Neighborhood Change in the Fourth Federal Reserve District: A Multivariate Approach

This special report provides a description of neighborhood change in the four largest cities of the Fourth Federal Reserve District, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from 1970 to 2010. The analysis relies on a statistical method of categorizing neighborhoods into a typology that is based on various quantitative characteristics of the residents and the housing stock. The typology captures the distribution of neighborhood types found in each city and provides a way to track how those neighborhoods have changed. Multiple variables are used to create each typology based upon the belief that urban neighborhoods are composites of many factors and that the methods used to study them should reflect that. In general, this analysis shows that from 1970 to 2010, most neighborhoods tended to remain the same from decade to decade. However, the overall rate of neighborhood change has increased in all four of the cities studied during the past two decades, with Cincinnati and Pittsburgh experiencing the greatest change from the 1990s to the 2000s.