From the Ground Up: Translating Geography into Community through Neighbor Networks

By Rick Grannis

Where do neighborhoods come from and why do certain resources and effects--such as social capital and collective efficacy--bundle together in some neighborhoods and not in others? From the Ground Up argues that neighborhood communities emerge from neighbor networks, and shows that these social relations are unique because of particular geographic qualities. Highlighting the linked importance of geography and children to the emergence of neighborhood communities, Rick Grannis models how neighboring progresses through four stages: when geography allows individuals to be conveniently available to one another; when they have passive contacts or unintentional encounters; when they actually initiate contact; and when they engage in activities indicating trust or shared norms and values.


Seamlessly integrating discussions of geography, household characteristics, and lifestyle, Grannis demonstrates that neighborhood communities exhibit dynamic processes throughout the different stages. He examines the households that relocate in order to choose their neighbors, the choices of interactions that develop, and the exchange of beliefs and influence that impact neighborhood communities over time. Grannis also introduces and explores two geographic concepts--t-communities and street islands--to capture the subtle features constraining residents' perceptions of their environment and community.


Basing findings on thousands of interviews conducted through door-to-door canvassing in the Los Angeles area as well as other neighborhood communities, From the Ground Up reveals the different ways neighborhoods function and why these differences matter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2009
• ISBN: 9781400830572

Rick Grannis

Rick Grannis is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Book preview

From the Ground Up

From the Ground Up

TRANSLATING GEOGRAPHY INTO

COMMUNITY THROUGH

NEIGHBOR NETWORKS

Rick Grannis

Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grannis, Rick, 1965–

From the ground up : translating geography into community through neighbor networks / Rick Grannis.

p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-14025-4 (acid-free paper)

1. Community life. 2. Neighborhood. 3. Communities. 4. Ecology. I. Title.

HM761.G73 2009

307.3′3620973—dc22                            2009003739

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables

Prologue

CHAPTER ONE

Neighborhoods and Neighboring

Geography and Community

It’s the Kids, Stupid!

Overview of the Book

CHAPTER TWO

The Stages of Neighboring

Neighboring: A Superposed Relation

Stage 1 Neighboring

Stage 2 Neighboring

Stage 3 Neighboring

Stage 4 Neighboring

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER THREE

Reconceptualizing Stage 1 Neighboring

Proximity

Boundaries

Face Blocks

Tertiary Face Blocks

Intersections

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER FOUR

Reconceptualizing Stage 1 Neighbor Networks

Layers of Complex Network Structures

T-Communities and Islands

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER FIVE

Selection and Influence

Selecting Homophilous Immediate Neighbors

Influence

Homophily and Influence Acting on Different Stages of Neighboring

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER SIX

Respondents, Interviews, and Other Data

Gang Neighborhood Ethnography and Interviews

Overview of the Other Data Collection Events

Structured Interviews

Cognitive Mapping and Alternatives

Data Collection in 68 Los Angeles Neighborhoods

Adaptive Link-Tracing

The Second Los Angeles Data Collection

College Town Census and Resample

Administrative Data

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER SEVEN

Selecting Stage 1 Neighbors

Selecting Racially Homophilous Tertiary Street Neighbors

Accepting Heterogenous Higher-Stage Neighbors

A Dialogue with Administrative Data

Segregating Tertiary Street Networks

Tertiary Street Network Borders

The Impact of a Single Tertiary Street Connection

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER EIGHT

Unintentional Encounters

The Substantive Reality of Passive Contacts

The Lived Experience of Tertiary Street Networks

A Note about Large, Multiunit Complexes

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER NINE

Stage 3 Neighbors and Tertiary Streets

Tertiary Street Proximity and Stage 3 Neighbors

Tertiary Street Networks and Stage 3 Neighbor Networks

More Than Proximity

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER TEN

The Importance of Neighbor Networks

Three Degrees of Neighboring

A Note about the Exhaustive Census

Neighboring Is a Family Relation

The Importance of Convenient Availability

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Network Influence Theory

Social Influence Network Theory

Beyond Density

The Horizon of Observability

Structural Cohesion

Merely a Mechanism?

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER TWELVE

Influence Networks in a College Town

T-Communities, Children, and the Horizon of Observability

T-Communities and Social Control

Neighbor Influence and T-Community Culture

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Influence Networks in a Gang Barrio

Geographic Neighborhood and Sociological Neighborhood

Neighborhood Community and Tertiary Street Networks

An Efficacious Neighborhood

Neighborhood Efficacy as a Function of Influence Networks

Influence Networks as a Function of Tertiary Street Networks

Main Points in Review

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Implications

Summary

What It All Means

APPENDIX

Survey Instrument

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations and Tables

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 3.1: Face block

FIGURE 4.1: Stage 4 neighbor network

FIGURE 4.2: Stage 3 neighbor network, which induces stage 4 neighbor network

FIGURE 4.3: Stage 2 neighbor network, which induces stage 3 neighbor network

FIGURE 4.4: Stage 1 neighbor network, which induces stage 2 neighbor network

FIGURE 4.5: T-communities

FIGURE 4.6: Tertiary street island

FIGURE 6.1: Distribution of t-community sizes

FIGURE 7.1: Pasadena’s tertiary streets by residential demographics

FIGURE 7.2: Enlarged subsection of figure 7.1

FIGURE 7.3: For spatially adjacent block groups, distribution of absolute difference in population that is white

FIGURE 7.4: For spatially adjacent block groups, distribution of absolute difference in population that is Asian

FIGURE 7.5: For spatially adjacent block groups, distribution of absolute difference in population that is Hispanic

FIGURE 7.6: For spatially adjacent block groups, distribution of absolute difference in population that is black

FIGURE 7.7: Demographic differences between spatially adjacent block groups by number of shared tertiary streets

FIGURE 8.1: Passive contacts by type

FIGURE 8.2: Sample cognitive map 1

FIGURE 8.3: Sample cognitive map 2

FIGURE 8.4: Cognitive maps compared to tertiary street island map

FIGURE 8.5: Cognitive maps compared to tertiary street island map (continued)

FIGURE 8.6: Cognitive maps compared to tertiary street island map (continued)

FIGURE 8.7: Composite of cognitive maps compared to tertiary street island map

FIGURE 9.1: Neighbors known as a function of distance (in house-steps)

FIGURE 9.2: Adaptive link-tracing network mapped onto t-community

FIGURE 9.3: Complete census of neighborhood network

FIGURE 9.4: Complete census of neighborhood network mapped onto census tracts

FIGURE 9.5: Complete census of neighborhood network mapped onto elementary school catchment areas

FIGURE 9.6: Complete census of neighborhood network mapped onto t-community

FIGURE 10.1: Sample adaptive link-tracing network

FIGURE 10.2: Distribution of path lengths in samples of size 10

FIGURE 10.3: Sample adaptive link-tracing network, respondents only

FIGURE 10.4: Why your neighbors know more neighbors than you do

FIGURE 10.5: Household neighbor network sizes, by presence of children

FIGURE 10.6: Neighboring relations, by presence of children in either household

FIGURE 10.7: Percentage of households reachable at each neighbor network step, by presence of children

FIGURE 10.8: Frequency of monitoring neighbors’ children in spontaneous playgroups

FIGURE 10.9: Frequency of socialization with neighbors

FIGURE 11.1: Example networks with identical order and size but disparate quantity and length of paths

FIGURE 12.1: My neighbors share my values at times 1 and 2

FIGURE 12.2: Comparison of models’ predictive power for My neighbors share my values

FIGURE 12.3: People are the best part of this neighborhood at times 1 and 2

FIGURE 12.4: Comparison of models’ predictive power for People are the best part of this neighborhood

FIGURE 13.1: Gang neighborhood tertiary street network

FIGURE 13.2: Number of alters respondents believed to be for them

FIGURE 13.3: Alters identified as for respondents by distance between alters’ and respondent’s residences

TABLES

TABLE 2.1: Guttman Scale of Neighboring Relations

TABLE 6.1: Overview of Data Collections

TABLE 6.2: Neighbors Known, by Data Collection

TABLE 7.1: Similarity of Neighbors in Previous Neighborhood, by Previous Neighbors’ Influence on Decision to Relocate

TABLE 7.2: Similarity of Neighbors in Current Neighborhood, by Influence on Relocation Decision, Desire to Remain in Neighborhood, and Awareness of Different-Race Neighbor

TABLE 7.3: Demographic Variability Accounted for, by Island or T-community

TABLE 7.4: Block Groups’ Demographics as a Function of Demographics of Island or T-community

TABLE 7.5: Block Groups’ Demographics as a Function of Demographics of T-community, by Presence of Children

TABLE 7.6: Percentage Racial Difference between Spatially Adjacent Block Groups, by Whether They Are Barriers, Borders, or Internal Adjacencies

TABLE 8.1: How Respondent Met Neighbor, by Percentage Identified as Passive Contact

TABLE 8.2: Overview of Cognitive Maps, by Data Collection

TABLE 9.1: Identified Neighbors by Same T-community or Census Tract, by Data Collection

TABLE 9.2: Neighbors Met by Passive Contacts, by Data Collection

TABLE 9.3: Neighbors Met by Passive Contacts, by Same Census Tract or T-community, by Data Collection

TABLE 9.4: Adaptive Link-Tracing Sequences, by Same Census Tract or T-community, by Data Collection

TABLE 9.5: Probability of Those Identified Living in Same T-community or Census Tract, by Distance from Respondent, College Town Census, All Neighbors

TABLE 9.6: Expected and Actual Number of Neighbors, by Same T-community or Census Tract, College Town Census, All Neighbors

TABLE 9.7: Probability of Those Identified Living in Same T-community or Census Tract, by Distance from Respondent, College Town Census, Farthest Neighbors Only

TABLE 9.8: Expected and Actual Number of Neighbors, by Same T-community or Census Tract, College Town Census, Farthest Neighbors Only

TABLE 9.9: Probability of Those Identified Living in Same T-community or Census Tract, by Distance from Respondent, College Town Follow-up, All Neighbors

TABLE 9.10: Expected and Actual Number of Neighbors, by Same T-community or Census Tract, College Town Follow-up, All Neighbors

TABLE 9.11: Probability of Those Identified Living in Same T-community or Census Tract, by Distance from Respondent, College Town Follow-up, Farthest Neighbors Only

TABLE 9.12: Expected and Actual Number of Neighbors, by Same T-community or Census Tract, College Town Follow-up, Farthest Neighbors Only

TABLE 10.1: Distribution of Neighboring Relations, by Presence of Children in Either Household

TABLE 10.2: Proportion of Neighboring Relations Providing Specific Services, Households with Children Only

TABLE 10.3: Proportion of Neighboring Relations Providing Specific Services, All Households

TABLE 10.4: Proportion of Neighboring Relations Providing Services Who Were Met through Passive Contact, All Households

TABLE 10.5: Proportion of Neighboring Relations Providing Services Who Were Met through Passive Contact, Households with Children Only

TABLE 12.1: Similarity in Residents’ Beliefs about Neighborhood, by Neighbor Network Steps Separating Them

TABLE 12.2: Neighborly Interactions and Perception of Neighborhood, All Households

TABLE 12.3: Neighborly Interactions and Perception of Neighborhood, Households with Children Only

Prologue

IT WAS 1995 and I sat in a Catholic church in a large city in Southern California. The mayor and the entire city council were there to respond to local residents, who were angry about a stop sign that had been placed at an intersection in their community a few months earlier. For three exhausting hours, mothers and fathers pleaded with their political leaders to remove the stop sign, which they claimed had destroyed their neighborhood community.

Unfortunately, their lay presentations were obviously incoherent. They clearly had no idea why the stop sign had wrecked their lives. Person after person came to the microphone and tried to offer up reasons, but they all sounded hollow. Everyone agreed, however, that neighborhood life had been much better before the stop sign was put in.

The politicians had come armed with environmental impact reports. They had also brought an urban planner as a hired gun. Slowly, patiently, and methodically, the mayor, the city council, and their urban planner showed that, not only had traffic decreased substantially on the east-west street traversing the neighborhood where the stop sign had been placed, but it had even decreased slightly on nearby north-south cross streets.

After about three hours, the meeting really began to fall apart. A curious city council member began pressing those who came to the microphone for their addresses. It soon became clear that individuals from several blocks away were there protesting. The city council member asked that only those who had been directly affected by the stop sign be allowed to speak. Many individuals said that they and their families had been affected even if they didn’t live on the street with the stop sign. Another city council member retorted that they were just trying to just stir things up; perhaps they were really upset over completely unrelated issues. This suggestion divided the crowd of protesters. After a few last enraged yells, many left and went home.

From that moment of the meeting on, a much smaller audience stayed on topic. Only those whose addresses fronted the street with the stop sign were allowed to speak. As the meeting pressed on into the night, the politicians and their aids proved over and over to these misguided constituents that what they believed was true could not be true. That one little stop sign could not have had the impact they claimed it did.

The meeting remained calm. Children played in the aisles, and babies cried. The city council thanked those who attended for their participation and reassured them that they were always ready to listen to their constituents. When the meeting finally ended, a few in the crowd politely clapped. Most just went home.

It was my ethnographic experience in this community in Southern California that first made me aware of the importance of both small streets and neighbor networks, although long before this event I had been fascinated by the large gang that dominated this city. From my first encounter with them while teaching at a local middle school (where the vast majority of the student population claimed some affiliation with them), I saw that the gang was well received, or at least highly tolerated, in their neighborhood. The school even offered an optional after-hours class, officially titled Practical Citizenship, but unofficially titled How to Be a Positive Gang Member. The school’s administrators had decided, if you can’t beat them, join them.

The members of the gang in the neighborhood covered a wide spectrum of ages. While many were in their twenties or thirties, with a few even older veteranos hanging around, no one joined the gang at that age. They joined when they were in middle school, before they could drive. They had contact with gang members at school, but unless that contact was reinforced back home, as they walked the streets of their neighborhood, the draw of the gang didn’t usually take.

Seeing this pattern play out, I suspected the importance of pedestrian access, and I began to explore its relationship to the gang. A vice-principal who became interested in my study helped me do a rough analysis, and we found out that the one-third or so of the student body who had little or no affiliation with the gang lived in areas that were not connected to the rest of the school’s catchment area by walkable streets. This made perfect sense to both the vice-principal and me. If they were going to join the gang, these middle school recruits had to be able to casually walk to meet gang members.

A few days after the stop sign meeting, I scheduled an appointment with one of the city council members and suggested that the stop sign, by slowing traffic on the north-south street, had actually made it easier for members of the gang who lived to the east to cross the street. A wall had come down, and the gang’s neighborhood was now expanding to include new neighbors, new juvenile neighbors, to the west. The city council member thanked me for my time but suggested that mine was an ivory tower theory. He had to live in the real world, where a stop sign couldn’t stop—or help—the spread of such a powerful gang. The gang had been kept out of the neighborhood before by the vigilance of the upstanding residents who lived there. If the gang was moving in now, it was because these good citizens had moved out and had been replaced by less worthwhile people.

A week later, I offered my idea about the stop sign to the community rights group that had organized the parents’ meeting. As with the city council member, I suggested that the slowing of traffic on the north-south street had made it possible for the gang to move west. The unwanted changes that people had noticed in their community reflected its silent merger with the gang’s territory.

The community rights activists were less cordial than the professionally smooth councilman had been. They were not concerned about what the gang did over in that other neighborhood. They were concerned about the increase in drinking and delinquency among local youth. Sure, some of the middle-schoolers were sporting the gang’s insignia, but those were the bad apples you have in every neighborhood. The community activists went back to studying their environmental impact reports.

That meeting occurred 14 years ago. Now the neighborhood in question is a well-established area of the gang.

Ever since then, I’ve watched for instances of minor physical changes that affect communities. I’ve watched communities plant hedges and put up temporary barriers on streets. I’ve watched bike paths go in and come out. I’ve watched communities change stoplights and stop signs and bus stops.

I’ve always watched for the sociological impact of these changes. In many cases, it has been apparent. Sometimes it has troubled local residents. In no case, however, have residents attributed improvement or deterioration in their neighborhood to a hedge or a bike path or a bus stop. They don’t believe that in our modern world of the Internet and cell phones, hedges and bike paths and bus stops could possibly have an impact.

It’s true they have little impact on adults, especially adults in cars or those easily navigating public transportation systems. They don’t have too much effect on high school students either. But sixth-graders who are potential gang recruits and preschool children who grow up without seeing a face of another race don’t typically move about that way, and they don’t live exclusively in a cyberworld, especially if they are poor. They play with the next-door neighbors or the kids down the block; and, while they play and learn what the world is like, their parents often stand on the street, watching them and talking to each other about trivia and work and sometimes how we raise our children and what is good and bad in the world. Unplanned relationships form, neighbor networks grow, and community is born from the ground up.

From the Ground Up

CHAPTER ONE

Neighborhoods and Neighboring

GEOGRAPHY AND COMMUNITY

Human behavior necessarily occurs within (or must transcend) physical space. Nowhere is this truer than in residential life. As real-estate agents and homeowners (especially those with children) often declare, where one makes one’s home matters almost as much as what one does inside it. In the rapidly shrinking world of the twenty-first century, psychologists, economists, political scientists, and sociologists still acknowledge the importance of the neighborhood context.

Not all neighborhoods are alike, however. Some neighborhoods are characterized by high levels of effective community. They offer social capital to their residents, a social organization that facilitates and coordinates cooperative action for mutual benefit, which allows them to deal with daily life, seize opportunities, reduce uncertainties, and achieve ends that would not otherwise be possible.¹ This social organization is a resource that is not individually attainable because social capital is not a characteristic of individuals; it is a supraindividual property of social structure, and it seems to be particularly well grounded in neighborhood communities.² Sources of social capital tied to the neighborhood community are analytically distinct from, and are as consequential as, the more proximate family processes and relationships occurring in the home. Some neighborhoods develop a further layer of mutual trust and shared norms, values, and expectations,³ beyond the resource potential of neighbor networks, which allows them to use these networks to achieve desired outcomes. Collective efficacy occurs when members of a collectivity, with social capital resources, believe they are mutually able and willing to use them to achieve an intended outcome.⁴ The distinction is a subtle, but important, one. A neighborhood may have social capital resources available for its constituent residents to use, but they may not trust the willingness or ability of their fellow residents to use these resource networks for the collective good, or they may not even be certain that they agree on what the collective good is.

From a less positive perspective, neighborhoods show remarkable continuities in patterns of criminal activity. For decades, criminological research in the ecological tradition has confirmed the concentration of interpersonal violence in certain neighborhoods, especially those characterized by poverty, the racial segregation of minority groups, and the concentration of single-parent families. Even in neighborhoods with less socioeconomic or racial isolation, crime rates persist despite the demographic replacement of neighborhood populations.⁵ In addition, neighborhoods not only determine one’s exposure to crime and violence,⁶ but also a host of less tangible deleterious factors⁷ that contribute to the development of an urban underclass, signs of social disorder that lead residents to perceive their neighbors as threats rather than as sources of support or assistance.⁸

Researchers have taken a growing interest in the role of neighborhoods in shaping outcomes for children, families, and neighborhood residents in general.⁹ These effects have included phenomena ranging from child and adolescent development¹⁰ (e.g., abuse and mal-treatment, school completion¹¹ and achievement,¹² drug use,¹³ deviant peer affiliation, delinquency¹⁴ and gangs,¹⁵ adolescent sexual activity¹⁶and pregnancy,¹⁷ childbearing¹⁸ and parenting behaviors,¹⁹ etc.) to concentrated disadvantage and its many corollaries (restricted economic attainment²⁰ and labor market failure, crime²¹ and violence,²² physical disorder,²³ the perpetuation of racism,²⁴ to name just a few). The conclusion reached by all of these studies is that neighborhoods influence our behavior, attitudes, and values.²⁵ They shape the types of people we will become and expose us to or shield us from early hazards that might restrict the opportunities available to us later in life. After our homes, and in conjunction with them, neighborhoods are where we first learn whether the world is safe and cooperative or inchoate and menacing. The neighborhood one lives in matters.

Neighborhoods matter, but different neighborhoods matter in different ways. Different neighborhoods have different effects, of different magnitudes. Some neighborhoods have almost no effect. For the researcher, neighborhoods cluster outcomes that cannot be accounted for in terms of the characteristics of the individuals or households currently residing in them. It is as if neighborhoods have personalities, enduring characteristics that survive the replacement of their constituent residents.²⁶ These neighborhood effects, however, necessarily involve a geographic context.