Event

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Speaker: Yeonhwa Lee, PhD Candidate in City and Regional Planning

Discussant: Ira Goldstein, President, Policy Solutions, Reinvestment Fund

Abstract: Socially diverse neighborhoods, including mixed-income neighborhoods, have long been proposed as a planning ideal and are increasingly a policy goal in many places. Scholars of neighborhood change have theorized and empirically shown that, while poor and affluent neighborhoods tend to persist, mixed-income neighborhoods tend to transition into either low- or high-income neighborhoods over time. However, neighborhoods that have maintained a high level of income diversity for as long as 30 years, or "persistently mixed-income neighborhoods" (PMINs), do exist in the U.S. This paper builds on a preceding paper that analyzes the temporal trends and spatial patterns of neighborhood income diversity in the metropolitan U.S. from 1990 to 2019 and addresses the following questions in a more locally grounded context: i) What are the characteristics of PMINs?; and ii) What are the explanatory factors of PMINs, and, in particular, how does local planning and housing policy contribute to, or hinder, the existence of PMINs? In this presentation, I discuss preliminary findings from the case of Philadelphia.