Episode 09: Neighborhood Perceptions with Prentiss Dantzler

Shane Phillips 0:05
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I am your host Shane Phillips. The purpose of the Housing Voice podcast is to bring academic research to a non-academic audience and to make connections between research and practice that can help our listeners build more affordable and equitable communities. Housing Voice is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. My co-host is Dr. Michael Lens, also of UCLA, and our guest today is Dr. Prentiss Dantzler coming to us from the University of Toronto. Today, we're talking about residential mobility or moving, which you might recognize was also the topic of our conversation last month with Dr. Kristen Perkins. But whereas last time, we talked about the impact of moving on children's well-being and specifically how the impacts vary between white children and black and Latino children, this time, we're talking about what influences people's decisions to move, or their likelihood to move. Dr. Dantzler work is asking not just how individual and neighborhood characteristics affect people's likelihood of moving, but also how their perceptions of their neighborhood, regardless of its actual conditions also influence their mobility. We have a lot of data on neighborhoods from household incomes and poverty rates to the age and race and ethnicity of their residents. We have much less data though, on how people feel about their neighborhoods about people's subjective experience of living in a place. But ultimately, that doesn't make it any less important to know. As we discussed in the interview, what people even consider to be their neighborhood is a very personal thing, and it might be as small as their block or as big as their city. Beyond giving some much needed and much appreciated attention to this more subjective experience of community, Dantzler's research uncovered some really surprising and interesting connections between people and the places they call home or the places they no longer call home. So I think you'll really enjoy this one.

With us today is Dr. Prentiss Dantzler, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Dantzler received his PhD in public affairs from Rutgers and he also had an appointment as Assistant Professor at Georgia State University until his move to Toronto which is coming soon. We're going to be talking today about his paper, 'Neighborhood Perceptions and Residential Mobility', which I'm going to try to state more colloquially here and just call 'How do people's feelings about their neighborhood affect their chances of moving somewhere else'. And we'll get into why that question is so important in just a minute but first, let me just welcome you to the podcast, Dr. Dantzler, we're glad to have you join us.

Prentiss Dantzler 2:51
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to get in a better deeper discussion about this paper but also just research in general so I appreciate it.

Shane Phillips 2:59
Yeah, and we have Mike Lens back with us. So you can say hi, Mike. And you can also say some nice things about Professor Dantzler because you know him well.

Michael Lens 3:07
I am happy to say hi to Shane and Prentiss. And of course, our many guests back from vacation feeling refreshed and super excited to talk shop with with Prentiss, who I have known for a while and, you know, have seen him be heavily coveted by many universities over the years. And that's why he's moved a couple times, but glad that we have been able to stay in contact and in conversation.

Shane Phillips 3:41
Cool. So we're gonna start off with just the kind of more general question here and just get a sense for what that background looks like a little bit. So you know, what got you interested in in housing policy and the work you're doing and what is your research focus area right now?

Prentiss Dantzler 3:55
Yeah, great question. So originally, I got interested in housing policy. I graduated undergrad in 2009. So like a great time to kind of graduate in the world economy. I moved back to Philly, and my dad had a rental property in Philly, the only one he had at the time, and he had a subprime mortgage. So I was looking at the paperwork in the mail that was coming to the house and realizing I was like why is he paying nine or 10% of interest rate on a mortgage for a house in a very low-income neighborhood where tenants weren't even paying half of the mortgage at that point. So at first I was kind of more so interested in environmental policy like in my undergrad was more environmental business. So I thought I was going to be working in like renewable energies and climate change and all that type of stuff. But I got more interested in housing policy because it was more personal and I was dealing with trying to figure out how to refinance and also Philly has one of the largest housing authorities in the country. And at the time, they were doing a lot of Hope six redevelopment across the city, so started to see a lot of public housing sites get, you know, gated off and fenced off and residents moved out and redeveloped and then had these kind of bigger questions about why these things are happening and what's going on behind the scenes. So that kind of got me intimately interested in just lower-income neighborhoods, housing assistance programs redevelopment that was going on. Since then I kind of broadened out. So while a lot of stuff I've been doing has been focused on housing assistance, I've been looking at just neighborhood change more generally, and trying to think about the different push and pull factors for a lot of communities that were dealing with mobility. So while we can talk about, you know, concentration of poverty, we have the gentrification story. So for me, there's a lot of ways to think about how these all fit into a bigger conversation about why these things are happening, and who's actually controlling the levers that cause these things to happen in the first place. So I'm doing a lot of work in just broadly defined as neighborhood change, but kind of more intimately around housing assistance programs in the US and now in, in Toronto, doing a lot of stuff around neighborhood change, and how that changes perceptions around place like this paper does. And also doing some more work in policy around areas like transportation policy, and that interconnection. And while we think about neighborhood change is one way where people are living, it's also like what are the costs that people are responding to? So a lot of it is housing, but it's also transportation. And it's also energy costs and utility costs, as we've seen with the pandemic, a lot of people staying in their homes and having rising utility costs. So really thinking about affordability issues, and how did that coincide with neighborhood change dynamics?

Shane Phillips 6:38
Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people come to the Urban Planning sphere in one form or another through that personal experience, I feel like for me, it was more kind of I just grew up in the suburbs, I don't think I knew that urban planning was a field until I was probably 27 or so. And I moved to Seattle without a car, shortly after it died, and I realized that the city that I always hated, I just hated because I drove a car there all the time. And once I didn't have a car there, cities are actually kind of cool that I became interested in how they worked and kind of spiraled from there.

Prentiss Dantzler 7:09
Right.

Shane Phillips 7:10
So I want to start us off with some headlines from the paper. And these are just my headlines, so you can choose to dispute them and add your own. The first for me was that individual measures like a person's race or ethnicity, their income, the way they perceive aspects of their neighborhood, like safety or decline, these things had a much greater impact on the likelihood of someone moving, of them moving, to a different home, then the sort of more empirical neighborhood conditions like poverty rates, vacancy rates, the overall racial ethnic mix, the demographic mix in the neighborhood. So who people are and how they feel about their neighborhood seems to be more influential than the neighborhood itself. And the second headline is that more positive perceptions about a neighborhood are actually associated with a higher likelihood of moving rather than a lower one. So basically, liking your neighborhood means you're more likely to move away from it, which I think is the opposite of what most people would expect.

Prentiss Dantzler 8:11
Very counter intutitive yeah

Shane Phillips 8:13
Yeah, very counterintuitive. And so before we go any further, is that a fair summary of some of the high level findings? I know I'm glossing over a lot with that introduction. So feel free to add anything you think needs to be added?

Prentiss Dantzler 8:26
Yeah, no, I think that's a good synopsis. I think part of the where we, my co-author Swan Jones at George Washington, were trying to do was really thinking about.... and I had some other work in another paper with a colleague, in Urban Affairs review, really think about subjective perceptions of place. I think a lot of what the literature tends to do is treat these kind of neighborhood conditions as objective measures without thinking about like, the poverty rate is a construction of years of disinvestment, and years of, you know, people moving around and years of problematic housing policy and all these other things. Well they're not just a state of being but there's also like a process behind those things that are happening. If you think about it in that particular way, then people are experiencing those processes in a different way versus this kind of condition. So a lot of what we were trying to do in this paper, or at least seek to kind of understand was, do these subjective measures actually matter? And we find out they really do. And I think the other piece of body in terms of like the mobility piece where we were thinking, this came up in a conversation where we were like, looking at the data, we're like, "yeah, this doesn't make sense". So then we were like, "wait, there's an efficacy of choice here", that we're not really exploring where you can love your neighborhood, that doesn't mean you have the opportunity to stay there right? So like, those kinds of intersections that, you know, you might see redevelopment going on in a lower income neighborhood and a lot of times that pushes people out of place. So it fits into these narratives about you know, how can you even these, the sample that we use is more lower-income households, but how can they actually understand these processes, right? Are they responding to neighborhood change in particular ways? And what we're seeing is that, you know, these individual characteristics matter a lot. But it's also like you can have high levels of satisfaction, and still not be able to maintain your residency in that neighborhood. So a lot of ways in which we're thinking about these things is like, yeah, you can love your neighborhood, but they might be pushed out or pulled out for other particular reasons, that we're not capturing in a lot of the neighborhood studies that we see.

Michael Lens 10:20
Right? Yeah. And I mean, if we think about those past studies, you know, obviously, a lot of our listeners might be familiar with the 'Moving to Opportunity' study, and, and there's, you know, that kind of cast a big shadow in a way over all of our research on neighborhood conditions, how neighborhoods affect people. And also I think it's a body of research or a set of data, that I've gone to, you know, quite a few times to try to get a sense of, you know, why people would want to sign up for a program like 'Moving to Opportunity' where, you know, you're given a voucher to leave public housing. Like, what is it about your current situation, your current place that makes you want to move? You know, and we can we can get to kind of certainly the the effects of moving but like, you know, what did you see in the, in the literature, in prior research about, like, why people want to move, you know, what is it about their neighborhood that, you know, makes people say, I would like to move, or I would like to stay, because, you know, a lot of what you talked about already is like, some people may want to stay but may not be able to.

Prentiss Dantzler 11:33
Yeah, I think there's a few things in that particular piece. So relating this to the other study I did with Patricia Ricci back in 2019 in Urban Affairs Review, we did household surveys in Camden, New Jersey, one of the, you know, highest crime levels in the country, high levels of poverty. And what we found was kind of counterintuitive to a lot of the literature that was written at the time as a graduate student was just like, most of the households that we study really liked where they live, they just had particular things that they would like to see in their neighborhoods that weren't there. So better access to different social networks that weren't present in their neighborhoods, or better access to transportation that allowed them to get back and forth to work or just to other amenities or resources that weren't in their communities. And that wasn't necessarily that they wanted to move to a more suburban place or a different neighborhood with like higher levels of these amenities or resources, but that they wish they had these resources there, right? And if you actually brought these resources... and this goes into, like the whole kind of conversation around Community Development versus mobility or programs, and for me haven't been trained in public affairs, and a concentration on community development, I tend to think about place-based initiatives, a little bit more intimately versus the kind of mobility experiments that we've consistently been doing. And I like to say I like to think about in this particular paper that we're trying to get at some of that as well, where a lot of the objective ways that we're really not looking at how people think about their place where we're looking at their individual characteristics, and then their neighborhood characteristics and trying to make sense of that, where most of the work I've been trying to do is get at some of the like, "what if we just asked people?" right, where we take more of like a qualitative approach, and really ask people what's really going on. But how can we empirically do that quantitatively as well, and using some of these other composite measures to think about these kind of normative questions like, do you like your neighbors, do you like where you live, do you have access to these things? And typically, in a lot of the research, it tends to only focus on household characteristics and neighborhood conditions to make those residential mobility arguments where I think I would push a lot of us as scholars to think about what are some of those subjective or kind of intentional ways that we can look about people's actually planning decisions? And how do they intersect with some of these other dynamics as well as like, a more efficacy or agency kind of argument in this space of like, individual characteristics or neighborhood conditions.

Shane Phillips 13:52
And a lot of this is just the availability of data, right? Like, we have a lot of data on poverty rates at the census tract level, at the census, block level, zip code all the way up to, you know, city, region, etc. And there's just not a lot of data out there. We're not doing a lot of surveys that are following people over time, these kinds of things.

Prentiss Dantzler 14:10
Yeah, this, this came up in my department at Georgia State where it's like, you know, and as most faculty members were looking for funding to do these kind of research projects and where can we like really look at different ways to do this stuff. And, you know, if you're, if you just want to study like lower-income households and stuff like that, and you're not doing something that's you know, kind of dominated a research field like evictions or stuff like that, you're not going to get funded compared to like 10 or 15 years ago. You have to tie it to like climate change, or, you know, health or these other dynamics, where that also gives us a lack of data to how to really think about these things, because that's not the preference of the salient conditions you're really looking at. You're looking at, you know, health outcomes or these other things that other scholars have done. But I do think a lot of times, and it's just like a function of research where we try to do these large-scale studies, and even in this particular data set, these are a lot of neighborhoods that we typically don't see research studies on. I think a lot of the Urban Studies world tends to focus on the big cities and draw parallels or inferences to other places where we need to be looking way more midsize cities, we need to be looking at neighborhoods in places that don't change as much, right? So like, I think a lot of ways even when we talk about gentrification or some of these other kind of extreme neighborhood change dynamics, we still preference it on like the New York's and Atlantas and Chicagos and LAs, they give us good inferences and get insights where we should be thinking about places like Des Moines and Denver and some of these other places that historically, we don't see a lot of research on compared to these other bigger cities that have kind of been the case studies for a lot of people.

Shane Phillips 15:45
Yeah

Michael Lens 15:45
Yeah, and that seems like an obvious, you know, intro to this data set. And you know, so kind of tell us a little bit more about this, in the Making Connections, data set, which was sponsored by the Annie Casey Foundation, collected by the National Opinion Research Center but it's not something that, you know, I've seen a lot in the literature, and it's certainly, as you point out, collecting data on perceptions of neighborhood in ways that we don't usually see. So how did this data set come about? And how did you use it for this study?

Prentiss Dantzler 16:24
Yeah, so I met Antoine at a convening in Chicago, I guess, five years ago at this point for the My Brother's Keeper initiative, during the Obama administration. And we met and it was like about a lot of people that were doing different work related to black youth, particularly men and boys of color. So a lot of people were in there were doing health research, criminal justice, research, housing research, all these kind of researchers, but also community members, practitioners, community organizers in this space. And you know, one of the roundtables that we were talking about was thinking about, you know, the applicability of a lot of the current research and what we know about just men in neighborhoods, men and boys in different urban neighborhoods. So we got the talking about it, and was like, oh, yeah, we connected, met each other, talked about our similar research interests. And then after the convening, we got some emails about different opportunities to engage in collaboration with each other. And one of the listings of emails we got was from the Annie Casey Foundation about the making connection data set. So this is a very interesting data set, you actually have to pitch your project without actually looking at the data, like the the code book first. Because the actual project is typically looking at kids and families and urban communities and see what they're responding to in those places. So we were like, "well, we don't really know what's in the data set. Let's pitch a project and see what happens". Luckily, the Annie Casey Foundation and National Opinion Research Council liked the project, or the proposal, and then when we got into data set, we saw that there were a lot of measures that really asked some of these subjective normative questions around people in their places. And then we were thinking about like, so how can we use this data set. We like the idea that it covered a lot of places that normally you won't see. So there was Harford, Dimora, Indianapolis, Louisville, Milwaukee, Providence, San Antonio, all these kind of cities are 10 neighborhoods across 10 cities, and they had three different waves. So the waves tend to be... wave one was in like the earlier 2000s, all the way up to the last wave for 2008 to 2011. So this gave us some like, ways to think about these things across time. And a lot of my work tends to be longitudinal or using panel data to like get at some of these issues. I try to resist using like a snapshot-in-time approach to think about how these changes actually intersect with the perception space, or the neighborhood conditions piece. Part of what we were trying to do in this particular piece, because a lot of it is like thinking about neighborhood satisfaction by itself. And you can use individual characteristics, and also neighborhood conditions. But part of what we want to think about is like this idea of mobility risk. So like people are in a particular place, what are the push and pull factors that are causing people to leave these neighborhoods all together. And that's how we got to this idea of thinking about it in kind of like a SEM model or Structural Equation Model where satisfaction relates to perceptions, perceptions may relate to mobility risk. And that's what we did in our article is to think about this as kind of like, there's all these things, they intersect or kind of have an effect on satisfaction. But then again, satisfaction has a an effect on actually moving or mobility. So a lot of times when we're thinking about, you know, a household dynamic and income levels and how many kids people have, that's one particular way to think about it. But what if you asked you know, a household like, how often are you likely to talk to your neighbor or do you feel like the neighborhood in which you're living has all the resources that you have - those tend not to be in the literature and if they are, they tend to be on smaller scale studies, that are qualitative in nature or focused on, you know, one neighborhood in one city. So this was a way for us to kind of exploit the data and think about these kind of questions across different places.

Shane Phillips 20:11
I do want to hold on the the perceptions and the methodology here a little bit, because we didn't actually talk about what the perceptions are that were measured. And so I think it was neighborhood satisfaction, neighborhood safety, neighborhood decline and neighborhood agency. Could you just quickly describe what each of those represent? I think a few of them are obvious, but some of them not so much.

Prentiss Dantzler 20:35
Yeah. So neighborhood satisfaction was basically a Likert scale of how well did you like different things in your neighborhood. So like, they admitted a lot of a focus on amenities like banks, check cashing places, businesses, health care facilities, community centers, parks, and playgrounds. And we grouped that ended a Composite Measure based off that for neighborhood satisfaction. The safety piece, were just kind of a Likert scale, like how safe do you feel in your neighborhood? So do you feel safe at your home at night? Do you feel safe outside during the day? What about trick or treating with your kids? Or do you generally just feel safe if you have children in your house? The next one was decline, so neighborhood decline was based on a number of ideas, and typically kind of like the broken windows stuff. So like criminal activity done by others, graffiti on walls and buildings, litter on sidewalks, vacancy, the presence of drug dealers, gang activity, prostitution, all these kind of other measures. And racial incidents was within that dynamic as well. And an agency was literally just trying to function, think about how much control people have like, do you feel like you have the ability to do things with your kids? Do you have the ability to address issues of graffiti? Do you have the ability to address issues about kids skipping school? Do you have the ability to actually address things about budget cuts that may have neighborhood impacts? So we'd like to try to think about the kind of ways in which people engage in their local community or try to improve their own community to think about this piece around agency. So I think that gives kind of a general assessment

Shane Phillips 22:12
Yeah yeah, and the agency one I found particularly interesting, I feel like that's not something we talk about a lot, actually, in urban planning is do communities have the agency or power or whatever we want to call it to kind of, you know, control their fate to some extent. But we don't really have a way of measuring that. So this was an interesting part of this.

Michael Lens 22:32
Yeah, and Prentiss I imagined that relates, in some ways to like, the sociological, you know, ideas around collective efficacy, you know, thinking about, you know, Bob Samson's work and other colleagues of his, you know, kind of echoing what Shane said, there's agency in planning, where it's like, you know, do you have community voice, you have community power. Collective efficacy, I always think of is more like the ability for a community to kind of organize around like either threats or opportunities in their neighborhood that might be a lot less formal, often than planning, right? Like, it's not like, 'can we, you know, organize for like a meeting or whatever' but it's like the everyday stuff that goes on in our neighborhood, like how much can we count on each other to like, you know, watch each other's backs to kind of organize against like things good and bad that happen all the time. Right?

Prentiss Dantzler 23:29
Yeah, and I agree, I think part of the way in which the literature is typically approach how people engage in neighborhoods, one is there just a huge kind of misnomer or focus on like property owners or homeowners engaged in at work without talking about how renters actually do engage in a lot of kind of organizing tactics, or convenings, or anything, to kind of address these issues, particularly those who have been living in these spaces for a long amount of time as well. And then, to your point, I do think we we tend to only focus on these kind of bigger forms of political engagement or civic engagement without thinking about the everyday ways in which people engage with each other in their neighborhoods. And if we're not really talking about, you know, do you know your neighborhood's, you know, grocery store down the street, or do you know, people in this place to help you make connections on x, y, z, I think we're missing out on a lot of just how life really is in that space, and we're only going to focus on these particular instances where it's like, formalized engagement versus these everyday mundane things that people do.

Shane Phillips 24:30
So getting into some more of the details here on the individual characteristic side. So this is sort of separate from the perceptions, those individual characteristics, did have a pretty big impact on neighborhood perceptions in terms of odds ratios and things. So just for example, people who earned more than $30,000 per year, they had 28% lower odds of having favorable neighborhood perceptions overall, and white residents also had 28% lower odds of favorable neighborhood perceptions. Each one year increase in age is associated with 4% lower odds of having favorable neighborhood perceptions, which just, I don't know, it's like a sad commentary on getting older, I guess.

Michael Lens 25:15
Neighborhoods going to hell! Get off my lawn

Shane Phillips 25:20
Women had 52% greater odds of having favorable perceptions, and what else have I got here, each additional year that someone lived in a neighborhood was 24% lower odds. So again, yeah, "get off my lawn" effect. And so that's just a sampling of some of these results and these odds ratios, but are there any that you found especially interesting or surprising here, and any lessons you think we could draw from them?

Prentiss Dantzler 25:45
I think the gender piece was the most interesting to me. And this came up with some colleagues that I was talking I'm working with now, Jr. Howe and Elizabeth CoviGlen, we were talking about this, because a lot of the research is particularly urban poverty research doesn't really make great parallels about, you know, lower income female-headed households, other than the tropes and stereotypes that we've seen, or the kind of outcomes that we've seen historically. But I do think a lot of times we oversample female households in a lot of the research, and then tend to think about in poor communities, you have black women lead in households, and then all the black men are arrested. And I feel like that's been a narrative and then discussion where that's not typically what we're seeing in a lot of different neighborhoods. And just how we collect data, right, like, the head of the household is maybe in a relationship, but we don't count their partner unless they are specifically living with them for a certain amount of time, and all these other ways. And I'm like, that's just, you know, we tried to make these kind of clean cuts on like what a household is or what a family is. And that's just not what it is, even in a lot of the other research I do, even when I'm thinking about children, I always think about children and other dependents, because that is another form of a cost burden that may impact a household overall. But usually, I don't see too much of that. So yeah, the gender piece was thinking about greater odds of having favorable neighborhood perceptions. And I wonder if that's just because is it how women are experiencing that particular place? Are they more optimistic about these changes, is there a gender difference, and how people just experienced neighborhood change overall. And I think that's what I'm really kind of thinking about it more so going forward with the work, is not just to explore these kind of racial dynamics, but these gender, race and class dynamics in tandem to think about how people are differentially experiencing the neighborhoods in which they are living in.

Shane Phillips 27:33
Yeah, and that was one of the bigger effects for gender. So I want to walk through the steps here, kind of we're going to go back to the headlines that I that I said at the beginning, but we have individual characteristics like income and gender, and how long you've lived in a neighborhood. And these things seem to affect the person's perceptions of their neighborhood. And then those perceptions, positive or negative, are associated with how likely they are to move. But as I mentioned, at the beginning, positive perceptions are actually associated with a greater likelihood of moving. And so what's going on there, you did say one possibility is just people like their neighborhood, but aren't able to stay there, you know, pushed out by higher rents or evicted or what have you. What other possibilities are there here?

Prentiss Dantzler 28:20
Yeah, I think it's the other piece, aside from that, is just how we understand neighborhoods. And then I think there's always a measurement issue when we're using like census data, or kind of neighborhood conditions data to really think about what's really going on, right? So like, this always comes up when I think about or talk to students about crime, where they'd be like, yeah, they live in lower income neighborhood where high levels of crime, and I'm like, well, if you take a place like Philly, or New York, where you're confined to a block, or a smaller, like neighborhood density, or high neighborhood density, but you probably don't function too much for like three or four city blocks, you may never come in contact with that crime. So you might not even understand what that really means to you, or your actual household right? And I think part of what we're thinking about why like neighborhood context definitely matters, I think people are experiencing their neighborhoods in different ways. So while we're looking at census tracks, you know, I use them all the time in data, I wish we had better kind of data to understand that like, you know, the kind of classic Chicago School like draw your neighborhood and tell me where you go every day. And that's an exercise that I do with students all the time to think about, yeah, how do you move across space, like how do you actually move across urban space. And when we're using a lot of census data, we tend to think about that people are moving across the spaces in unison or in like Universal ways, which is not typically the case. I'm thinking about somebody like my grandma who when before she passed, she rarely left the block that she lived on. Right, so like her perceptions about how the neighborhood were changing, were based on things that she saw on the news every night, and had nothing to do with how she's interacting with people is literally what she's seeing on TV. And I think that also plays into how people are thinking about their places where you can see redevelopment going on within your particular place, but based on who's living in every development, you might interpret that in very different ways, right? So you can see a whole new housing facility and not notice that affordable housing complex. And you're like, "Oh, this is good for the neighborhood". And as soon as like a homeowner might say or property owner might understand that's an affordable housing complex, they're like, "no, this neighborhood is not doing well", this is a negative perception, while the objective measures of like, you know, increasing housing for that neighborhood may be going up, the perceptions or the understandings of those are going in different ways. So I think, part of what the neighborhood perception piece, really, it's a mobility risk, is like there are different ways that people were experiencing neighborhood change. And particularly for this sample, that tends to be on a lower income side of things, their understanding of these neighborhoods, regardless of how much they like it or don't, are still not enough to really explain what's really going on in terms of their mobility to actually stay in place. There's other drivers and dynamics that are pushing them out. Like it would be nice thing about evictions, and you know, housing, finance, and all these other questions in the case of this study, but at least within this site is where we tried to do is focus on some of these other dynamics.

Shane Phillips 31:07
Yeah, and I do think it's important to acknowledge that, like, there's not one explanation for any of this, every household is experiencing something different. So it could be some are being pushed out. It could be some, you know, they have favorable perceptions about their neighborhood, because like, life for them is just going pretty well. And it keeps going well, and they move out because they go to a neighborhood that better suits their needs. Like there's everything in between is possible, I think.

Prentiss Dantzler 31:31
Yeah, even like a job, right, so like, if you ask a lot of faculty, and they studied where they end up studying, and they're like, "well, I really like, you know, I did my training here. I like the city. And I probably did research in the city". It's like, "Oh, I got a job across the country so now moving". So your level of satisfaction doesn't matter in terms of your mobility risk. And if anything, even if you like it, there are other things that are drawing you to move away. It's like a job.

Michael Lens 31:53
Right.

Shane Phillips 31:53
Yeah, so unlike individual characteristics, and neighborhood perceptions, you found that the neighborhood conditions, things like vacancy rates and poverty rates that don't depend on people's perceptions, they just kind of are what they are. Those didn't really predict mobility in a substantive way. And I think that result also will surprise a lot of people, because we usually think of those neighborhood conditions and outside forces as having a pretty big impact on people's life outcomes. And moving obviously, is a big part of people's lives, for whatever reason that happens. So what's the story, you tell yourself about why that is happening? And maybe you can even explain a little bit to get into the methodology or stuff here, you found that the vacancy rates, poverty rates, they were statistically significant. And yet the coefficient was basically zero. So how those two things can be true at the same time,

Michael Lens 32:51
Statistics versus substance maybe

Prentiss Dantzler 32:53
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, great question. I think part of it is, I tend to think about if I was living in a lower-income neighborhood, how often do I actually think about vacancy rates, right? Like, how often do I think about some of these other dynamics unless I'm experiencing them on a day to day, and for a lot of households, they're not, right? Even if like lower-income households move on average, somewhere between like four and six years, they're only going to think about these things every four, six years, unless their own thread of eviction or some other type of displacement measure. And while we think about census data as, you know, having this kind of condition at this point in time, it's like, well, if I'm not actually thinking about this actual neighborhood condition, at this point in time, you're not going to get any relationship or how I'm understanding.

Shane Phillips 33:35
Yeah, I do think as planners, we can forget that like regular people aren't just like looking at the housing market data. Yeah, check out Redfin, just to see how things are going.

Michael Lens 33:46
Yeah, and something like vacancy rates. I mean, that's only visible, right, in the extreme right? Like, yeah, if you have a marginally higher vacancy rate, it's not that you can see that, it's not that, you know, a bunch of people have moved away, you know?

Prentiss Dantzler 34:02
Yeah, I agree. I think part of what a lot of ways we treat kind of some of these neighborhood conditions that tend to be somewhat problematic, right. And to Mike's point, like even a vacancy rate is usually like when people think about vacancy and you ask them, they're talking about blight. They're not really just talking about housing units not being occupied. They're literally talking about physical blight as associated with housing as not being occupied. So a lot of ways even poverty rates, right? So like, you could have high poverty rates, you have a high degree of poor people in a particular neighborhood. But that's not necessarily being understood as that way. So I grew up in a low-income house, if you asked me if I was poor growing up, I probably would have said, "Yeah" but that had nothing to do like me loving my neighborhood. And I also function in and outside that neighborhood. So like, I do think a lot of ways in which some of the research that we've been talking about in urban studies in urban planning and housing policy, sometimes we overstate what these results really mean to a lot of the people that are living in these places. And to the point that was just saying, right, like a lot of people are not thinking about a lot of these measures on a day-to-day basis, as most of us are, I literally just got an argument with somebody in Denver about the housing market. And it was like a real estate person. They're like, "Oh, the median house price is this", and I was like, "no, it's not I just looked this up yesterday". So there's a lot of ways in which certain, like everyday, you know, people are not thinking about these things, because they're thinking about a million other things where we just have the ability and the privilege to do so. So, yeah, well, I was thinking, when we were doing the research on the neighborhood piece, to me, it's always thinking about how people are intersecting with these neighborhoods, how they're experiencing these neighborhoods, versus just the rates of poverty or unemployment or vacancy, right, or, and also, to some extent, I wonder how many people actually know how much is really going on when you think about subjective perceptions like we doing in this paper versus those kind of objective measures. Like I have no idea what the vacancy rate of this neighborhood is, I know it's changing a lot. If you told me it was high or low, I just would just take it for granted or even unemployment, right? I don't know if everybody on my block is unemployed, or employed, or even people in my neighborhood. So these kinds of perceptions about going counterintuitive to some of the actual "objective" measures we use?

Michael Lens 36:14
Yeah, and I think there's quite a lot of research, you know, backing that up. I think of, you know, not only some of the kind of qualitative work around moving opportunity that tries to explain, like, so why did people typically, if they made these moves, only make moves to places that weren't really that much better from where they came from? And then I think of some of the work of Stephanie DeLuca and her colleagues, yeah, in Baltimore, but in other locations, you know, that are really trying to explain, or give us, you know, kind of hard evidence as like, look, people who are making these moves, especially if they're low-income households, especially they come from neighborhoods that, you know, are not particularly desirable, they haven't traveled very much outside of these neighborhoods, they have a very narrow scope of what's possible, and in a very limited set of places that they think are fit for them or appropriate for them, or that they could afford or, you know, there's a million other things, as you said, that they're thinking about on a day to day basis. And like when these kind of big moving questions come up like, there's still a long list of things that they're thinking about, that has nothing to do, or little to do with the poverty rate or the crime rate in a census tract that people like us can observe and pour over and run a bunch of fancy models about right?

Prentiss Dantzler 36:14
Yeah, and then to that point, I think about some of the other more recent research like Akira Rodriguez, his book on Atlanta's public housing, and tenant activism, even places where you have a group of people in her own housing assistance in lower-income neighborhoods, they were literally fighting for no public spaces. And they were literally trying to establish political activism in different ways that goes kind of outside where we think because the natural tendency that I do think a lot of urban scholars think about today is like, "oh, they would never leave and live in these places, they want to go to those places where more amenities and resources" and that kind of big debate that goes on in terms of like, how do we have housing for all and how do we establish a more equitable housing kind of landscape tends to think of treaty as these kind of place-based strategies to these mobility experiments that we've consistently seen over and over again? So yeah.

Shane Phillips 38:35
Something you said a little bit ago, Prentiss, made think about we have our own definition for what a neighborhood is. And even among researchers that varies, sometimes it's all the way down to like a census block, or a collection of blocks or a census tract or larger. What do we know about how people are thinking about their neighborhoods? Because that seems really important here? If I think my neighborhood is this, like eight square mile area, and your grandma thinks that the neighborhood is her block, and everything outside of that is just irrelevant? How do we deal with that or what do we know about?

Prentiss Dantzler 39:11
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think there's always a technical issue, when thinking about neighborhoods, and, you know, we tend to follow the line of thinking that's been there for years where it's like, "census track may not be perfect but that's what we use", right? And sometimes if we have better, more kind of specific data, we might use a census block or black groups or whatever, have you. I do think if you ask, you know, people living in their places, how they understand our neighborhood, you're going to get all types of answers. And we could theorize that those answers kind of play out and allow us to still think about census tracts as the best appropriate measure. But I do think there's still a big issue in terms of how we think about where people are living in their everyday interactions. So thinking about always gotta individualizing it, just like this doesn't makes sense to me in my everyday life. When I was in Denver, if you asked about my neighborhood, I couldn't tell you much. Because I didn't really function in my neighborhood, I lived there. And then in the morning, I went to work in a whole different city. And then if it was on a weekend that I was staying with friends, I was downtown. So there's a lot of ways in which my neighborhood was like, it was fine, it was quiet, I didn't really experience it too much because half that day, I wasn't there. And even on the weekends, for the most part, I probably wasn't there.

Shane Phillips 40:24
It's like where you slept but not where you lived?

Prentiss Dantzler 40:27
Yeah, these bedroom, like, why we thought about bedroom communities as these kind of smaller places. But I think a lot of people treat their neighborhoods as bedroom communities for to some extent, right, like, whether they're going to school or they're working, especially for like lower income households, where they tend to maybe work in more than, you know, eight or 10 hours a day. And they tend to function in different parts of the neighborhood. Plus, you add on the transportation piece that we were talking about earlier, there's a lot of ways in which these instances of neighborhoods are only based off the extreme events that happen, and not those everyday kind of lived experiences that they're just going through. So is there a better measure? I'm not convinced right now, right? If we could get better data, yeah, use data, have residents and households draw where they go every day, and, you know, maybe use cell phone data to track where they're going every day, if you want to use the data science and all the new stuff that we're doing these days. But for now, I'm just going to restaurants, at least for the foreseeable future, till we get better data or other ways of doing it. It'd be nice to just follow people, you know, use their cell phones as movement, and I know people are doing that. But yeah, we just don't have that opportunity, especially when you want to do more longitudinal stuff, right, so yeah..

Shane Phillips 41:38
One more thing that this made me think of the connection between or lack of a connection really, between people's perceptions and the sort of empirical conditions of their neighborhood. I'm wondering if there's something here with like, the pace of change is really what people are feeling more so than, you know, the static or the objective conditions at that time, or like where their neighborhood ranks among the whole spectrum of neighborhoods in their city or region or whatever. I just think about like, you know, in coastal cities, LA, San Francisco, New York, etc, the last five years, we talked about housing production and development as like this big housing boom. And if you compare it to, you know, the last couple decades, we are building quite a bit. And it's in very visible locations, compared to where a lot of housing used to be just built, where no one could see it at the kind of suburban fringe. And so there's this perception that we're in a housing boom. But if you look back, it's not actually that we're building a whole lot. It's just, we have this really low baseline. And, I'm just wondering if that feeling of, well, nothing has changed for so long, in that specific way. And now it feels like it's really changing a lot. Is that sort of what's going on here? The other example I was thinking of was, you know, with how a lot of the most anti-immigrants or more kind of more conservative places in the US aren't those that have a lot of immigrants in sort of absolute terms but those that had very low numbers of immigrants, but have experienced sort of an influx in recent years, and that rapid shift is really what's causing people's perceptions to change, as opposed to, you know, whether it's 2%, or 5%, or 40%, or whatever.

Prentiss Dantzler 43:21
Yeah, I think those points are right, and I think you're spot on, I think about how people are seeing relative change versus just these absolute changes that are happening in our neighborhoods, right? And this came up recently in the city of Atlanta, I was doing a panel at the Regional Planning Commission earlier in the year, and one of the researchers there said, "we're down to 175,000 housing units that we need right now". And that was like pre-pandemic levels, and then based off the pandemic, we have a lot of people paying cash offers for houses in the city and across the metro area, that are not from the city or the metro area. Two of the largest places that we're getting people are from New York and California. So it's just like, taking advantage. But it's also this kind of relative ways in which people are seeing housing costs. And I think that plays out so on everyday, where how much are you willing to spend on an apartment in New York is gonna be very different how much you're willing to spend on apartment in Baltimore. And like, people are going to be more or less willing to see these changes as the norm versus these are extreme or just crazy, or it doesn't make sense at all. And we're starting to see that more here in the city where the pace of change depending on a neighborhood has either been very high or very low. But you'll see an example as we all saw, where like Amazon HQ, like the next day prices values went up or crazy and you know, organizing happened and people were developers were coming in to buy properties. And we see that same thing here in the city of Atlanta right now, with Microsoft coming in on the west side. And now you know, abandoned properties that tend to be around 50 or 60,000, are almost 300,000 right now, off speculation to the market and what's going to happen in the city overall. So while I think, you know, the relative pace of change has been, you know, ebbs and flows. And we tend to focus on the extremes, right? If there's like extreme shifts in the market, or extreme shifts in population, like a kind of relative change in that place may mean a lot more to those locals versus us looking at from the outside looking in.

Shane Phillips 45:23
Yeah, and I think people make associations that aren't always explicit, where you're seeing some development. And you're also seeing, you know, much more relevant to you, housing prices go up really quickly, or your rent is going up really quickly. And you sort of bundle those things together, and just like, look at all this change happening, my rents going up, and I see this development. And so there just must be a lot of both of these things. And, you know, whether it's true or not, I do think people kind of just put those things together in many cases.

Prentiss Dantzler 45:52
Yeah, to that point, I remember when I was in graduate school, and being in Philadelphia, we saw a lot of neighborhood change happening in like the early 2000s, in mid-2010s. And part of it was like, people were saying, like, "it's the universities fault, the universities are doing all this". And I was like, "but you do know that the universities don't actually own that land next to them that the private developers actually building housing, it makes economic sense for them to do that if they want to read more rents from students". So while a lot of university is doing one particular thing, there are ways that you know, sometimes the university partners that were private developers, or sometimes it's just private developers in and of themselves, taking advantage of those changing dynamics of those neighborhoods. But people see the institutions as leading that or something else happening that may not actually be true when you look at the fine details around what's really going on.

Shane Phillips 46:41
Yeah, I think that's the story of basically every university in the neighborhood that surrounds them, I think. I mean, it's true of UCLA, for sure, and I did my Master's program at USC, USC, where it's even more, the case where there's really this feeling of like the university is sort of colonizing the neighborhood, even though it's been there for a very long time. But it keeps growing and its influence keeps expanding, whether it's its own projects or not.

Prentiss Dantzler 47:07
Yeah, and this is to the bigger point, right, historically, we based on the lack of private investment, and these cities, especially urban communities, that kind of Eds and Meds approach was typically the primary way where you could actually see these changes, right? So, and historically there's been a push to do that, right, having urban universities more engaged in their surrounding communities. So while they may be doing more kind of social service programs with community residents, or households around them, at the same time, because you know, some of them in a ways were causing some of the displacement that's happening in tandem? Well, you have other community programs that work for lower income households around you, but you could also be promoting more students to come to your campus, which is going to lead to more student development for housing. So these things don't work in, in opposition, a lot of times they work simultaneously.

Shane Phillips 47:53
Well, I think we've covered quite a bit here. Is there anything important you feel like we missed in this conversation?

Prentiss Dantzler 48:00
No, not really, I think, you know, Mike, and I have known each other for some years now. And it's always good to see him and also get to kind of officially meet you. But I do want to kind of listeners and scholars that are focused on urban planning or in policy, housing spaces to kind of just think more critically about the changes that are going on. And part of what I want to see going forward is like a younger researchers, just to kind of challenge a lot of the ways we've been thinking these things have historically been right, like, yeah, neighborhood context really does matter. But it matters in different ways than we're historically looking at. Always think about like the Sharkey favorite paper that came out like in 2014. And like, yeah, maybe neighborhoods matter, yes or no. And it's like, "yeah, that's one way to look at it" but to what extent do they matter, how much do they matter, why do they matter? Those are the better questions when we're really engaging in this research where it doesn't need to be treated as dichotomous outcome, yes or no. But there's, there's more flexibility in that. And then the second point, I would just like to say is, a lot of times when we're thinking about neighborhood change, there's an iterative process of like neighborhood change, versus how people are actually experiencing those changes. And a lot of times when we're using census data, or some of this more objective measures, even when I think about just vacation kind of studies, a lot of times I get annoyed, because there's always this lag, especially in the quantitative stuff, where you're like, oh, the place didn't change that much. And I'm like a processes dissertation take place over decades, right? There's processes of disinvestment or uneven development that happens that prime places to go through these changes. So while relatively you might not see a lot of physical mobility, or residential mobility, culturally, politically, and even investment economically, you'll see a lot of mobility that's happening, just if you look at the ways in which capital is flowing in and out of these neighborhoods. So a lot of ways in which we kind of need to think more critically, historically, and institutionally about why neighborhoods really matters - what I want a lot of researchers but just people in general to think about. So we can actually respond to things in the immediate and also think about long term changes that we can push for. There's always this kind of what I call the politics intervention where there's immediate threats to a household and lower income neighborhood like evictions. But there's also this long-term kind of threat about disinvestment, and neighborhood decline that happens, as in tandem, and simultaneously. So people are grappling with those, and I want researchers to grapple with those a little bit more than we historically have been doing.

Michael Lens 50:24
Yeah, this has been such a great conversation Prentiss. And, you know, as you noted, we've known each other for, for some years, kind of going back to various academic conferences, and dirty secret about these conferences is sometimes we just hang out and talk like normal people. And we don't just sit around and have these very deep conversations about policy and research. And so it's been really, really nice to hear, to see your brain work, and to hear, hear all these different areas in which you can learn so much from you. Um, you know, is there, I guess, maybe to leave us off? Like, what are you excited about for, you're obviously embarking on a new adventure, as far as a new country in Canada and a new city in Toronto and a new job, but, you know, what's something that you're excited about that you're working on?

Prentiss Dantzler 51:24
Yeah. So for the last couple of years, since I had a Fulbright at Toronto back in Fall 2019, I've been working with their housing authority to ask these kind of very similar questions that we've been asking here in the States about, does housing systems work? Who does it work for? How much does it keep people in place? You know, in certain cities and across the country, you know, the Housing Authority is one of the main evictors or main eviction kind of filers. So yeah, I'm working with them to kind of ask those same questions. And part of the reason, the draw Toronto, like I wasn't on the market, it just kind of came up. So it was nice to get the job. But part of it is the thing about is this is supposed to be, you know, a political context where there's a country that provides more social services, or a bigger social safety net, how much do they do better in housing policy right? And I think, a lot of times what I get annoyed at, with a lot of those scholars in conferences and everything else is because we haven't really had an imaginary about what our equitable housing system really looks like. And I think a lot of times, you know, a lot of the band-aid issues that we're doing do help people in the immediate, but we're still gonna be having these reoccurring issues of displacement that really affect households going forward right? So yeah, you could have more public housing, that's not going to solve the housing crisis in a lot of cities, you can have more housing vouchers, but you we already know with stories around landlords, right? Like even Eva Rosen's beautiful book gives us another insight to how this doesn't really play out like we thought it would. I think a lot of times with working with community organizations and housing organizations and kind of government agencies allows us to see what's really going on behind the scenes, when typically, we can have a very kind of academic lens, and, you know, do it from the side, and just like, "Oh, yeah, this is what's happening. And then you start talking to people and you're like, yeah, that's happening. But it's not the reasons why we think it's going yeah. So for me is to think about, you know, Toronto is seems like the best place right now for me to think about how some of these issues can play out. But also think about what can we pull back to the states to really think about long term federal, state and local housing policy to address some of these issues. Like, just because I'm going into Canada doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing research on the States, coming up.

Michael Lens 53:38
I'm about to go to London to write a book on black neighborhoods in the United States so sometimes things don't make sense.

Prentiss Dantzler 53:45
Right, and I think the other piece, I'm really interested in the big project that I keep talking about, so I'll make sure I do it is looking at HOAs. I think that's another untapped ways in which we're thinking about neighborhood governance, by people like Brian McKay has been doing research on HOAs for a long time and other kind of economists like Rachel Metzler, a new school. She's been doing some work on that. And I'm really interested in thinking about HOA fees as these pockets of private governance that facilitate issues of segregation, discrimination, displacement, or is it also neighborhood containment? There's not a lot of good data out there to really think about HOAs right? And I think a lot of ways in which I've been seeing the numbers like one in six new housing developments are within HOA so if this is going to be a major form of like neighborhood governance, how do those kind of smaller community organizations actually dictate who lives in places and while we're thinking about affordability issues, it's like yeah, those are not always the certain drivers. There are other institutional things that we're seeing that are also causing people to stay or live or move within her neighborhood so...

Shane Phillips 54:53
And I do feel like HOAs too like there's the... I think probably most HOAs are in these tracks, you know, sprawl developments. But I've always been, you know, increasingly interested in this question of like, well, if we want to, you know, address climate change, affordability issues in urban areas like, owner- occupied housing needs to be part of that, it can't just all be apartments, but the management, the governance of these buildings by HOA is often so terrible. And so like, how do we build that up if the experience of living in an HOA is so terrible, and I mean, obviously, like the extreme example of that is the Surfside case just recently in Florida with the building collapse, but they're obviously just much smaller issues too that people just run into day to day. So I think that'll be interesting for a variety of reasons.

Prentiss Dantzler 55:44
Yeah, to that point, I think even historically, like you've been saying, we've been treating the choices like suburban institutions, but even with new condo developments, those introduce a new kind of governance structure within urban downtown cities or even urban neighborhoods overall, because nude condos go up especially market-rate condos that are going up across like the city of Atlanta and other places like Toronto. And as a result, you have a new kind of neighborhood institution that's popping in, right? So like, the ways in which... the introduction of these organizations is really interesting to me.

Shane Phillips 56:12
Yeah.

Prentiss Dantzler 56:13
But they just fit another narrative or they just add another layer of complexity to like think about how to drive or create a more equitable housing system, where we're usually focused on government actors, or private developers. And it's like, there's all these other organizations and institutions in the middle, that are functioning in a variety of ways that we need to explore more intentionally going forward.

Shane Phillips 56:34
Absolutely. And that I think, is as good a place as any to wrap this up. Thank you again, Professor Dantzler for joining us and Mike, anything you want to close out with?

Michael Lens 56:44
No, this has been such a fantastic conversation and it was a good one to come back to after after my vacation. So the podcast lives on strong.

Prentiss Dantzler 56:57
Thank you all for having me. I really appreciate it.

Shane Phillips 57:07
You heard Mike, the podcast lives on strong. Thanks for listening to the UCLA Housing Voice podcast. You can find show notes, some key takeaways from the paper and a transcript of the interview on our website at Lewis.ucla.edu UCLA Lewis Center also shares regular updates on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter @ShaneDPhillips. And Mike is there @MC_Lens. See you next time.

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