Social scientists and urban planners have long assumed poor neighborhoods are "under-retailed." A recent national study, however, finds that high-poverty neighborhoods actually have higher access to basic goods and services. This counter-intuitive pattern, the investigators hypothesize, is a legacy of historical patterns of urban development, in which low-income city residents lived mostly in older, denser, mixed-use neighborhoods. If this is so, changes in residential patterns due to gentrification or housing policy could alter these patterns of access to stores and services. The researchers will investigate the role of the built environment in patterns of spatial accessibility by race and poverty in New York City. Their research combines data on business locations from the Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) database for 1992 and 2001 with detailed small-area measures from the US Census and local government. Using a kernel density approach, they will describe race/ethnic and economic differences in accessibility. The influence of market factors, immigrant composition, and built environment characteristics will be assessed through cross-sectional spatial regressions. By comparing patterns and determinants of retail density in 1992 and 2001, they will show how race/ethnic and economic differences in accessibility have changed over time and explore the role of gentrification and public policies in the area of assisted housing and economic development. The research will provide new empirical evidence about differential access to goods and services in American cities, expanding scholarly understanding of the mechanisms through which neighborhoods shape opportunity. More broadly, the project will also inform sociological debates about the consequences of race/ethnic and economic segregation, and about the spatial scale of urban social and economic processes. This work will have a broader impact by showing how a variety of policies, such as zoning, investments in transportation infrastructure, and economic development and housing policy, affect spatial accessibility. These results will inform policy priorities for addressing disparities in neighborhood access to retail and consumer services and improving the life chances of city residents.
