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Working Paper

Within-city Variation in Urban Decline: The Case of Detroit

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When a city experiences a decline in income or population, do all neighborhoods within the city decline equally? Or do some neighborhoods decline more than others? What are the characteristics of the neighborhoods that decline the most? We answer these questions by looking at what happened to neighborhoods within Detroit as the city experienced a sharp decline in income and population from the 1980s to the late 2000s. We find patterns of changes in income and population that are consistent with the model and empirical patterns of gentrification presented in Guerrieri, Hartley, and Hurst (2011), only playing out in reverse.
Topics
Neighborhood quality
02.01.2012ISSN 2573-7953 WP 12-05DOI 10.26509/frbc-wp-201205
Keywords urban decline, income dynamics, detroit, externalities
JEL Classification Codes R21, R23, I32

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.

Note: There is a data description file that accompanies this paper.

Suggested Citation

Guerrieri, Veronica, Daniel A. Hartley, and Erik Hurst. 2012. “Within-city Variation in Urban Decline: The Case of Detroit.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 12-05. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201205