Background
There is a strong belief that living in deprived neighbourhoods has an additional negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics: so-called neighbourhood effects. Since the publication of the book “The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy” (Wilson 1987) the body of literature on neighbourhood effects has been growing. Theoretical explanations of neighbourhood effects include role model effects and peer group influences, social and physical disconnection from job-finding networks, a culture of poverty leading to dysfunctional values, discrimination by employers and other gatekeepers, access to low-quality public services, and exposure to criminal behaviour (Galster 2012). Despite the apparent consensus that neighbourhood effects exist and that deconcentrating poverty can help solve some of the problems, there is a growing body of critical literature which questions the evidence base and the derived urban, neighbourhood and housing policies. This literature suggests that selection and not causality is behind most of the current neighbourhood effects ‘evidence’ (see van Ham & Manley 2010). According to Cheshire (2007 p2) “there is surprisingly little evidence that living in poor neighbourhoods makes people poorer and erodes their life chances, independently of those factors that contribute to their poverty in the first place”. The critical literature argues that most existing studies only show correlations between neighbourhood characteristics and individual outcomes, which are caused by selection effects, and are no real causal neighbourhood effects. Durlauf (2004) reports that even the gold standard quasi-experimental studies such as Moving to Opportunity program (Goering et al. 2002) find little impact of neighbourhood characteristics on adults’ outcomes.


Research objectives
The objective of DEPRIVEDHOODS is to develop a better understanding of the relationship between socio-economic inequality, poverty and neighbourhoods. A recent paper by van Ham & Manley (2012) has set out an ambitious research agenda, based on which 7 detailed research objectives for DEPRIVEDHOODS have been formulated.

  1. To develop a holistic theoretical framework which incorporates neighbourhood change, neighbourhood sorting, neighbourhood choice and neighbourhood effects within one overall framework.
  2. To operationalize neighbourhoods better and to develop and use alternative bespoke neighbourhood geographies to demonstrate the (in)stability of results depending on the way in which neighbourhoods are defined and the scale at which neighbourhood contexts are studied.
  3. To advance our understanding of neighbourhood change (changing spatial concentrations of disadvantage & poverty) by analysing neighbourhoods in cities in the four research countries over longer periods of time, and to investigate the drivers of change (inflow, outflow, in-situ change).
  4. To understand individual (household) neighbourhood choice, and individual neighbourhood histories over longer periods of time, including the relationships between parental neighbourhood characteristics and the neighbourhood choices of their children as adults.
  5. To incorporate neighbourhood choice and neighbourhood histories explicitly in models of neighbourhood effects.
  6. To analyse the effects of other spatial contexts, such as workplaces on individual outcomes, together with characteristics of residential neighbourhoods and neighbourhood histories.
  7. To use the outcomes of DEPRIVEDHOODS to critically reflect on the effectiveness of area-based policies designed to tackle poverty and inequality in cities.

Data
Unique geo-coded longitudinal data, which allows researchers to follow individuals over longer periods of time, from four countries will be used: The Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom and Estonia. These countries represent different types of welfare systems, and comparing the research outcomes will be challenging, but will enrich our understanding of the general applicability of the neighbourhood effects hypothesis.


References
Atkinson & Kintrea 2001 Disentangling Area Effects: Evidence from Deprived and Non-Deprived Neighbourhoods. Urb.Stud.38 2277-2298; Becker & Ichino 2002 Estimation of average treatment effects based on propensity scores. Stata J. 2 358-377; Cheshire 2007 Segregated Neighbourhoods and Mixed Communities. Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Coulter & van Ham 2011 Contextualised mobility histories of moving desires and actual moving behaviour. IZA 6146; Durlauf 2004 Neighborhood effects. In Henderson Thisse. Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics 2173-2242. Elsevier; EC – European Commission 2010: Why socio-economic inequalities increase? Facts and policy responses in Europe. Directorate-General for Research; Ellen & Turner 1997 Does neighbourhood matter? Assessing recent evidence. Hous.Pol.Deb.8 833-866; Galster 2002 An economic efficiency analysis of deconcentrating poverty populations. J.of.Hous.Econ.11 303-329; Galster 2012 The Mechanism(s) of Neighbourhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications. In: van Ham et al. Neighbourhood Effect Research: New Perspectives. Dordrecht Springer; Goering et al. 2002 A cross-site analysis of initial moving to opportunity demonstration results. J.of.Hous.Res.13 1–30; Hulchanski 2007 The Three Cities within Toronto: Income Polarization among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2000. University of Toronto, CUCS Research Bulletin 41; Ioannides & Zabel 2008 Interactions, neighbourhood selection and housing demand. J.of.Urb.Econ.63 229-252; Kearns 2002 Response: From residential disadvantage to opportunity? Reflections on British and European policy and research. Hous.Stud.17 145-150; Manley 2006 The modifiable areal unit phenomenon – an investigation into the scale effect using UK Census data. PhD thesis; Manley et al. 2013 Neighbourhood Effects or Neighbourhood Based Problems? A Policy Context. Springer; Musterd 2002 Response: mixed housing policy: a European (Dutch) perspective. Hous.Stud.17 139–143; Musterd & Andersson 2005 Housing mix, social mix and social opportunities. Urb.Aff.Rev.40 761–790; Musterd et al. 2012 Temporal dimensions and measurement of neighbourhood effects. Env.&Plan.A 44 605-627; Openshaw & Taylor 1979 A million or so correlation coefficients, three experiments on the modifiable areal unit problem. In Wrigley, Statistical Applications in the Spatial Sciences. Pion; Östh et al. forthcoming Analysing Segregation using individual neighbourhoods. In: Lloyd Shuttleworth Wong. Segregation. Policy Press; Pearl 2009 Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Cambridge Uni Press; Pinkster 2009 Living in concentrated poverty. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam; Sharkey & Elwert 2011 The Legacy of Disadvantage: Multigenerational Neighborhood Effects on Cognitive Ability. Am.J.of.Soc.116 1934-1981; Tunstall & Lupton 2010 Mixed Communities: Evidence Review. London: Department of Communities and Local Government; van Ham & Manley 2010 The effect of neighbourhood housing tenure mix on labour market outcomes: a longitudinal investigation of neighbourhood effects. J.of.Econ.Geo.10 257-282; van Ham & Manley 2012 Neighbourhood effects research at a crossroads. Ten challenges for future research. Environment and Planning A 44 2787-2793; van Ham et al. 2012 Neighbourhood Effects Research: New Perspectives. Dordrecht; Wilson 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.