Patrick Sharkey - Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality

Patrick Sharkey is associate professor of sociology at New York University and an affiliated member of the faculty at the Robert F. Wagner School for Public Service.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92424-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92425-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92426-7 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92424-6 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92425-4 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92426-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

Sharkey, Patrick

Stuck in place : urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality / by Patrick Sharkey.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92424-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92424-6 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92425-0 (paperback : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92425-4 (paperback : alkaline paper)

[etc.]

1. African American neighborhoodsSocial aspects. 2. African American neighborhoodsEconomic aspects. 3. Urban African AmericansSocial conditions. 4. Urban African AmericansCivil rights. 5. Discrimination in housingUnited States. 6. EqualityUnited States. I. Title.

E185.86.S514 2012

323.1196 073dc23

2012017909

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Stuck in Place

Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality

PATRICK SHARKEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

This project evolved in several stages, and I received a tremendous amount of feedback and support at each stage. The idea for the project emerged when I was in graduate school. While reading the literature on intergenerational economic mobility, I wondered why there was no equivalent research on mobility into and out of poor and affluent neighborhoods across generations. I brought the question to the three faculty members who had given me the most guidance while I was at HarvardRobert Sampson, William Julius Wilson, and Chris Winshipand they all agreed that it was an important gap in the literature. That was the beginning of my dissertation.

Since those initial meetings, these three advisers and mentors have spent much more time responding to my questions, thoughts, and ideas than I deserve. Bill Wilson, whose research on urban poverty inspired me to become a sociologist, provided extensive feedback and pushed me to think more broadly about the implications of my findings for understanding racial inequality in America. Chris Winship spent hours with me discussing tricky methodological issues, conceptual problems, and strategies for refining and improving the analyses I was proposing. I thank them both for their insight, for their advice and suggestions, and for their support throughout graduate school and beyond.

Rob Sampson was the chair of my dissertation committee. When I heard Rob was coming to Harvard, a year after I had arrived to begin grad school, I was thrilledbut I had no idea what an impact he would have on my development as a sociologist. This book, along with all of my work, bears the unmistakable imprint of the countless conversations I have had with Rob discussing ideas, planning courses, puzzling over methods, and interpreting results. Many of the ideas that I put forth in the book are influenced by his research, by the collaborative research we have conducted together, and by the feedback that Rob has given me throughout the development of the manuscript. I am enormously grateful for his mentorship.

Beyond my three advisers, I was lucky enough to be able to interact with a group of thoughtful and incisive people while completing my graduate work. Christopher Jencks and Jim Quane were particularly helpful in guiding my thinking throughout the early stages of the project, and I benefited tremendously from the feedback of other faculty, researchers, and peers during (and after) graduate school, including Corina Graif, David Harding, Joel Horwich, Elisabeth Jacobs, Pam Joshi, Therese Leung, Jal Mehta, Pam Metz, Bikila Ochoa, Jennifer Sykes-McLaughlin, Laura Tach, Chris Wimer, and Scott Winship.

When I finished my doctoral work the strongest parts of the project were the descriptive analyses demonstrating the degree to which neighborhood inequality is passed on across generations. My committee members urged me to make it something more, and it was only after I left grad school that I began to focus primary attention on the consequences of persistent neighborhood inequality. I spent two years in the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program at Columbia University, pushing this project forward and beginning new lines of research as well. During this period I received excellent advice and feedback on the project from Peter Bearman and Bruce Link, and I was able to draw on the knowledge and the ideas of a wonderful and diverse group of fellow scholars in the program and faculty at Columbia, including jimi adams, Lisa Bates, Maria Glymour, Gina Lovasi, Kathy Neckerman, Ezra Susser, and Julien Teitler. I thank them all.

I began an extended collaboration with my friend Felix Elwert during this time as well. Felix and I spent several years coming up with a strategy that would allow us to identify the effect of living in poor neighborhoods over multiple generations. This collaboration resulted in the analyses that are presented in of the book and also in a stand-alone journal article published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2011. It has been a tremendous experience to work with Felix, and our conversations have been crucial in refining my thinking about the cumulative effects of neighborhood poverty. We benefited also from the thoughts and comments of David Harding, Robert Mare, Steve Raudenbush, and Geoff Wodtke, all of whom provided important feedback on this part of the project.

When I finished my fellowship and began teaching at New York University, the book project was much more expansive than when I left graduate school, but it was not complete. One of the central questions that remained underdeveloped was What next? That is, how can public policies disrupt or confront the problem of multigenerational neighborhood disadvantage? In considering this question, I was heavily influenced by the thoughts of Larry Aber, a colleague and mentor at NYU. Hoping to take advantage of Larrys expertise on issues surrounding neighborhood inequality, child development, and public policy, I asked him if he would be willing to read the concluding chapter of the manuscript. When we met a few weeks later, Larry had read the entire manuscript and had an array of ideas and questions about the overarching argument of the book and about specific sections, paragraphs, and sentences throughout the book. I am extremely grateful to Larry for his willingness to read the book and share his thoughts with me, which were highly influential in the revision process and in the writing of the concluding chapter.

My colleagues in the Sociology Department at NYU also have been remarkably generous in offering their feedback on different pieces of the manuscript. In particular, Richard Arum, Dalton Conley, Steven Lukes, Gerald Marwell, Harvey Molotch, Caroline Persell, Florencia Torche, and Larry Wu have, at various points, provided specific ideas or comments that have stuck in my mind and made their way into the book, in one form or another. Others have provided similarly important comments in informal conversations or during presentations of the research; these others include Xavier de Souza Briggs, Tom Cook, Kathy Edin, Herbert Gans, Michael Hout, and Loic Wacquant. I thank all of these individuals for contributing to the final product.