George C. Galster

• PhD
• Professor at Wayne State University

Neighbourhoods are salient for many dimensions of individuals’ social and economic well-being, yet the impacts of rapidly emerging digital information and communication technologies (DICTs) on neighbourhoods and the social processes within them are understudied. This gap motivates this Special Issue, the themes of which we introduce here. We provid...

Using longitudinal register data from Oslo, Norway, this article examines how cumulative childhood exposure to family and neighbourhood contexts influences the educational attainments of young adults, paying special attention to how these determinants vary by gender and immigrant status. Specifically, we examine how neighbourhood socioeconomic and...

The urban neighbourhood – though increasingly assailed as a problematic spatial construct – still matters in contemporary societies because it is a crucial unit of reference in metropolitan housing markets. The logic is as follows. Key housing market actors – households, owners, developers, and agents – believe that the local area in which they liv...

Despite much research on the societal and individual consequences of new digital communication technologies, little attention has been paid to the neighbourhood as a locus of impact. This paper investigates how the growing influence of social media and real estate platforms will likely shape the process of neighbourhood change and the geographic di...

Identifying the determinants of social mobility for children of non-Western immigrants is of vital concern as immigration pressures grow across the West. Prior studies have minimized the role of place as one such determinant but suffers from several unsupportable assumptions. We interrogate this issue by quantifying the relative contributions made...

Substantial recent influxes of immigrants have transformed metropolitan housing markets across Europe, North America, and Australia. Where and under what physical and sociodemographic conditions these new residents and their children live influence their life chances and societal inequalities and cohesion. Using population register data, we estimat...

Regeneration is an internationally popular policy for improving distressed neighbourhoods dominated by large social housing developments. Stimulating employment is often touted as a secondary benefit, but this claim has rarely been evaluated convincingly. In 2003, Glasgow City Council transferred ownership of its entire social housing stock to the...

We investigate how childhood housing careers affect young adults’ secondary school and college educational attainments, focusing on the role played by cumulative exposure to homeownership. We analyze Norwegian census and administrative data using extensive controls for youth, household, housing, mobility, and neighborhood characteristics and employ...

Background: Federal policy has increasingly sought to build financial capability, earnings, and assets of subsidized housing recipients. Objective: We conduct a benefit-cost analysis of the Denver Housing Authority's (DHA) innovative Home Ownership Program (HOP), which incentivizes participants to increase earnings, build wealth, and purchase ho...

This article provides a holistic analysis of why and how federal assisted housing policy (specifically, public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC], and voucher programs) should be reformed in ways that would be more conducive to socially desirable outcomes at the neighborhood level. First, I argue that past research has documented mutual...

Nonlinear and threshold relationships are commonly manifested in neighborhoods, both relating to effects of neighborhoods on residents and causes of neighborhood changes arising from individual mobility and housing investment decisions. These relationships are generated by amalgam of often reinforcing processes related to socialization, gaming, tol...

This study examines what neighborhood conditions experienced at age 15 and after are associated with teen childbearing and fathering among Latino and African American youth and whether these neighborhood effects vary by gender and/or ethnicity. Administrative and survey data from a natural experiment are used for a sample of 517 Latino and African...

We investigate whether rental housing discrimination directed against 2 predominant ethnic minority groups in Sydney, Australia, is more likely to occur in neighborhoods with a particular mix of ethnicities, socioeconomic profiles, or quality of social goods and whether this geographic pattern reinforces spatial disadvantages of these minorities in...

We conduct an impact analysis of the Denver, Colorado, Housing Authority’s Home Ownership Program (HOP) employing quasi experimental methodologies (i.e., nearest-neighbor matching, inverse probability weighting with regression adjustment) that permit causal inferences of program impacts with substantial confidence. HOP is an unusual, enhanced varia...

We analyze data from a natural experiment involving Denver public housing that quasirandomly assigns low-income Latino and African American youth to neighborhoods. Intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated models reveal substantial effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and safety domains on youth and young adult educational, emplo...

This article conducts the first contextual analysis of ethnic-based discrimination in an Australian rental housing market: metropolitan Sydney. Logistic regression is employed to investigate how the likelihood of five behaviors by rental agents that may favor Anglo home seekers varies according to characteristics of the agent, home seeker, dwelling...

We quantify the relationships between measures of neighborhood context and school performance (repeating a grade, grade point average and dropping out before a diploma is earned) for low-income Latino and African American adolescents ages 12-18. We employ administrative and survey data from a natural experiment involving the Denver Housing Authorit...

Investigating differential treatment in rental housing markets is important to ensure that renters are not discriminated against based on their personal characteristics. However, little Australian research has focused systematically on this question. This paper reports the results of a study that used paired tests to estimate the extent of differen...

Do the geographic contexts in which disadvantaged children are raised influence whether they have difficulties in elementary school? We address this question by estimating Cox proportional hazard models with instrumental variable measures of context, using data for 410 low-income Latino and African American children who lived in Denver public housi...

The paper investigates the impact of ethnic segregation on the life chances of low-income African American and Latino children, focusing on whether it is the ethnic composition of the neighbourhood per se that matters or other, correlated aspects of the residential environment. The approach links the consequences of segregation and neighbourhood ef...

In this paper we advance a dual-prong method for evaluating whether data from a natural experiment can be leveraged to draw convincing implications about causal effects of neighborhood context on health. In particular, we probe a natural experiment’s ability to surmount potentially confounding measurement issues arising from geographic selection bi...

We review the longstanding dialectic that has characterized theorizing, evidence-gathering, and policy-making in the realm of neighborhood social mix, take stock of where the debate now stands, and offer suggestions of where next steps in scholarship might be most fruitful. The preponderance of plausibly causal evidence from Europe and North Americ...

We quantify how young adult employment and educational outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos relate to their adolescent neighborhood conditions. Data come from surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households who lived in public housing scattered throughout Denver County. Because DHA allocations mimic random assignment to neighb...

Using crime data over a period of a decade for Glasgow, this paper explores whether the density of prior offenders in a neighbourhoods has an influence on the propensity of others to (re) commence offending. The study shows that the number of 'newly active' offenders in a neighbourhood in the current quarter is positively associated with the densit...

An important frontier in context effects research is investigating nonlinear and threshold effects. There is ample theoretical foundation for suggesting that several endogenous social processes generate nonlinear relationships between measures of neighborhood social composition and a variety of outcomes for individual residents. There is also a gro...

In any given year, more than 6 out of 10 children in the United States are exposed to some form of violence in the neighborhood, at school, or within the home; half of these children experience polyvictimization, or exposure to multiple forms of violence. Despite widespread concern about childhood exposure to violence, researchers continue to have...

We quantify how teen employment outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos relate to their neighborhood conditions during ages 14-17. Data come from surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households who have lived in public housing scattered throughout Denver County. Because DHA household allocation mimics random assignment to neighbo...

Currently, in many Western countries there are concerns that clustering of ethnic minorities in certain parts of cities will negatively affect integration processes. However, scholarly theory and evidence on this point is mixed. We use Swedish data and conduct a panel analysis quantifying the degree to which the ethnic composition of the neighbourh...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Ideally, planners would intervene in neighborhood processes before substantial forces of decline have gained momentum. Unfortunately, currently there is no guidance about which neighborhood indicators forecast future neighborhood changes. This study seeks a neighborhood early warning indicator that is readi...

We advance scholarship related to home foreclosures and neighborhood crime by employing Granger causality tests and multilevel growth modeling with annual data from Chicago neighborhoods over the period 1998–2009. We find that completed foreclosures temporally lead property crime and not vice versa. More completed foreclosures during a year both in...

The CDBG turns 40 this year. Thus, it is an appropriate time to take stock of this important program and consider how it can be improved. The purpose of this article is to introduce what we believe to be 6 key issues that must be addressed if the program is going to live up to its full potential. Those issues concern: the continuation of the progra...

We quantify how social detachment (measured as neither working nor attending school) of low-income African-American and Latino young adults relates to their teen neighborhood conditions. Data come from retrospective surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households. Because DHA household allocation mimics quasirandom assignment to neighborhoods...

Background and Purpose The Family Self-Sufficiency program (FSS) aims to build financial, human, and social capital in households receiving housing subsidies. Authorized by the National Affordable Housing Act of 1990, FSS is a central part of federal efforts in this area. Despite the program’s longevity and importance, no research assesses its co...

We investigate spatial patterns of residential and nonresidential land use for 257 United States metropolitan areas in 1990 and 2000, measured with 14 empirical indices. We find that metropolitan areas became denser during the 1990s but developed in more sprawl-like patterns across all other dimensions, on average. By far, the largest changes in ou...

We investigate patterns of residential and nonresidential land use in 311 United States metropolitan (Extended Urban) areas in 2000 using four measures: intensity, compactness, mixing, and core-dominance. A cluster analysis revealed four distinctive groups of land use patterns: (1) Most-Intense, Least-Compact, Least-Mixed, More-Monocentric Developm...

The Denver Child Study explores the extent to which multiple dimensions of neighborhood context affect the physical and behavioral health, exposure to violence, risky behaviors, education, youth and young adult labor market outcomes, and marriage and childbearing of Latino and African-American children and youth from low-income families. The study...

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...

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 me...

The personal and social costs of concentrating low-income (typically minority) households in neighbourhoods with high proportions of similarly disadvantaged households has long been of concern in the U.S. In this chapter, Galster explores four federal housing programs tasked with reducing poverty concentrations over the last 25 years: (1) scattered...

Background and Purpose Informed by ecological systems theory, social disorganization theory and social capital theory, this study investigates the neighborhood contexts associated with running away, alcohol, tobacco and drug use, gang participation, aggressive behavior, and incarceration for a sample of low-income, Latino and African American chil...

Background and Purpose: Despite the recent proliferation of social scientific literature focusing on neighborhood effects on an array of child outcomes, little is known about the magnitude of such effects or the mechanisms by which these effects transpire across developmental stages, gender and ethnicity. In this paper, we contribute to this lite...

Background and Purpose: Informed by ecological systems theory, social disorganization theory and social capital theory, this study investigates the neighborhood contexts associated with teenage childbearing and fathering for Latino and African American adolescents who resided in Denver public housing for a substantial period of time during their...

Background and Purpose: Since the 1990s, federal housing policies expanded the opportunities available to low-income families, significantly increasing the numbers of Latino homeowners from 45% in 2000 to 50% in 2007. However, the ongoing economic and housing crises of the past few years have seen Latino homeownership rates fall below 47% by the...

The research in this article examines the effect on cnme rates of public housing transformation in Atlanta and Chicago, focusing on the neighborhoods receiving households relocated with housing vouchers. Modeling the complex relationship between voucher holder locations and crime, using quarterly data, our analysis found that cnme rates fell substa...

For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly...

This article explores immigrants' socioeconomic success consequential to their choice of neighborhood. We describe and analyze seven aspects of socioeconomic success during the 1980s for 14 immigrant groups in five metropolitan areas. Exposure indices measuring aspects of the census tracts in which these groups lived in 1980 are calculated and anal...

How will housing markets respond to increased frequency and severity of flooding expected with global climate change? Existing models yield poor predictions because they assume perfect information and rational decision-making processes in the housing market. This paper sets out a plausible alternative framework for analysing housing price responses...

Federal programs have consistently encouraged ever-lower-income households to buy homes, despite concerns about the long-term sustainability and desirability of homeownership from the perspective of wealth-building, especially since the recent housing market collapse and the epidemic of mortgage foreclosures. We ask in this paper: can very low-inco...

 Questions have been raised about the wisdom of low-income homeownership policies for many reasons. One potential reason to be skeptical: low-income homebuyers perhaps may be constrained to purchase homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is a potential problem because home purchases in such neighborhoods: (1) may limit appreciation; (2) may red...

Purpose: Federal housing policy has for many generations encouraged homeownership as an anti-poverty and asset building tool. Since the 1980s, these policies have explicitly extended this encouragement to households of ever-lower incomes. However, the explosion of home foreclosures during the past few years has raised questions about the wisdom of...

Since the term "geography of opportunity" was introduced (Galster and Killen 1995) and amplified (Briggs 2005)' there has been a groundswell of policy-oriented research related to the many facets of this issue. From the particular perspective of policies that help disadvantaged families move out of concentrated poverty neighborhoods' we must apply...

The past decades have witnessed increasing concern over the family ills engendered by neighborhoods inhabited overwhelmingly by families with limited resources. This study focuses on a different sort of residential context-neighborhoods with substantial income mixing - and the extent to which very low-income (VLI) families - those earning less than...

This article reports on the print media advertising practices of a major real estate company operating in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during 1981–1984. Statistical findings suggest that, compared to home sellers in a white neighborhood listing with this company, those in an integrated or black neighborhood could expect significantly: (1) lower frequencie...

This article discusses the appropriate measurement of neighborhood racial integration and proposes a new operational definition. A neighborhood is integrated if currently (1) its stock of households may be classified as “mixed” (no single group comprises more than 75% of the neighborhood's population), and (2) the flow of households into and out of...

This paper focuses on three areas of civil rights policy: housing, education, and employment. The authors describe the current state of discrimination and/or segregation and analyze their costs, diagnose past failures of public policies, and propose new strategies. Both antidiscrimination and prointegration policies are recommended. The authors arg...

The authors argue that race neutral policies will be inadquate to overcome the historical momentum of race conscious behaviors and stereotypes that perpetuate segregation; explicitly race conscious policies that take account of the dynamics of racial transition will be needed. Such policies are socially desirable because they break a key link in a...

This article argues that the two fundamental methodological approaches employed in the existing literature that assesses the causes of racial segregation are suspect, because each potential cause of segregation is viewed as exogenous. Recent illustrations of these approaches are provided. It is then argued that a superior way to view the causes of...

Six major challenges confront statistical researchers attempting to quantify accurately the independent effect of neighbourhood context on individuals: (1) defining the scale of neighbourhood; (2) identifying mechanisms of neighbourhood effect; (3) measuring appropriate neighbourhood characteristics; (4) measuring exposure to neighbourhood; (5) mea...

Problem: How have the main themes of housing scholarship, planning, and policy evolved since 1968, and how do they inform current scholarship?Purpose: This introduction explores how housing issues have changed over thelast 40 years, to provide a holistic context for this special issue on the future(s) of housing.Methods: I review secondary sources,...

We investigate theoretically and empirically two interrelated potential consequences of the spatial concentration of poverty: negative externalities to proximate residents (stimulation of socially harmful behaviors like crime) and property owners (reduced maintenance and, in the extreme, abandonment). Inasmuch as these consequences are capitalized...

The paper presents an analytical framework for elucidating the equity and social efficiency criteria that might be used to justify a housing policy aiming for a substantial mix of neighborhood residents by income, ethnicity and/or immigrant status. This framework permits the classification of multivariate statistical studies comprising the Western...

Many western European housing policies have tried to increase the residential mix of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Unfortunately, policymakers have given little consideration to how these groups will interact as neighbours. There are numerous theoretically grounded mechanisms by which the social mix of a neighbourhood may influence socio-eco...

Since 1992, the federal government has established regulations encouraging the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase home mortgages originated in neighborhoods traditionally underserved by financial institutions, with the aim of stimulating housing-market activity within such neighborhoods. This research tes...

During the past decade, a rapidly expanding body of empirical research has emerged that statistically links disadvantaged neighborhood environments with social and economic outcomes of low-income, minority children. Nonetheless, the mechanisms by which neighborhoods putatively affect children remain poorly understood. This article examines the perc...

1 Contact information: (1) An, xudongan@usc.edu, 213-821-1351, 213-740-0373 (fax); (2) Bostic, bostic@usc.edu, 213-740-1220, 213-740-6170 (fax). The authors are grateful for helpful comments from, and participants at 2006 Annual AREUEA meetings in Boston and the 46 th ACSP annual conference in Kansas City. We thank the USC Lusk Center for Real Esta...

Although prohibited by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, studies in the 1980s; found that racial steering by real estate agents in the U.S. was still occurring. That legislation was strengthened in 1988, but throughout the 1990s, no study examined whether these tougher strictures helped eliminate steering. In 2000, HUD and the Urban Institute c...

Using paired testing data from the 1989 and 2000 Housing Discrimination Studies (HDS) and data on fair housing enforcement activities during the 1990s in the corresponding metro areas, we investigate whether 1989-2000 changes in the metropolitan incidence of racial/ethnic discrimination correlate with fair housing enforcement activity during the 19...

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the recent spatial redistribution of the urban poor does not necessarily bode well for the future. During the 1990s, the share of metropolitan population living in census tracts with high percentages (more than 40%) of poverty indeed fell significantly, but the shares with 10% to 20% and 20% to 40% poverty rates...

The goals of public housing have evolved from providing shelter to providing opportunities for escaping from welfare and buying one's own home. Despite numerous federal policies aimed at enhancing resident self-sufficiency and homeownership through programs run by local public housing authorities, little is known about who participates and who succ...

The authors examine the longitudinal fortunes of the poorest fifth of U.S. metropolitan neighbor-hoods, defined as those with 20% or higher poverty rates in 1980. They employ logistic regression to identify the factors correlated with 1980-1990 increases and decreases in poverty rates across these poor neighborhoods and examine whether factors vary...

Three challenges confront statistical researchers of neighbourhood impacts on individual behaviours: (1) operationalising ‘neighbourhood processes’; (2) potentially non-linear relationships between neighbourhood characteristics and outcomes; and (3) the selection bias problem. To better comprehend these challenges and overcome them, the paper propo...

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...

This paper presents a comparative static analysis using a conceptual model of the social benefits and costs associated with alternative spatial distributions of the poor. This analysis demonstrates that the necessary and sufficient conditions for justifying deconcentration of the poor on the grounds of increasing net social benefits are much more s...

The Housing Discrimination Study 2000 (HDS 2000) is the third nationwide effort sponsored by HUD to measure the amount of discrimination faced by minority home seekers. This report provides national estimates of discrimination faced by African Americans and Hispanics in 2000 as they searched for housing in the sales and rental markets. It also prov...

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or it funders.

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 control...

The paper advances the conceptualisation of neighbourhood by specifying it as a bundle of spatially based attributes associated with clusters of residences, sometimes in conjunction with other land uses. There follows a discussion of how this 'composite commodity' definition relates to the planning challenge of spatially bounding neighbourhood. The...

This paper examines the results of a paired testing study of neighbourhood-based discrimination in the provision of quotes for home insurance in New York City and Phoenix, Arizona. We examine whether agents treated insurance-seekers buying their first homes in moderate-income, predominantly black or Hispanic-occupied neighbourhoods differently from...

In this article, the authors assemble, synthesize, and assess the disparate, fragmented literature concerning thresholds related to neighborhood change. They find several theories of neighborhood change that imply the existence of thresholds and identify six alternative mechanisms for generating threshold effects. They critically examine empirical...

Metzger fails to define or distinguish key concepts related to neighborhood change theories and policy and instead mischievously treats them interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. The intellectual history he presents is distorted and myopic. Unsupported assertions, distortions, and citations taken out of context characterize his use of evidence...

In this article, we investigate the threshold‐like effects of four aspects of neighborhood environment: poverty rate, adult nonemployment rate, female headship rate for families with children, and secondary school dropout rate. We used a sample consisting of virtually all census tracts from U.S. metropolitan areas. The relationship between the valu...

This study estimates the size of the potential US home owner market and examines the relative default risks associated with expanded home ownership among lower-income, 'underserved' households. Using the 1990 SIPP database, a logit model is developed that predicts the likelihood that a renter household will move into home ownership during an 18-mon...

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 located within 500 feet, we found a strong positive impact on property values in higher‐valued, real‐appreciation, predominantly white census tracts. Howe...

Several emergent theories assert that neighborhood affects immigrants’ socioeco‐nomic advancement. This study analyzes a range of demographic and socioeco‐nomic indicators for immigrants’ census tracts, summarized as exposure indices. Indicators are based on 1980 and 1990 census tract information for five major metropolitan areas. Seventeen immigra...

In recent years, US policy-makers have given increasing emphasis to geographically dispersing recipients of housing subsidies, based on the assumption that residence in concentrated poverty neighbourhoods abets socially dysfunctional be- haviours. The paper assesses this assumption, both theoretically and through a meta- analysis of extant empirica...

A model for temperature effects in p–n junction solar cells is introduced. The temperature of solar cells and the losses in the solar cell junction region caused by elevated temperatures are discussed. The model developed is examined for low-cost silicon solar cells. Plots of output power and efficiency as functions of the time throughout the day a...

This paper analyses the relative merits of demand‐side and supply‐side strategies for attacking the housing problems faced by low‐income renters. The analysis is distinctive in that it takes seriously the emerging consensus among international housing scholars about the centrality of housing quality sub‐market dynamics and spatial considerations. R...