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4 Studying the Spatial Dimensions of Mobility
Pages 35-50

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From page 35...
... (Matthew Staiger) • More policy research should focus on the active interventions that divide space and reinforce spatial stratification (e.g., home mortgage interest deduc tion, land use regulations, occupational licensing requirements, local housing decisions)
From page 36...
... One project is using social media data in order to construct neighborhood-level measures of social networks; this will allow researchers to relate measures of
From page 37...
... FIGURE 4-1 Rates of economic mobility in the United States. SOURCE: Workshop presentation by Matthew Staiger, February 14, 2022.
From page 38...
... A federal program called HOPE VI provided almost $7 billion in order to improve the living conditions of distressed public housing projects in the 1990s and 2000s. One specific project, he said, was a $20 million grant to the Dixie Homes Projects in Memphis, Tennessee.
From page 39...
... . He offered three statements that drill down into this overarching idea and that have implications for both understanding mobility and interventions directed at mobility: • Spatial advantages and disadvantages are long-term multigenera tional processes; • Spatial inequality is generated by active interventions into space; and • Mobility happens through processes that can be captured by eth nography: interactions, local social processes, turning points, shifts in mindset, and sense of identity.
From page 40...
... Instead, the combination of social policies and the persistence of segregation has led to these severe racial inequalities in neighborhood environments. The persistence of spatial inequality by race is directly linked with prospects for economic mobility, said Sharkey.
From page 41...
... "It's not an accident," said Sharkey, that children growing up in some Atlanta suburbs will grow up to make significantly more than children growing up in neighborhoods on the other side of the river. This inequality "is the result of active intervention into urban space, with the goal of dividing space, in order to hoard resources, in order to exclude disadvantaged populations, in order to reinforce spatial inequality." When researchers acknowledge that spatial inequalities are generated by active interventions in the space, said Sharkey, it becomes clear that inequality is relational; the decisions made by actors on one side of a boundary affect the outcomes on the other side of the boundary.
From page 42...
... However, systemic and institutional racism is pervasive and obvious in the "invisible places" in rural America -- for example, the South's rural Black Belt, the lower Rio Grande valley, or on Indian reservations. Rural segregation and geographic isolation in these areas are a direct result of the historical legacy of slavery, racial oppression, land grabs, conflict, and violence, and the effects persist to this day.
From page 43...
... The third reason for increased attention to rural areas, said Lichter, is the "3 Ds" of depopulation, death, and diversity: the population of rural America has declined over the past decade; "deaths of despair" are increasingly common; and a majority of the population growth over the last decade is from groups other than non-Hispanic White people. The research community, said Lichter, "must work toward mainstreaming rural-oriented work as opposed to relegating it to the backwater as unimportant or, worse, falling prey to conventional stereotypes about rural people and places." Research on rural America needs to acknowledge and examine the heterogeneity among communities, he added, sharing an old saying in the field of rural sociology: "When you've seen one rural community, you've seen one rural community." In addition, the boundaries that separate rural and urban America are "fluid and ambiguous," and research should examine the ways that urban and rural areas are interconnected in the world.
From page 44...
... However, the majority of rural people in the United States actually live in metropolitan areas -- these rural metropolitan people create "lots of conceptual confusion." Furthermore, the administrative boundaries that define rural and urban places change over time; this can create significant problems in longitudinal research. Researchers need to consider, said Lichter, how to define and categorize rural areas, including whether to divide and count by rural region, commuting zone, or rural neighborhood.
From page 45...
... Private Data A workshop participant asked Staiger about the potential role for leveraging cell phone GPS data or other private data to understand processes related to mobility. Staiger responded that there is "enormous potential" in the data owned by private companies, particularly in terms of understanding the role of neighborhoods in shaping economic mobility.
From page 46...
... Sharkey agreed that there are mechanisms that can contribute to families sharing networks that can support people during difficult times and on which they can rely to stay in school or purchase a house, and so on. However, he said, there is a broader shift of rising inequality across regions, and the chances for upward mobility are now based on where a person spends the early part of their life.
From page 47...
... Although many speakers made the point that neighborhoods matter, said Small, he asked them to elaborate on why neighborhoods matter -- what are the specific mechanisms that create advantage or disadvantage in mobility? Sharkey listed a number of neighborhood factors related to mobility, including violence, pollutants in water and air, and exposure to lead.
From page 48...
... They have used these data to examine the issue of police violence by looking at the resources of local police departments across urban area commuting zones. Sharkey explained that communities with few resources and high levels of violence may struggle more with police violence than neighborhoods with a higher property tax base and more resources.
From page 49...
... (Staiger) • Students need rigorous training in areas including big data, data science, and ethnographic research.


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