Policy, Planning, and People: Promoting Justice in Urban Development

Chapter 15. Neighborhood Social Mix: Theory, Evidence, and Implications for Policy and Planning

Chapter 15 Neighborhood Social Mix: Theory, Evidence, and Implications for Policy and Planning George C. Galster Progressive thinkers about the residential composition of neighborhoods have long held that population socioeconomic diversity was desirable (Gans 1961; Sarkissian 1976). Similar sentiments still undergird a rich palette of official pronouncements and planning initiatives in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Programmatic examples include: urban regeneration measures that replace concentrations of social housing with more diverse housing stocks; social housing management and tenant allocation reform; tenantbased housing allowances; and land-use planning rules requiring mixed developments (see Berube 2005; Briggs 2005; Musterd and Andersson 2005; Norris 2006). Despite its longstanding, exalted place in the pantheon of planning nostrums , the goal of “socially mixed neighborhoods” has been challenged on conceptual and empirical grounds by a wide range of scholars, including Atkinson and Kintrea (2000, 2001), Ostendorf, Musterd and de Vos (2001), Kearns (2002), Musterd (2002, 2003), Musterd, Ostendorf and de Vos (2003), Meen et al. (2005), Galster (2005), Delorenzi (2006), Joseph (2006), Joseph, Chaskin, and Webber (2006), Cheshire (2007), Van Kempen and Bolt (2009), and Darcy (2010). It behooves planners to take the challenges seriously, not to pursue social mix as a matter of faith. This chapter aims to assist planners in this quest. It synthesizes and extends the challenges to social mix and assesses comprehensively the empirical evidence from many disciplines and nations as it interfaces with the topic 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 307 3/14/13 9:48 AM 308 George C. Galster considering both the goal of social mix and the means to achieve it. It tries to clarify what questions we need to ask and the degree to which answers seem certain regarding concepts, policy rationales, and causal mechanisms, and then draws appropriate, pragmatic implications for planners. The Slippery Concept of Social Mix “Social mix” is an intrinsically vague, slippery term; it is typically used to mean different things by different planners and policymakers. Three thorny aspects lie at the heart of this ambiguity (Tunstall and Fenton 2006; Kleinhans 2004): • Composition: On what bas(es) are we mixing people: ethnicity, race, religion, immigrant status, income, housing tenure—all, or some of the above? • Concentration: What is the amount of mixing? Which amounts of which groups comprise the ideal mix, or are minimally required to produce the desired outcomes? • Scale: Over what level(s) of geography should the relevant mix be measured? Does mixing at different spatial scales involve different causal processes and yield different outcomes? Planners must be precise and explicit in specifying the parameters of these three aspects of social mix before they can evaluate evidence in a precise way or recommend specific planning policies and practices. Below I examine the evidence base related to all three aspects, after establishing an evaluative framework in which evidence can be assessed. The Equity and Efficiency Rationales for Social Mix as a Goal Policy documents and the scholarly literature are replete with a wide range of objectives for a neighborhood social mix strategy. Important insights can be gained by reframing all these rationales in terms of who, ultimately, is the desired beneficiary of the policy. I would suggest this tripartite classification of potential beneficiaries: 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 308 3/14/13 9:48 AM 309 Neighborhood Social Mix • Disadvantaged Families, Adults, and Children (potentially defined according to tenure, economic, racial-ethnic, national-origin, and/or religious status, depending on context) • Advantaged Families, Adults, and Children • Society (all advantaged and disadvantaged individuals aggregated, though not necessarily benefiting equally or weighted equally by cultural norms) I assume the typical reader here is not a planner whose goal is to help the advantaged exclusively.1 Thus, I will only amplify on the first and the third, which hereafter I will refer to the “equity” and the “efficiency” rationales, which I now define. Defining Equity and Efficiency Rationales I specify that equity is improved if any social mix policy increases absolutely the well-being of the disadvantaged group in society. If society wished to pursue a policy of mixing advantaged with disadvantaged individuals in order to benefit the latter group, either of two necessary conditions would appertain.2 Disadvantaged individuals must (1) lose well-being by residing with other members of their group (at least past some point of concentration) and/or (2) gain well-being by residing with members of the advantaged group (at least past some point of...