Neighborhood Stability & Change: Unbundling the Dynamics of Place and Race in Los Angeles 1940-2000

Urban economics and sociology offer many narratives to explain the evolution ofurban America since the Second World War. These stories include the rise and fall ofsegregation, the inexorable march of the middle class to the suburbs, the ¯ltering ofaging housing stock from one class to the next, deindustrialization and the accompa-nying loss of jobs for blue-collar workers, \tipping" models, and others. Where theremay be empirical support for their existence in some aggregate sense, their ability toexplain the evolution of urban areas appears to be greatly enhanced through theirinteraction along several of the dimensions by which neighborhoods are de¯ned. Weargue that the post-War metropolis is a highly dynamic environment in which wavesof people move through places with their own dynamic. We ask: how do places andpeople interact? We work systematically with three dimensions of census tract datafrom Los Angeles County over a 60-year sample period { race/ethnicity, human capi-tal, and ground rent. Our initial ¯ndings show the great importance of understandingneighborhood characteristics in the metropolitan and historical contexts. And whilewe use census tract data like most other urban social scientists, we argue that the trueobject of inquiry is the neighborhood. Neighborhoods, like census tracts, never changelocation. But neighborhood types do change locations in various times, and we haveto make a clear distinction between the neighborhoods (unique, immobile) and thetypes (general, mobile). Using case studies of segregation and tipping, we find that thereceived wisdom about both can be significantly augmented by our approach.