The Disparate Neighborhood Impacts of the Great Recession: Evidence from Chicago

Abstract

We advance scholarship about how macroeconomic forces differentially manifest themselves across local spaces by developing a holistic conceptual framework and empirical analyses involving multilevel change modeling. Unlike prior work, we examine differential rates of change in neighborhood indicators. We illustrate our approach with Chicago data measuring the crime, housing, and economic domains of neighborhood quality of life over the 2000–2009 period. We find that the local dynamic manifestations of macroeconomic cycles were far more nuanced than have been previously observed. Neighborhood indicators moved along distinct trajectories, sometimes but not necessarily tracking each other or the overall business cycle, and they changed with varied intensities. The Great Recession of 2006–2009 had disparate negative impacts on lower-income and minority-occupied neighborhoods' local job opportunities, home prices, and home foreclosures, though this was not true for credit or crime indicators. Credit indicators performed geographically much differently than in the prior Chicago recession.