Urban Policy and Community Development
Program

IPR’s urban policy and community development faculty examine the shifting landscape of urban life, considering myriad issues related to today’s urban experience. Additionally, many IPR faculty work on projects that are closely tied to urban policy in areas such as education, housing, welfare reform, community policing, and philanthropy.

Overview of Activities

Urban Issues in France and the United States

IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook, OSC Director Alain Chenu (l.), and faculty co-organizers Lincoln Quillian of IPR and Marco Oberti of OSC welcome participants to a joint workshop on cross-national urban issues at Sciences Po in Paris.

IPR faculty are examining common issues of urban poverty, education, and housing in collaboration with scholars from Sciences Po, one of France’s most influential universities, and in particular, one of its major research institutes, Observatoire Sociologique de Changement (OSC). In summer 2010, 15 IPR faculty and Northwestern graduate students traveled to Paris for a two-day workshop on “City and Schools.”

During the panel on housing, segregation, and data collection, IPR sociologist Lincoln Quillian presented preliminary results from his model of household relocation decisions, which links the choice to household and neighborhood characteristics. The model includes housing and demographic data from the U.S. census that many researchers in France have historically been barred from collecting. OSC researcher Mirna Safi described how research trends in France are changing, with better data collection and more attention paid to inequality, rather than just assimilation, in French immigration studies. Northwestern
graduate student Elizabeth Onasch presented her study on debate following a proposal, eventually struck down, to allow French researchers to collect race and ethnicity data.

On a panel on school choice, IPR education economist David Figlio shared results from his study of Florida’s school voucher program, indicating that public schools that faced increased competition to keep students improved their test scores slightly after the voucher program was introduced. OSC education researcher Agnès van Zanten painted a sociological portrait of middle-class parents, mindful of being in the “right school,” who employ informal “hot knowledge” networks to validate housing and school choices. OSC doctoral student Mathieu Ichou showed that low-income immigrant parents in France are as equally engaged as their middle-class counterparts in their children’s schooling.

Another panel looking at schools and meritocracy included a review by education researcher and IPR associate James Spillane of his work on organizational routines as key mechanisms by which school leaders attempt to link administrative goals and classroom instruction. Marie Duru-Bellat, an OSC sociologist, talked about how the increase in postsecondary degrees in Europe does not necessarily lead to better outcomes and can reflect social rigidity. IPR education researcher James Rosenbaum discussed how well-intentioned high school counselors create “hidden stratification” by recommending college programs with 80-percent failure rates to low-achieving students, instead of more realistic options.

Moving to housing, segregation, and inequalities, OSC professor emeritus Edmond Préteceille pointed to his research showing that, contrary to what the media report, most French immigrants live in predominantly white areas. OSC postdoctoral researcher Bruno Cousin discussed how upper-middle class Parisians are segregating themselves into enclaves on the west side of the city. IPR graduate research assistant Hisham Petry demonstrated a spatial modeling software he developed to explore the persistence of U.S. academic achievement gaps.

IPR associate John Hagan, a sociologist and law professor, presented his research on the 10 to 20 percent of U.S. children who have a parent that is incarcerated while they are in elementary school. This situation exerts a major roadblock for children to reach higher education and improve their socioeconomic status. Linking education and criminal records for 4,000 young adolescents, OSC researcher Hugues Lagrange showed that failed social integration was a likely reason behind higher rates of criminal behavior among those with Sahel—and, to a lesser extent, North African—origins. Northwestern graduate student Robert Vargas presented his analysis of peer interactions in three Mexican American adolescent groups, showing how status and power dependency help insulate them from ridicule, teasing, and peer pressure.

During another panel on social mobility, IPR developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale presented a new framework for simultaneously advancing the education of low-income children and their parents, whereby early childhood education centers serve as the access point for promoting the parents’ postsecondary attainment. Examining U.S.-French master’s degrees between 1970 and 2008, OSC sociologist Louis Chauvel links returns on investments in education with generational and social mobility, finding a decline in returns on French “educational assets” as compared with the United States. OSC graduate student Jules Naudet explored how a French or American’s ethnic, racial, class, and national identity can have an impact on experiences of social success.

The workshop was co-organized by Quillian and Figlio with OSC’s Marco Oberti. A second workshop is planned for summer 2011 at Northwestern.

Racial Segregation in U.S. Cities
Housing trends in many U.S. cities clearly reflect decades of racial segregation. But why do current residents continue to relocate along racial lines? Quillian is examining the modern-day causes of urban racial segregation in a new project with Elizabeth Bruch of the University of Michigan. One hypothesis is that a community’s racial make-up directly affects the decision to move—or not to move—to a certain community, either due to prejudice or a preference for living among neighbors of one’s own race. A second hypothesis is that race only appears to matter because it is associated with other characteristics that do matter to households, such as school quality or poverty and crime rates.

To test these hypotheses, Quillian and Bruch have developed new methods for modeling residential mobility across neighborhoods. Their conditional logit model incorporates multiple characteristics of destination neighborhoods, thus improving the model’s capacity for realism in replicating residential decision making. Preliminary results suggest that racial composition is a major factor in residential mobility decisions, even controlling for housing prices, economic status, and other factors of the destination communities. The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Effects of Mixed-Income Housing
Since the 1990s, the philosophy of U.S. housing policy has been steadily moving away from the creation of low-income high-rises to construction of more mixed-income housing. Still, little is known about how the burgeoning of mixed-income developments is playing out in cities across the nation. Quillian is a core researcher on one longitudinal study that seeks to place mixed-income housing in its broader social context. With sociologists Robert Sampson of Harvard and Robert Mare of the University of California, Los Angeles, he will help conduct a study of the long-term effects of mixed-income housing on families and neighborhoods. The project is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It was designed in part from the recommendations of the Mixed-Income Housing Group, an interdisciplinary circle of scholars organized by the Social Science Research Council with MacArthur Foundation support to devise an agenda for future research on mixed-income housing. Quillian was a member of that exploratory research group, along with sociologist Mary Pattillo and economist Greg Duncan, both IPR associates.

Pattillo also continues to examine the mixed blessings of mixed-income neighborhoods with her study of the historic rise, alarming fall, and dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood/Oakland community. This work highlights common disputes between haves and have-nots, homeowners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification.

Privatization of Public Housing
Ten years ago, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) launched its “Plan for Transformation” and began demolishing densely populated, public housing high-rises across the city. Since then, 25,000 public housing units in Chicago have disappeared. So where are those residents now? IPR social policy professor Dan Lewis seeks to answer that question through a new study of the privatization of public housing, funded by an IPR seed grant.

The main goal of the CHA plan was to replace the old housing projects with a combination of mixed-income housing, scattered-site housing, and Housing Choice Vouchers (formerly known as Section 8). Over the last decade, much of this ambitious plan has been implemented, but its success is still under debate. Lewis plans to interview residents of one of Chicago’s last remaining large-scale, public housing sites and follow their moves and housing choices to assess the impact of the CHA plan.

Challenges of Research-Police Partnerships
To improve police policies and practices, researchers and practitioners must work toward a shared understanding of when and how particular data and research efforts can be used. IPR political scientist Wesley G. Skogan draws on his years of experience working with the Chicago Police Department to establish some guidelines for building more effective research-police partnerships.

In exchange for granting researchers access and cooperation, police administrators often expect to receive information that is timely and useful for their own purposes. However, these expectations can be difficult for researchers to meet, as the research process involves many time-consuming tasks—from procuring funding to developing an appropriate research design to collecting and analyzing data. Skogan suggests that police practitioners might benefit from a fuller understanding of the many steps involved in conducting quality research and how these steps relate to the timeliness and utility of research findings. He also suggests that researchers offer interim reports to police and administrators when possible and adopt a “strategic feedback” approach in communicating their overall findings. This approach involves answering questions such as what works and in what situationsand identifying the policy and supervisory factors involved in making a particular strategy effective.

Project CeaseFire
Despite 15 years of declining crime, Chicago continues to be one of the nation’s leading cities for homicide. Project CeaseFire, a community-based initiative of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention, aims to address this issue by reducing gun and gun-related violence in targeted areas in Chicago and the state. With support from the National Institute of Justice and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Skogan and his team recently completed a three-year, multisite evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. In addition to fieldwork, interviews, and surveys, the researchers also examined the program’s impact on shootings and killings through a statistical analysis of time series data, a network analysis of gang homicide, and innovative use of GIS-computerized crime mapping techniques. Skogan is currently at work on a book about the study.

Police Reform and Community in Brazil
At the 2010 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Chicago, Skogan presented his evaluation of an experimental community policing initiative in Brazil. The evaluation included repeated waves of interviews with treatment communities alongside a national survey of how Brazilians view police and other public security personnel. It shows changes in the views of residents of poor, high-crime communities following the program’s introduction, as well as changes in the attitudes of local police officers.

Collective Efficacy in Chicago
Collective efficacy refers to a community’s ability to maintain effective social controls without forced or externally induced actions, such as enforcement by courts or police. In a new project with Christopher Maxwell of Michigan State University and Joel Garner of the U.S. Department of Justice, Skogan revisits a landmark study of collective efficacy in Chicago from the mid-1990s. The researchers use updated and more extensive geocoded crime data collected by the Chicago Police Department from 1991–99, as well as archived data from the original study, to gain a better understanding of the geographic nature of criminal behavior.

The original study, published by Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls in 1997, found that residential stability as well as concentrated immigration and poverty were three important factors associated with levels of neighborhood collective efficacy and that collective efficacy explained much variation in community violence. In particular, higher levels of collective efficacy appear to lessen the effects of concentrated disadvantage, leading to both decreases in homicide rates and perceived levels of violent crime. The findings were based on a survey of more than 8,000 residents across Chicago, who were divided into 343 neighborhood clusters. The revised analysis by Skogan and his colleagues also takes into account how residents’ responses might be related to the crime rates and community characteristics of clusters nearby their own area of residence.

Building Civic Engagement
Lewis continues to direct the Center for Civic Engagement at Northwestern, which seeks to promote active citizenship and social responsibility by engaging students, faculty, and staff in service-learning projects and community partnerships, as well as conducting and disseminating research. Its second annual conference was held in 2010 around the theme of “New Media and Political Engagement.” The center also began collaborating with journalism professor and IPR associate Jack Doppelt to engage student translators in Doppelt’s Immigrant Connect project, an online community (www.immigrantconnect.org) for immigrants and second-generation children in and around Chicago.