Ep 09: Neighborhood Perceptions with Prentiss Dantzler

Institutions like the U.S. Census Bureau offer us a wealth of statistics about the places people live: household incomes; demographics like race, ethnicity, age, and gender; how many people own or rent their homes, how much they pay, and where they moved from. We know much less about how people perceive their neighborhoods — how they feel about the places they live, regardless of their objective conditions, and how that affects their ability or willingness to stay. What do we miss when we overlook these subjective feelings and impressions? Dr. Prentiss Dantzler of the University of Toronto joins us to discuss his work on this subject, and to share some of the surprising ways that neighborhood perceptions relate to residential mobility.

Show notes:

• Jones, A., & Dantzler, P. (2021). Neighbourhood perceptions and residential mobility. Urban Studies, 58(9), 1792-1810.
• Ciorici, P., & Dantzler, P. (2019). Neighborhood satisfaction: A study of a low-income urban community. Urban affairs review, 55(6), 1702-1730.
• Leventhal, T., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2003). Moving to opportunity: an experimental study of neighborhood effects on mental health. American journal of public health, 93(9), 1576-1582.
• Sampson, R. J. (2017). Collective efficacy theory: Lessons learned and directions for future inquiry. In Taking stock (pp. 149-167). Routledge.
• DeLuca, S., & Rosenblatt, P. (2017). Walking away from The Wire: Housing mobility and neighborhood opportunity in Baltimore. Housing policy debate, 27(4), 519-546.
• DeLuca, S., Wood, H., & Rosenblatt, P. (2019). Why poor families move (and where they go): Reactive mobility and residential decisions. City & Community, 18(2), 556-593.
• Korver-Glenn, E., Dantzler, P., & Howell, J. (2021). A critical intervention for urban sociology.
• Rodriguez, A. D. (2021). Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta's Public Housing. University of Georgia Press.
• Sharkey, P., & Faber, J. W. (2014). Where, when, why, and for whom do residential contexts matter? Moving away from the dichotomous understanding of neighborhood effects. Annual review of sociology, 40, 559-579.