Leonard S. Rubinowitz

The Urban-Suburban Investment-Disinvestment Process: Consequences for Older Neighborhoods

The pattern of suburban growth and decline of older neighborhoods within metropolitan areas is often seen as inevitable. However, these processes are shaped, in a significant way, by a relatively small number of private sector actors, including institutional investors, developers and mortgage bankers. Because of their ideologies and their perception of the economic realities, these interests invest increasingly in large scale developments on the suburban fringe and choose not to invest in older urban and suburban neighborhoods. These investment decisions have significant negative impacts on these older, middle class neighborhoods which are struggling to remain viable. With the withdrawal of these traditional sources of real estate investment capital, such neighborhoods face a concentration of foreclosures and abandonment of housing. Because these investment decisions are so important to the future of older neighborhoods, it is appropriate that there be public intervention to assure that there is an adequate flow of capital into these neighborhoods. The approaches which might be used include regulation—that is, requiring the industry to change invest ment patterns without rewarding them for doing so—and subsidy—providing incentives for investors to provide capital for older neighborhoods.

Low-Income Black Children in White Suburban Schools: A Study of School and Student Responses.

In 1976, as a result of the Gautreaux housing desegregation lawsuit, the Federal Government funded a program to assist low-income families in Chicago, Illinois, to move into private housing throughout the Chicago metropolitan area. The Federal Government made rent subsidies available for these families to make these moves. By late 1981, a year before the study reported here began, approximately 1,300 families had moved through this program, some to more than 50 primarily white suburbs and others to predominantly Black urban areas. When low-income Black families move into white middle-class suburbs, how do the Black children and the suburban schools respond to each other? How responsive were these suburban schools and teachers to the low-income Black students? How did the new students respond to their new schools? These are the questions to be addressed in this article.2 School desegregation has been studied extensively in recent