On his book Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves
Cover Interview of August 07, 2019
In a nutshell
Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves presents
a holistic analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood
change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of
neighborhoods in America. The foundational proposition of this book is: we
make our neighborhoods and then they make us. That is, our collective actions
in metropolitan housing submarkets regarding where we live and invest
financially and socially will determine what characteristics our neighborhoods
will manifest and how they will evolve. In turn, these multidimensional
neighborhood characteristics influence our attitudes, perceptions, behaviors,
health, quality of life, financial well-being, children’s development, and
families’ opportunities for social advancement. The book advances a model of
understanding the causes and effects of neighborhood dynamics through the lens
of metropolitan housing market demands and supplies.
Unfortunately, the private, market-oriented decision-makers
now governing human and financial resource flows among American neighborhoods
usually arrive at inefficient and inequitable outcomes from the perspective of
the larger society. Inefficient resource allocations arise due to
externalities, strategic gaming, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Externalities
are actions by investors that create benefits or costs to their neighbors that
they do not consider when deciding whether to undertake the action. For
example, homeowners do not consider how under-maintaining their homes harms the
values of property owners nearby. Strategic gaming occurs in situations where
investors’ payoffs from property improvements depend heavily upon whether
neighboring investors undertake similar actions and what these investors will
do is uncertain. Few investors will choose to be the first to renovate their
dwelling in a deteriorated neighborhood when they worry that no one else will
follow suit. Thus, each waits for the other to assume the risk of taking the
lead, so no one renovates. Self-fulfilling prophecies occur when people react
to an expected neighborhood change in ways that actually encourage that change
to occur. For instance, if whites anticipate that their home values will fall
if many nonwhites move into the neighborhood and react by trying to sell their
properties at discounts, they will create the very situation they feared. These
various forms of market failure systematically produce too-little housing
investment in many places and too much segregation by race and income. This
means that the current characteristics of neighborhoods are inefficient form a
society-wide perspective.
Moreover, lower-income, black and Hispanic households and
property owners typically bear a disproportionate share of the costs associated
with under-investment, segregation and neighborhood transition processes, while
reaping comparatively little of their benefits. Because neighborhood context
powerfully affects children, youth and adults—yet neighborhood contexts are
extremely unequal across economic and racial groups—space becomes a way of
perpetuating unequal opportunities for social advancement. This means that neighborhoods
are inequitable form a society-wide perspective.
To remedy these substantial market failures to provide
efficient and equitable neighborhoods, I provide a comprehensive set of
neighborhood-supportive public policies and programs in the domains of physical
quality, economic diversity, and racial diversity. These initiatives should be
guided by the principle of strategic targeting. This means that the public
sector must use its scarce resources in a spatially focused, concentrated way
such that it leverages substantial private investment and encourages households
and investors to pursue the same ends as the policy.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Making Our Neighborhoods, Making Our Selves presents a holistic analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of neighborhood change and offers strategies for making a more socially desirable palette of neighborhoods in America. The foundational proposition of this book is: we make our neighborhoods and then they make us. That is, our collective actions in metropolitan housing submarkets regarding where we live and invest financially and socially will determine what characteristics our neighborhoods will manifest and how they will evolve. In turn, these multidimensional neighborhood characteristics influence our attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, health, quality of life, financial well-being, children’s development, and families’ opportunities for social advancement. The book advances a model of understanding the causes and effects of neighborhood dynamics through the lens of metropolitan housing market demands and supplies.
Unfortunately, the private, market-oriented decision-makers now governing human and financial resource flows among American neighborhoods usually arrive at inefficient and inequitable outcomes from the perspective of the larger society. Inefficient resource allocations arise due to externalities, strategic gaming, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Externalities are actions by investors that create benefits or costs to their neighbors that they do not consider when deciding whether to undertake the action. For example, homeowners do not consider how under-maintaining their homes harms the values of property owners nearby. Strategic gaming occurs in situations where investors’ payoffs from property improvements depend heavily upon whether neighboring investors undertake similar actions and what these investors will do is uncertain. Few investors will choose to be the first to renovate their dwelling in a deteriorated neighborhood when they worry that no one else will follow suit. Thus, each waits for the other to assume the risk of taking the lead, so no one renovates. Self-fulfilling prophecies occur when people react to an expected neighborhood change in ways that actually encourage that change to occur. For instance, if whites anticipate that their home values will fall if many nonwhites move into the neighborhood and react by trying to sell their properties at discounts, they will create the very situation they feared. These various forms of market failure systematically produce too-little housing investment in many places and too much segregation by race and income. This means that the current characteristics of neighborhoods are inefficient form a society-wide perspective.
Moreover, lower-income, black and Hispanic households and property owners typically bear a disproportionate share of the costs associated with under-investment, segregation and neighborhood transition processes, while reaping comparatively little of their benefits. Because neighborhood context powerfully affects children, youth and adults—yet neighborhood contexts are extremely unequal across economic and racial groups—space becomes a way of perpetuating unequal opportunities for social advancement. This means that neighborhoods are inequitable form a society-wide perspective.
To remedy these substantial market failures to provide efficient and equitable neighborhoods, I provide a comprehensive set of neighborhood-supportive public policies and programs in the domains of physical quality, economic diversity, and racial diversity. These initiatives should be guided by the principle of strategic targeting. This means that the public sector must use its scarce resources in a spatially focused, concentrated way such that it leverages substantial private investment and encourages households and investors to pursue the same ends as the policy.