Although there is now a large body of empirical research on neighbourhood effects, we know relatively little about the causal mechanisms responsible for relationships between neighbourhood attributes and individual outcomes. A list of 15 potential causal pathways which may lead to neighbourhood effects is given, grouped into four categories: social-interactive mechanisms, environmental mechanisms, geographical mechanisms, and institutional mechanisms. The ultimate goal of neighbourhood effects research is not only to identify which mechanisms are responsible for neighbourhood effects, but also to quantitatively ascertain their relative contributions to the outcome under investigation. A pharmacological metaphor of “dosage-response” is used to understand how the theoretical mechanisms could be causally linked to individual outcomes. This metaphor refers to questions regarding the composition and the administration of the neighbourhood dosage, and the neighbourhood dosage-response relationship. This chapter concludes that despite the ever growing literature on neighbourhood effects, there is far too little scholarship to make many claims about which causal links dominate for which outcomes for which people in which national contexts and any conclusions on the existence of such effects should be treated as provisional at best.

The Mechanism(s) of Neighbourhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications

Problem: Existing planning and redevelopment models do not offer a holistic approach for addressing the challenges vacant and abandoned properties create in America's older industrial cities, but these shrinking cities possess opportunities to undertake citywide greening strategies that convert such vacant properties to community assets. Purpose: We define strategies shrinking cities can use to convert vacant properties to valuable green infrastructure to revitalize urban environments, empower community residents, and stabilize dysfunctional real estate markets. To do this we examine shrinking cities and their vacant property challenges; identify the benefits of urban greening; explore the policies, obstacles, and promise of a green infrastructure initiative; and discuss vacant property reclamation programs and policies that would form the nucleus of a model green infrastructure right-sizing initiative designed to stabilize the communities with the greatest level of abandonment. Methods: We draw our concl...

Greening the Rust Belt: A Green Infrastructure Model for Right Sizing America's Shrinking Cities

http://psycnet.apa.org/books/13620/009.pdf

Case Study Methods

The estimation of neighborhood effects in the social sciences: An interdisciplinary approach☆

∗∗∗ Cities across the United States that have considerable vacant land are debating whether to foster community gardens on that land, while cities with land shortages are debating when to replace gardens with other uses. Meanwhile, many cities are looking for new ways to finance green spaces. Little empirical evidence about the neighborhood impacts of community gardens is available, however, to inform the debate or to help cities design financing schemes. This article estimates the impact of community gardens on neighborhood property values, using rich data for New York City and a difference-in-difference specification of a hedonic regression model. We find that gardens have significant positive effects, especially in the poorest neighborhoods. Higher-quality gardens have the greatest positive impact.

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The Effect of Community Gardens on Neighboring Property Values

This article statistically examines the sale prices of single‐family homes surrounding Section 8 sites first occupied between 1991 and 1995 in Baltimore County. If only a few Section 8 sites were l...

The impact of neighbors who use section 8 certificates on property values

How should we allocate public resources for revitalizing low-income urban neighborhoods? Once public investments in an area reach some minimum threshold, do they leverage substantial private resour...

/pdf/targeting-investments-for-neighborhood-revitalization-3gcqbdyftn.pdf

Targeting Investments for Neighborhood Revitalization

This study tests the hypothesis that the acquisition of existing property by the public housing authority and its subsequent rehabilitation and occupancy by subsidized tenants significantly reduced the property values of surrounding single-family homes in Denver during the 1990s. This assessment examined pre- and post-occupancy sales, while controlling for the idiosyncratic neighborhood, local public service, and zoning characteristics of the areas in order to identify which sorts of neighborhoods, if any, experienced declining property values as a result of proximity to dispersed housing tenants. The analyses revealed that proximity to a subsidized housing site generally had an independent, positive effect on single-family home sales prices. The most notable exception to this pattern occurred in neighborhoods more than 20 percent of whose residents were black. Proximity to dispersed public housing sites in these neighborhoods resulted in slower growth in home sales prices in an other-wise booming housing market and suggest a threshold within “vulnerable” neighborhoods whereby any potential gains associated with rehabilitating existing units are offset by the increased concentration of poor residents. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Assessing the property value impacts of the dispersed subsidy housing program in Denver

We analyzed impacts on single-fam- institutional settings. As part of the nationily home prices of eleven, small-scale supportive wide “deinstitutionalization” movement housing facilities announced in Denver during beginning in the 1970s, chronically men- 1989–1995.Using a difference in differences econo- tally ill, developmentally and physically dis- metric specification, we found that these facilities abled, non-violent produced a positive impact on house prices within offenders, recovering 1,001 to 2,000 feet.We attributed this effect to coun- substance abusers, and frail elderly inditervailing externalities (building rehabilitation vs. viduals have increasingly been domiciled resident behaviors) that vary in their spatial extent. in small-scale facilities located in residen- Supportive housing facilities were systematically tial neighborhoods. This “normalization” sited in neighborhoods with declining relative of residential environment, coupled with prices compared to elsewhere in the census tract. on-site and on-call specialized care, is seen This location bias led a conventional econometric as therapeutic bymany policy makers (New- specification to erroneously estimate a negative property value impact from supportive housing.

Supportive housing and neighborhood property value externalities

Quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to investigate the extent to which proximity to 14 supportive housing facilities opening in Denver from 1992 to 1995 affects crime rates. The econo...

Peter Tatian

Papers

The impact of neighbors who use section 8 certificates on property values

Targeting Investments for Neighborhood Revitalization

Assessing the property value impacts of the dispersed subsidy housing program in Denver

Supportive housing and neighborhood property value externalities

The Impact of Supportive Housing on Neighborhood Crime Rates