Dynamics of Neighborhood Quality in Chicago

The quantitative examination of neighborhood quality of life has traditionally focused on individual indicators and their level of occurrence, such as number of crimes and how much they rise or fall over time. While this approach can help to identify a neighborhood’s problems, it does not contribute to an understanding of the way indicators of quality interact with each other and change over time. This paper explores the use of analytic methods that are better suited for assessing neighborhood change, focusing on the rate at which changes occur as opposed to changes in magnitude. It seeks both to identify general correlations between indicators and to explore how these relationships are affected by neighborhood contexts and by conditions that originate outside the neighborhood, such as the collapse of the housing market in 2006 and the national recession that followed.