapse and increasingly unstable employment status brought about severe family economic hardship (Allen, 2013; Ellen & Dastrup, 2012; Grusky, Western, & Wimer, 2011; Palmer, 2013; Williams et al, 2013), which likely increased the risk of unhealthy home food environments (Adams et al, 2015; MacFarlane, Crawford, Ball, Savige, & Worsley, 2007). In addition to a family-level mechanism, the role of macroeconomic and neighborhood economic contexts in home food environments has been conceptually established (Rosenkranz & Dzewaltowski, 2008; Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2012), yet little empirical literature has investigated home food environments in macroeconomic and neighborhood economic contexts.…”

“…The Great Recession, the most recent, longest, and devastating economic downturn since the Great Depression in 1930s, disproportionally affected socioeconomically disadvantaged or minority neighborhoods because their residents were more likely to hold unstable jobs sensitive to macroeconomic conditions (Allen, 2013; Delmelle & Thill, 2014; Hyra & Rugh, 2016; Ong et al, 2003; A. Owens & Sampson, 2013; Solari, 2012; Williams, Galster, & Verma, 2013). Another reason for the concentrated influence is a high percentage of home mortgages (particularly subprime loans) in many low-income and minority neighborhoods that experienced gentrification, driven in part by the real-estate bubble in the early- to mid-2000s (Hyra & Rugh, 2016).…”