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| Peter Rosenblatt http://www.luc.edu/sociology/faculty/peterrosenblattphd.shtml |
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| Stefanie A. Deluca http://soc.jhu.edu/directory/stefanie-a-deluca/ |
The death
of Freddie Gray in April 2015 sparked unrest in Baltimore and drew
international attention to issues of race, police brutality and urban poverty. Efforts
to understand what happened have led some to look at Sandtown-Winchester, the
poor and segregated neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived. Two decades ago, Sandtown was the site of one
of the largest community development efforts in U.S. history. Our article examines
the long-term impacts of the Sandtown-Winchester Neighborhood Transformation
Initiative (NTI), which marshalled more than $130 million in public and private
funding, and worked with residents to improve housing, employment, and
educational opportunities in the neighborhood.
Nearly 20
years after the reforms began, we found that homeownership had increased
significantly in Sandtown, from fewer than one-quarter to more than 40 percent
of families in the neighborhood. Our analysis suggests that this increase is
likely due to the NTI. Yet our findings also highlight the continued challenges
facing the neighborhood: we found weak impacts of education reforms in the
local schools, and no impact of the NTI on the long-term neighborhood poverty
rate. The neighborhood unemployment rate, while a strikingly high 19.3% at the
end of the 2000s, was lower than it might have otherwise been according to our
analysis.
Our
findings highlight the importance of rigorously evaluating community change
initiatives. Programs like the NTI, which seek to improve the neighborhoods in
which poor families live, are rarely evaluated in ways that allow us to
separate their impacts from changes that might have occurred in the absence of
the program. This contrasts with policies that provide low-income families with
resources to live in more affluent neighborhoods, such as Moving to Opportunity,
which receive greater research attention and scrutiny regarding their ability
to affect changes in the lives of those they are meant to help. Our article
uses statistical methods (propensity score matching) to carefully select a
group of comparison neighborhoods that were similar to Sandtown before any of
the reforms began, and looks at outcomes over time in both Sandtown and these comparison
neighborhoods. This allows us to distinguish between changes in Sandtown that
might be related to broader economic or political forces, and those that were
likely brought about by the NTI.
Our
article also underscores the potential pitfalls of redevelopment efforts that
focus heavily on increasing homeownership in low-income communities. Homeownership
potentially allows families to build wealth, and is especially significant in
African-American neighborhoods like Sandtown that have been plagued by
systematic disinvestment due to redlining and lending discrimination. Yet
strategies to create homeownership opportunities in such neighborhoods can be
problematic for individual families if the rest of the neighborhood does not
experience sustained improvement, anchoring families to communities with
below-average schools and leaving them vulnerable to foreclosure.
As we
continue to look for answers for what happened in Baltimore, it is instructive
to understand past attempts to ameliorate urban disadvantage. Our article acknowledges the methodological
challenges of evaluating community initiatives, and shows the difficulties of
overcoming the many disadvantages that accrue in poor and racially segregated
neighborhoods. Further research on community development programs can help us
develop policies to preserve inner city communities and increase the scope of
benefits to extend to families living in them.
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