This introductory review essay examines some of the key concepts and approaches framing the ongoing debate around mixed communities and housing regeneration policies around the world. This review summarizes past positive and negative side effects of social mix reported in the extant international literature. It then describes social mix housing policies in the Global East and the Global South, including China, Japan, South Korea, sub-Saharan Africa, and Singapore. In moving forward, the review essay adopts Galster and Friedrichs’s challenge to think about the progressive reformation of a “social mix version 2.0”—what it might look like, and what the policy implications of such an improved version of social mix might be. Three policy implications are discussed: intentionality of social mix; mixed-income housing transit-oriented design; and learning from the Global East and Global South.

Substantial recent influxes of immigrants have transformed metropolitan housing markets across Europe, North America, and Australia. Where and under what physical and sociodemographic conditions these new residents and their children live influence their life chances and societal inequalities and cohesion. Using population register data, we estimate conditional logit models of neighbourhood selections jointly stratified by immigrant and income status for nine types of Oslo region families making ‘child-salient,’ inter- neighbourhood moves. Although homophily is an important driver of residential selection for both native and non-Western immigrant families, its significance pales in comparison to neighbourhood proximity and sectoral constraints in the spatial patterning of housing search. Study findings enhance our understanding of segregation processes and offer new perspectives on social mix housing policies. Social mix should attempt to enhance diversity at the larger spatial scales primarily by improving information about and enhancing access to potentially desirable residential options and countering anti-immigrant perceptions or discriminatory actions by real estate agents or mortgage brokers.

We analyze data from a natural experiment involving Denver public housing that quasirandomly assigns low-income Latino and African American youth to neighborhoods. Intent-to-treat and treatment-on-treated models reveal substantial effects of neighborhood socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and safety domains on youth and young adult educational, employment, and fertility outcomes. Effects are contingent on when a youth was first assigned to public housing and the neighborhood characteristic in question. Benefits from neighbors of higher occupational prestige are stronger if a child begins experiencing them at a younger age, whereas negative consequences of neighborhood crime are only manifested for teens. Neighborhood effect sizes apparently depend on the interaction among exposure duration, disruption effects of mobility, and developmental stage-specific differences in vulnerability to the given neighborhood effect mechanism operative. Our results hold powerful and provocative implications for where assisted housing should be developed and how applicants should be assigned to neighborhoods.

(2020). Community practice, social action, and the politics of pandemics. Journal of Community Practice: Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 89-99.

> “There is no blight on American life so great as the enduring poverty in our great cities and of the still unseen poor in the rural and mountain regions. And, of course, in the larger world.” > > John K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society ([1958] 1998:xii) It was images of poor families taken in rural Appalachia by photographers Billy Barnes, John Dominis, and Andrew Stern, coupled with the writings of The New York Times journalist Homer Bigart and seminal books by scholars Michael Harrington ( The Other America [1962]) and John Galbraith ( The Affluent Society [{1958}1998]) that brought poverty to light as a major social problem facing a relatively affluent America of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Concerned with expanding opportunities and increasing income for the 37 million Americans living in poverty at the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty on January 8, 1964, initiating a “new era of direct federal involvement in schools, hospitals, labor markets, and neighborhoods” (quoted in Bailey and Danziger 2013:1-3). The overarching goals of the War on Poverty were to: sustain high levels of employment; accelerate national and regional economic growth; improve labor markets; regenerate urban and rural communities; expand educational and training opportunities for youth as well as adults; advance the nation’s health; and expand support to the elderly and disabled (Bailey and Danziger 2013:7). To address these goals, Johnson worked with Congress to pass more than 200 pieces of legislation, resulting in the largest expansion of social safety net programs in U.S. history. This legislation created the Medicaid and Medicare programs providing health care to low-income people and the elderly; expanded the Head Start early education program; increased funding for K-12 and postsecondary education; established Food Stamps (currently known as SNAP) and other school and community-based nutrition programs; …

(2020). Removing the knees from their necks: mobilizing community practice and social action for racial justice. Journal of Community Practice. Ahead of Print.