Lance Freeman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Lance Freeman

Economic Policy Review (Federal Reserve Bank of New York)

This article considers the use of racial equity analysis, or racial equity planning, as a tool to... more This article considers the use of racial equity analysis, or racial equity planning, as a tool to remedy the inequality that has been structured into the built environment through past and ongoing discriminatory and racially insensitive land use regulations and planning. It describes the history of land use planning in the United States, the resulting legacy of exclusionary practices, and the need to explicitly address racial inequities in American cities by considering the impacts of large-scale planning projects. As an illustration, the author describes a racial disparity report that studied the likely effects of a proposed development in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. The article also discusses the promise, limitations, and possible unintended consequences of racial equity planning, including NIMBYism and the use of studies to thwart development generally.

2015 Fall Conference: The Golden Age of Evidence-Based Policy, Nov 13, 2015

Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 20, 2018

From the Great Depression until the 1970s, project-based housing assistance, in the form of the P... more From the Great Depression until the 1970s, project-based housing assistance, in the form of the Public Housing Program, was planned and developed in a way that reinforced existing patterns of residential segregation by race. As the victims of public policy that promoted segregation, African Americans decried the way that public housing was used to expand and maintain the ghetto. The dire and persistent need for decent affordable housing and the concomitant resources that develop and maintain such housing, however, have complicated the African American response to segregated affordable housing. This complex and multifaceted stance toward segregated affordable housing has had implications for affordable housing policy from the Public Housing Program through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. This chapter chronicles the African American response and considers the implications of this response for past, present, and future public policy.

Social Science Research Network, 2016

Journal of Planning Education and Research, Mar 23, 2021

By quantifying Twitter activity and sentiment for each of 274 neighborhood areas in New York City... more By quantifying Twitter activity and sentiment for each of 274 neighborhood areas in New York City, this study introduces the Neighborhood Popularity Index and correlates changes in the index with real estate prices, a common measure of neighborhood change. Results show that social media provide both a near-real-time indicator of shifting attitudes toward neighborhoods and an early warning measure of future changes in neighborhood composition and demand. Although social media data provide an important complement to traditional data sources, the use of social media for neighborhood studies raises concerns regarding data accessibility and equity issues in data representativeness and bias.

American Journal of Health Promotion, Mar 1, 2007

We use new longitudinal census microdata to provide the first causal evidence of how gentrificati... more We use new longitudinal census microdata to provide the first causal evidence of how gentrification affects a broad set of outcomes for original resident adults and children. Gentrification modestly increases out-migration, though movers are not made observably worse off and neighborhood change is driven primarily by changes to in-migration. At the same time, many original resident adults stay and benefit from declining poverty exposure and rising house values. Children benefit from increased exposure to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, and some are more likely to attend and complete college. Our results suggest that accommodative policies, such as increasing the supply of housing in high-demand urban areas, could increase the opportunity benefits we find, reduce out-migration pressure, and promote long-term affordability.

Cityscape, Sep 1, 2016

The papers presented at the Research Symposium on Gentrification and Neighborhood Change, sponsor... more The papers presented at the Research Symposium on Gentrification and Neighborhood Change, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 25, 2016, are indicative of a sea change in gentrification scholarship. In this commentary, I place the research presented at the research symposium and in the Symposium section of this issue of Cityscape into the context of earlier research on gentrification. In doing so, I aim to show how this scholarship complements our understanding of the process of gentrification and to also show how current efforts might be informed by understanding past scholarship.The term gentrification was initially coined a half-century ago by the British sociologist Ruth Glass. She wrote, "One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class-upper and lower.... Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed" (Glass, 1964: xvii).Written at a time when central cities across much of Europe and the United States were nearing the nadir of their post-World War II decline, this apparently new type of neighborhood change caught many observers by surprise. Gentrification was perhaps all the more startling when observers across the Atlantic started to notice such changes happening in the United States. Central city decline was perhaps steeper and more troubling in the United States than anywhere else in the Western World.This "return to the city" movement unsurprisingly captured significant scholarly attention. The first wave of gentrification scholarship attempted to document the amount of gentrification occurring in U.S. cities and its causes and consequences. Regarding the causes of gentrification, early scholarship pointed to many factors that mirror those presented in the studies presented at the research symposium. The Canadian geographer David Ley was perhaps the foremost proponent of changing tastes among the "new" middle class that led to preferences for central city living. This new middle class had tastes, born of their high levels of education and white-collar work, that drew them to authentic central city neighborhoods and the type of lifestyles they could create there (Ley, 1980).The findings presented at the research symposium by Victor Couture and Jessie Handbury (2015), Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Daniel Hartley (2016), and Lena Edlund, Cecilia Machado, and Michaela Sviatchi (2015) in many ways mirror those produced by the first generation of gentrification scholars in the last decades of the 20th century. Like Ley, Couture and Handbury (2015) pointed to tastes, in particular, to young educated people's attraction to amenities like theaters and bars, as drivers of central city locational choices. Also echoing the "new middle class" thesis put forth by Ley (1980), Baum-Snow and Hartley (2016) found that it is young, highly educated White people who were responsible for much of the population growth near the central business district (CBD) from 2000 to 2010. Finally, Edlund, Machado, and Sviatchi (2015) identified consumption factors, specifically, being able to consume more leisure, as an important explanation for the 21st century gentrification. That these findings echo a central tenet of scholarship on gentrification during the 1970s and 1980s suggests choices and preferences of highly educated young adults were and continue to be an important explanation of gentrification.The 21st century vintage of gentrification, however, contrasts in important ways from the gentrification that occurred decades earlier. It is perhaps most important to note that gentrification in the 1970s and 1980s appears to have happened on a much smaller scale. Indeed, Brian Berry would christen the early gentrification as "Islands of Renewal in Seas of Decay" (Berry, 1985). …

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jpe-10.1177_0739456X21998445 for Up-and-Coming or Down-and-Out? ... more Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jpe-10.1177_0739456X21998445 for Up-and-Coming or Down-and-Out? Social Media Popularity as an Indicator of Neighborhood Change by Constantine E. Kontokosta, Lance Freeman and Yuan Lai in Journal of Planning Education and Research

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2021

change. Eyal describes an outfit called SurfaceStations.org, which he says ‘‘organized an impress... more change. Eyal describes an outfit called SurfaceStations.org, which he says ‘‘organized an impressive citizen-science survey of 1,221 U.S. stations measuring surface temperatures.’’ The SurfaceStations.org effort, which Eyal acknowledges was launched by climate skeptics, aimed to show that climate scientists were using bad data, though it ultimately found that this was not the case. As Eyal tells it, SurfaceStations.org was a grassroots group whose challenge to scientific expertise ended up affirming that expertise. Eyal might be right about the outcome, but he’s wrong about the process. SurfaceStations.org was not a grassroots group. It was created, according to reports published in the Guardian in 2012, by Anthony Watts, a TV weather presenter, with funding from the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think tank that specializes in climate change denial. Much of Heartland’s funding comes from the fossil fuel industry. Yet Eyal characterizes SurfaceStations.org as having ‘‘no material interest in the workings of regulatory or policy science’’ (p. 139). That’s not true; the corporate interests were there, operating in disguise. Exposing these interests doesn’t negate Eyal’s analysis. But it does remind us that institutional analysis is incomplete, and potentially misleading, if it fails to consider the flesh-and-blood actors who create and use institutions to pursue their interests. When Eyal says that he did not write the book to offer a solution to the crisis of expertise, I find it refreshing. Why should he be obligated to propose solutions to a problem that is built into how the system works? His contribution, rather, is to bring us ‘‘bad news,’’ as he puts it, quoting Alvin Gouldner. The news is about how our need to rely on expert judgment in matters of law and policy inevitably creates problems that we can’t solve but can deal with more intelligently if we know how to talk about them. That is precisely what Eyal’s book can help us do, now and again. A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America, by Lance Freeman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 328 pp. $32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780231184601.

Urban Affairs Review, 2008

In the wake of the civil rights era, it is generally thought that the importance of class in dete... more In the wake of the civil rights era, it is generally thought that the importance of class in determining social outcomes has increased. The extent to which this is true for locational outcomes, however, is unclear. This article examines how Blacks' ability to translate individual characteristics into locational outcomes changed over the period from 1970 to 2000. The results presented here show that higher socioeconomic status Blacks have more White neighbors, fewer poor neighbors, and live in neighborhoods with higher housing values. This pattern was evident in 1970, however, and appears to have changed little over time. To the extent Blacks are living in more integrated and higher-status neighborhoods, it appears to be because their socioeconomic status is improving. Their ability to translate their status into locational outcomes remained static.