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Affordable housing has declined in recent decades, yet limited research has examined the demographic and economic changes influencing place-level affordability—especially outside of large metros. In this study I examine the effects of county-level population growth and decline, population aging, and natural amenity development on rates of affordable housing, income, and housing costs across four types of counties. While declines in affordability from 1990-2016 were universal between rural and urban counties, population growth is associated with decreases in affordability in rural counties but increased affordability in large metros counties due to estimated decreases in housing costs. Population aging is estimated to improve affordability in large and small metro counties, despite the associated decrease in income and housing costs across all county types. The effects of aging vary greatly between owners and renters. Natural amenity development, despite its theoretical importance, is not associated with changes in affordability for rural counties.

In the late 1930s, an agency of the United States government called the “Home Owners’ Loan Corporation” (HOLC) graded thousands of urban neighborhoods on the perceived risk they posed to mortgage lenders and property investors. To make these determinations, HOLC field agents collected vast amounts of socioeconomic, demographic, and housing data about these places and presented their findings in an impressive set of maps. While these “redlining” maps have received considerable academic and media attention, the data used to assign risk grades—available for most cities in their “area description” sheets—remain virtually unusable. Correcting this issue, I convert eight of the most consequential variables from 129 cities into an accessible and analyzable tabular format. These include the Black population percentage, “foreign-born” population percentage and group, family income, occupation class, average building age, home repair status, and mortgage availability. This data product will allow researchers to gain a more complete picture of the HOLC’s City Survey program, and it will provide a valuable new source of historical socio-demographic data at the neighborhood level.

Scholarly debate focuses on whether cultural capital reproduces existing inequalities or provides a path to upward mobility. Most research, however, focuses only on cross-sectional associations and is unclear about how disadvantaged adolescents can increase their amounts of cultural capital. Traditionally, most adolescents’ interactions with adults occur across two axes of socialization: families and schools. Families provide opportunities to increase cultural capital while schools value and reward cultural capital. Thus, if adolescents do not obtain cultural capital through their families, they may be at a significant disadvantage when navigating the education system. We hypothesize that adolescents may be able to increase cultural capital through valuable social capital access and exposure – their ties to and meeting frequency with other important adults with knowledge of the education system. We investigate this topic using experimental longitudinal data on mentoring relationships. We find that high levels of social capital access and exposure positively affect cultural capital, but only for adolescents with highly educated parents. Our findings suggest that cultural capital may not be an engine of social mobility if adolescents from low-SES households cannot acquire or increase their cultural capital.

Scholars have recently remarked upon the emergence of what Richard Florida has termed The New Urban Crisis, a global phenomenon whereby cities are being lumped into winners and losers, with inequality rising in the winner cities where real estate prices are pushing out those who most need access to the opportunities hoarded within. In this article, I argue that the new urban crisis is not a crisis of the city per se but is itself a symptom of greater crises occurring at the level of global capitalism. By revisiting Castells’ The Urban Question, I read the new urban crisis as a product of how the urban social structure fits into the reproduction of capitalism on a global scale, arguing that, under the regime of flexible accumulation, the urban social structure is asked to reproduce two distinct circuits of capital accumulation set loose by the transition to post-industrialism: accumulation via production and accumulation via finance. These distinct circuits of accumulation utilize the elements of urban social structures differentially, often at cross purposes. This produces continued crises in the reproduction of capitalism, as well as continually shifting relations between elements of the urban social structure, producing a plurality of urban forms.

The 21st century global city is in the midst of a new urban crisis: while it holds an increasing monopoly on employment opportunities, it has become harder to access. In this article, I argue that young urban aspirants are still accessing the global city in crisis through the practice of co-living. Co-living can be understood as an emergent collection of residential commoning practices employed by in-bound urbanites to access in-demand parts of the city and attain employment, housing and community. Through a relational ethnographic case study of the PodShare co-living space in the global city of Los Angeles, I argue that co-living is as an urbanism arising to stabilize the new urban crisis on both the level of the individual and the city, guiding individuals to grin at their condition and be increasingly mobile between multiple global cities in an attempt to maximize their chances of securing longer-term residency.

Sociological research has established the greater exposure of African Americans from all income groups to disadvantaged environments compared to whites, but the traditional focus in studies of neighborhood stratification obscures heterogeneity within racial/ethnic groups in residential attainment over time. Also obscured are the moderating influences of broader social changes on the life-course and the experiences of Latinos, a large and growing presence in American cities. We address these issues by examining group-based trajectory models of residential neighborhood disadvantage among whites, Blacks, and Latinos in a multi-cohort longitudinal research design of over 1,000 children from Chicago as they transitioned to adulthood over the last quarter century. We find dynamic consistency among whites and dynamic heterogeneity among nonwhites in exposure to residential disadvantage, especially Blacks and those born in the 1980s compared to the 1990s. Racial and cohort differences are not accounted for by early-life characteristics that predict long-term attainment. Inequalities by race in trajectories of neighborhood disadvantage are thus at once more stable and more dynamic than previous research suggests, and they are modified by broader social changes. These findings offer insights on the changing pathways by which neighborhood racial inequality is produced.

Gli interventi rivolti alle minoranze rom e sinta sono fortemente marcati da una scarsa conoscenza dei gruppi in questione, se non dalla presenza di informa-zioni errate, di stereotipi radicati e di forti pregiudizi. Non entreremo qui nel merito della fenomenologia degli stereotipi diffusi nella popolazione italiana o fra gli operatori sociali. Cercheremo semmai di definire alcuni caratteri di questi gruppi la cui conoscenza è essenziale ai fini di una corretta programmazione sociale. Procederemo con estrema sintesi e per punti. 1. Il mistero rom: la varietà. 2. La condizione giuridica. 3. I conflitti locali con la società maggioritaria. 4. Il razzismo e la discriminazione. 4.1. Criminalizzazione e criminalità. 5. La debole rappresentanza e la frammentazione degli interventi. 6. La scolarizzazione. 7. Avvertenze di metodo nella costruzione di politiche per i gruppi zigani. 8. (False) Controversie in vista della programmazione di interventi

La problématique de cet article est relative à la difficulté des penser et mettre en œuvre des politiques sociales différentiés, par rapport à la multiplicité des situations et compétences des personnes dites Roms dans les villes de l’Europe occidentale. Le cas des innovations dans les politiques locales italienne sera mobilisé pour développer des réflexions valables aussi en France pour le travail social et les politiques locales en directions de ces groupes. 1. Une représentation homogénéisant. 2. La vulnérabilité des groupes Roms. 3. Création et mise en place de politiques à l'endroit des groupes tziganes : questions méthodologiques et de design. 4. La variété d’instruments comme principe de design. 5. (Fausses) Controverses en vue de la programmation d'interventions sociales. 6. Construction du consensus, volonté politique et formes de médiation. 7. L’action collective des Roms comme levier de l’action publique locale