Neighbourhoods at risk: Residential mobility and neighbourhood tipping

Neighbourhoods at risk: Residential mobility and neighbourhood tipping The last year of the project was a quite productive one where many studies were completed. Some of them are accepted for publication while others are submitted. We do also have some that are not completely finalised. Those studies will be finalised over the next months. The work in the project was organized as a series of single studies, in this report we do not present everything, instead we report some highlights and particularly interesting empirical findings. Throughout the studies in the project we focus on unevenness in settlement patterns of different groups (i.e. segregation) within the city and consequences hereof in terms of neighbourhood effects. The studies are framed within a welfare policy setting. A basic approach of the project has been an ambition to consider social policy in a urban form-frame and to interpret urban form and distribution within a social policy frame. The index of segregation (IS) can be interpreted as an expression of how large share of a group has to relocate for the group to be evenly distributed over the urban landscape. The IS according to income has, on average, gone from 13.0 to 13.9 over the period from 1990 to 2011. Segregation according to country of origin has for most groups gone down from 1990 to 2011; for e.g. Iranians the IS has gone from 57.5 to 32.4 percent from -90 to 2011; for the Vietnamese the corresponding figures are 67.3 and 45.5. One of the larger immigrant groups, the Pakistanis, has increased their segregation from 48.4 up to 53.7. In addition, the native Norwegians has experienced an increased segregation (22.7 to 24.1). We have also studied how transitions into disability benefits is distributed over the urban landscape. Here we segregation indexes at a level of down towards 10 percent. This is a quite low figure and we do not find any tendencies towards increased clustering subsequent to entry into disability benefits. Narratives and interpretations of neighbourhoods are also part of the neighbourhood and how life and life quality plays itself out there. One of our studies give us a new view of the history of the neighbourhood Romsås: from a social democratic planned ideal, through negative spirals strengthened by the Romsås killing and the shared narrative of it up to the present with newly rehabilitated facades and a widely shared view of a well-functioning neighbourhood where people feel at home. A homogeneous housing stock, which have led to a socio-economic homogeneous population, despite of heterogeneity in terms of country of origin, seems to be instrumental for the sense of belonging and well-being. Qualitative studies at Stovner supports this conclusion. There we find more a blaming-the-others narrative. In one study we show that parents rank in the income distribution is, to a large extent, passed on to the children at the age around 30. Furthermore, the strength in the interdependencies between parents and income rank varies between city districts in Oslo. In order test for causal effects from neighbourhoods into future incomes of children we do a parametric comparison of siblings in families who have moved to neighbourhoods that presumably are good for upwards social mobility ? the younger siblings have a larger exposure to the good neighbourhood, while sharing the same family characteristics. We find move to a good neighbourhood lifts boys 21 percentiles in the income distribution for boys with low-income parents, while we do not find any similar effects on girls. Also for middle-aged males, we found neighbourhood effects on earnings. In neighbourhoods with a high share of low-income earners the incomes of others decreased with 0.3 percent for each percentage point increase in the share of low-income earners; at lower shares the marginal effects are only one half of it. This we studied in both Haugesund and Oslo, a bit surprisingly we did not find any (significant) differences of the magnitude of neighbourhood effects in the two localities. In both these two cities we decomposed income inequality in order to find out which share of income dispersion that can be attributed to the neighbourhood-level. In Haugesund the neighbourhood variation capture 12 percent of the income variation while it were 17 percent in Oslo. Similar studies from the US has found contributions from the neighbourhoods towards total income spread at about 30 percent.

Within the project Neighbourhoods at risk: Residential mobility and tipping we study neighbourhood dynamics and mechanisms that yield socio-economic and ethnic concentration. The larger part of the study addresses neighbourhood dynamics in two districts i n Norway: Haugalandet (at the Norwegian West Coast) and Groruddalen (north-east in Oslo). There is some concern that some localities in Groruddalen have a socio-economic and ethnic concentration that can develop into a societal problem. At a macro-level we study how neighbourhood mix varies and how it evolves over time. Special focus will be placed on the incidence of tipping, i.e. an accelerating concentration of socio-economic or ethnic minorities. Individual neighbourhood choice is studied in general, more specifically we study the determinants of individual mobility behaviour vary between groups and areas with differing degrees of concentration. Empirical studies of the interconnectedness between neighbourhood characteristics and different measures o f participation are the next step. One of the main challenges in the project is to discriminate between the results of sorting and the causal effects of neighbourhood social mix. The larger part of the study is based on a longitudinal data base spanning the period from 1992 up to the present. The data base is compiled from different administrative registers and contains information on all Norwegian individuals. These data are analysed using variety of quantitative techniques, ranging from spatial econom etrics to different techniques suitable to handle endogeneity (difference-in-difference regressions and propensity score matching). The project also contains a qualitative part where we aim to disentangle and identify mechanisms behind mobility and neighb ourhood choice. Here we want to capture motives, interpretations and constructed narratives of the mobility careers of the informants - and future plans and dreams. This part will utilise life course interview