Neighborhood Change

Changes in Physical Structure

Urban and suburban neighborhoods are defined visually by their physical stock—infrastructure, commercial and industrial buildings, apartments, and houses. The urban land use model, associated primarily with economist William Alonso, saw the type, size, and density of physical structures as a function of the value of land. High-value land, traditionally near the center of the city, would attract offices and flagship stores in tall buildings. Lower-value land, traditionally near the periphery, would attract mostly low-density residential housing. As a city expanded and as access increased, the spreading zones of commercial, industrial, and residential structures would cause the physical structures within individual neighborhoods to change.

Historically, neighborhood change at the urban edge has been marked by high levels of new construction, particularly houses laid out at lower densities. More recently, outer suburbs have also attracted commercial, industrial, and apartment structures. This indicates that the nature of access has changed as superhighway intersections and airports define new locational advantages. Nonetheless, aspects of physical structure once associated with central business districts—high densities, tall commercial buildings—are found in these so-called edge cities.

Negative changes in land value have also influenced neighborhoods in the inner city. Here the process is one of increasing blight as existing physical structures are undermaintained and eventually may become abandoned. Sometimes the structures are burned down and the land is overgrown with weeds. Such neighborhood decay is particularly acute in those cities that are experiencing dramatic population loss. A less dramatic effect is the process of filtering. Neighborhoods go through a life cycle whereby the housing progressively ages. Although some neighborhoods may retain or even increase their value with age, in many cases an aging housing stock attracts progressively poorer inhabitants as wealthier residents seek out better and newer housing. When the intrinsic value of the property exceeds the sum it is able to command in the marketplace, a rent gap emerges.

Changes in Socioeconomic Conditions

Closely associated with the changes in a neighborhood's physical structure are the changes in its social and economic situation. One famous model of urban form, developed by sociologist Ernest Burgess, related increases in neighborhood social status with distance from the city center. A second model, developed by Homer Hoyt, suggested that neighborhoods at separate economic levels were arrayed as wedges that began near the city center and then spread out to the city edge. Later, sociologists and geographers helped to spearhead the growth of social area analysis and factorial ecology that looked at how patterns related to income, life cycle, and ethnicity were layered on each other. Although these models are interesting generalizations, variations in socioeconomic status depend on many things. So too does the extent to which the socioeconomic condition of a neighborhood changes.

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