This article uses the unique case of low-income renters who have participated in tenant rights education to understand how an increased understanding of their rights and responsibilities shaped tenant strategies for addressing destabilizing housing conditions. We find that tenants varied in their responses with some demanding repairs or rent reductions and others resigning themselves to their housing situations. This variation was not random: the strategies tenants adopted after rights education reflect social vulnerabilities, particularly the formality of rental arrangements and legal status to live in the United States. Tenants incorporated what they learned into their plans for next steps which helped some avoid, or at least delay, displacement in the short term and improved their capacity to advocate for repairs. However, tenants with multiple social vulnerabilities or whose situations fall in legal gray areas were resigned to their situations. They avoided displacement but that avoidance came at the cost of requesting repairs or contesting unfair rent increases. A subset of tenants felt no need to alter how they approached housing issues but planned to use the information in the future, either for themselves or others in their community. Tenant rights education influences strategizing for low-income renters in positive ways, but to truly disrupt housing precarity, rights education must be combined with ongoing legal support and policies that reduce rent burdens.
Research on group threat has identified the racial composition of neighborhoods as significant for understanding spatial variation in racial bias and discrimination. A distinct but related strand of research has found disproportionate rates of arrests of non-Whites in predominantly White neighborhoods. This past work has generally operationalized racial composition in residential terms. Here, I explore the role of the racial composition of everyday mobility patterns in predicting racial threat. I propose that just as White neighborhoods experiencing growing non-White residential populations exhibit patterns of group threat, the same dynamic may occur in White neighborhoods experiencing large influxes of non-White everyday visitors. Drawing on arrests and cell phone mobility data from New York City, I find that in predominantly White neighborhoods, Black arrest rates are 150 percent higher when the share of Black visitors exceeds the share of Black residents by 10 percentage points. Similar but smaller patterns also appear for Hispanic visitors and Hispanic arrests. These heightened inflows of non-White visitors into these predominantly White “threatened” neighborhoods help explain why predominantly White neighborhoods sometimes exhibit especially elevated non-White arrest rates. Overall, this study offers a novel perspective on how policing practices intersect with the racialized control of space in urban environments.
This study seeks to investigate the ways in which local religious institutions shape mechanisms of informal social control within one of the largest Arab ethnic enclave communities in the northeastern United States, where a high concentration of working-class Muslim immigrants reside. The study draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 58 first- and second-generation Muslim-Arab immigrants and 10 community agency members who work in local institutions. The findings reveal the pivotal role two local mosques played in facilitating and mobilizing collective efficacy among Muslim residents to confront neighborhood crime. In addition to promoting social organization and boosting various levels of social control within the community (e.g., private, parochial, public), the analysis shows that local mosques also contributed to the physical revitalization of the Arab neighborhood by investing in vacant land and run-down properties, further improving the physical and economic conditions in and around the ethnic enclave. This study extends the immigrant revitalization perspective by elucidating the distinct ways in which the spatial concentration of Muslim immigrants, along with their religious institutions, can reshape disadvantaged urban spaces.
Sociologists have long debated whether the concentration of immigrants in some neighborhoods exacerbates or mitigates disadvantage. This study extends this inquiry to investigate residential stability in poor immigrant neighborhoods. Quantitative analyses show that poor immigrant neighborhoods nationwide have an eviction rate 26 percent lower than similarly poor non-immigrant neighborhoods. Ninety in-depth interviews with landlords and tenants in two neighborhoods, Boston's Chinatown and Houston's Gulfton, demonstrate how co-ethnic owners and property managers engage in informal practices that provide flexibility to households at risk of displacement. However, in Chinatown's enclave housing market, efforts by co-ethnic landlords and community organizations further suppress rents; in Gulfton's secondary immigrant housing market, low rents (and low evictions) come at the cost of dilapidated housing. This article connects immigration and housing studies by underscoring how the protective qualities of some poor immigrant neighborhoods extend to housing dynamics, shielding their residents from evictions in a precarious housing market.
This article examines how people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles navigate prolonged waiting for permanent housing within a highly constrained and opaque service system. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show that enrollment in housing waiting pools often signals formal inclusion but rarely results in housing, producing instead varied strategies of waiting rather than reliable pathways to placement. Participants respond to this uncertainty through practices such as bypassing queues, hustling staff, and performing compliance with service requirements-strategies shaped by unequal resources and prior exposure to homelessness services. Rather than determining housing outcomes, these practices shape how clients become legible to street-level bureaucrats and influence staff perceptions and patterns of engagement under conditions of scarcity. By situating waiting as a relational and administrative process, this article contributes an analytic framework for understanding how urban service systems reproduce inequality through the management of time.
How does real estate development relate to order maintenance policing patterns? I argue that real estate developers influence low-level policing to protect their investments, tracing the history of funding and financial incentives to police redevelopment. I use development permits as a tangible metric of spatially rooted investment and construct a dataset of census tracts in New York City from 2009 to 2019. I find that areas with more new residential development are associated with more order maintenance arrests in the following year, net of crime, calls to police, and area demographics. This relationship is largest for corporate-owned redevelopment, suggesting that increasing corporatization may uniquely relate to policing patterns. I find that this relationship is present not only in areas at risk of gentrification, but also in wealthier and Whiter tracts, where development-directed policing functions to protect increasing investment in already-wealthy areas. Spatial Durbin models show that redevelopment may have an even greater effect on the policing patterns in the surrounding area. By quantifying the influence of physical reinvestment on disorder policing, this article highlights the relationship between urban economic investment and formal social control.
In 1979, a group of men incarcerated in New York state (NYS) prisons analyzed the relationship between neighborhoods and incarceration, finding that 75 percent of the NYS prisons' population came from just seven neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). Inspired by this study, we combine novel archival data with census tract imprisonment data to examine the geography of incarceration in more recent years. Our findings reveal a marked spatial deconcentration of imprisonment since the original study. By 2020, 75 percent of people imprisoned in NYS came from 1,551 census tracts-far exceeding the spatial area covered by the original seven neighborhoods containing about 300 tracts. Using spatial lag regression and cluster analysis, we identify over 20 cities with significantly high imprisonment rate clusters. Despite this geographic shift, some tracts within the original seven neighborhoods continue to have among the highest incarceration rates in the state. Our findings both challenge existing urban theories linking concentrated punishment to urban metros and highlight the durability of punishment vulnerability in place.
This article looks at the beautification efforts undertaken in South Central Los Angeles by TreePeople, an environmental organization promoting the creation of urban forests in public spaces. Based on a variety of primary sources such as memos, correspondence, documentary photographs, and newspaper cuttings, the article reveals how community organizers have crafted discourses on neighborhood management to a broader neoliberal agenda, for which crime prevention policies and the regulation of the social order in inner city neighborhoods are paramount. The tree-planting activity organized on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on Saturday, January 13, 1990, epitomizes the rationalization of public space through incentives concerned with the well-being, personal development, and character building of community members. In sum, the article demonstrates how community organizers promoted personal responsibility over government intervention to tackle an urban environment defined as inherently violent, while organizing the management and discipline of poverty through local politics of urban forestry.
Refugees in the United States are being resettled in low-income urban neighborhoods with long histories of housing instability and racialized poverty, and where struggles over inequality and belonging shape everyday experiences. While prior research emphasizes the structural challenges refugees face and their strategies of legal and social claims-making, few studies explore how these processes unfold within urban housing systems where race and space are deeply contested. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Syrian refugees in northern New Jersey, this study shows how refugees navigate racialized housing institutions and mobilize collective claims for improved living conditions. Newly arriving refugees, like their long-term minoritized neighbors, encountered persistent barriers to safe and affordable housing. With nonprofit support, refugee families pursuing legal claims against exploitative landlords built alliances with other marginalized tenants, resisting housing inequality and challenging their incorporation into racialized urban poverty. By tracing these everyday collaborations, the study reveals how interracial alliances emerge through shared struggles, reshaping race relations and creating spaces where refugees expand agency, build collective belonging, and contest the intertwined inequalities of race, space, and place. These findings uncover an alternative pathway to integration rooted not only in formal state resources but also in grassroots interracial collaboration within marginalized urban communities.
This article leverages the quasi-random assignment of college roommates among freshmen enrolled at a large university in the Northeast between 2012 and 2016 to examine how the racial and ethnic background of first-year roommates shapes subsequent residential choices. Specifically, we investigate the influence of freshman-year roommate composition on the racial and ethnic diversity of students' sophomore-year dorm rooms and their post-graduation neighborhoods. Our findings indicate that students randomly assigned to a roommate of a different race or ethnicity are more than twice as likely to live in a racially and ethnically diverse dorm room during their sophomore year compared to those who elect to live with a roommate from the same racial and ethnic background as themselves. However, we find limited evidence that these early residential experiences influence levels of diversity in the neighborhoods students elect to live in after graduation. Overall, these results offer mixed support for the contact hypothesis.
Social movement scholarship on the emergence of protest has limited engagement with urban scholarship on the spatial production of social relations. Spatial characteristics related to urban form may determine where and how often people gather to protest. This study examines walkability as an urban design feature that may increase protest frequency. Using the 2020 George Floyd protests in the United States, I conduct an empirical between-city case study through a series of negative binomial regressions. I pay particular attention to protests which take place in the public forum, defined as sites which, for symbolic and traditional reasons, are likely to be favored by protestors. Walkability is found to be associated with higher protest frequency both at the citywide and census tract level. Moreover, among cenus tracts, this association holds true in separate analyses of public forum and non-public forum sites. These findings give empirical credence to longstanding theories about the importance of spatial factors in shaping urban social movements and suggest that movement scholars should account for built environment factors when predicting protest. I call attention to several theoretical pathways which, through future research, should be tested as potential causal factors underpinning the relationship observed in this study.
Placemaking is a vaguely defined yet ubiquitous activity of urban development. It comprises a professional field encompassing experts, technical discourses, canonical texts, and even academic programs. This article suggests that placemaking's popularity signals the growing complexity of the community development field and the political coalitions required for housing and neighborhood development in U.S. cities. Using Detroit as a case study, I examine how two distinct development coalitions downtown and in a residential neighborhood coalesced around different placemaking approaches, conceptualized as an economic development versus community development frame. The result of both efforts is similar: a narrow view of development prevailed, channeling placemaking processes into well-known urban development strategies. The urge to involve the community in decision-making comes at a time when issues of urban inequality have gained prominence in public discourse. Yet, city officials, non- and for-profit developers, community advocates, and "engagement professionals" operate within a state and federal competitive grant system that prioritizes lower-income neighborhoods located near stronger housing and land markets, raising concerns around displacement. Placemaking effectively minimizes this tension by symbolically elevating the local histories and affective ties of longtime residents while promoting market-aligned development.
Residents of two Midwestern, post-industrial communities use absent objects, and specifically industrial transportation infrastructures, in their narratives of place and meaning. Drawing from 35 interviews, as well as archival documents and ethnographic research, I find that speakers repeatedly discussed trains and ships when prompted to make sense of present-day economic hardship. Industrial transportation infrastructures emerged as a category of analysis applied by interviewees themselves-a representation of both acute experiences and of the chronic structural and cultural marginalization brought about by deindustrialization. Bringing narrative and infrastructure studies into conversation with structural and cultural strands of deindustrialization research, I suggest that study participants leverage declined infrastructural systems as narrative props-objects used to tell a meaningful story-to articulate how legacies of structural disinvestment impact their communities. This article shows how lived experiences and contemporary interpretations of large-scale political economic processes can be mediated through the material residues of infrastructural decline.
