Neighborhood Development in the Metropolitan Economy: A Policy Review

:This article introduces policymakers and scholars to several issues in the development of city neighborhoods and their residents. It constructs a literature review around a tree diagram of problems and solutions, arguing that this is a more useful way to organize information than the social science questions that typically interest academics. Following this structured overview, I make the following arguments about space and scale in neighborhood policy: (1) Even if we adopt an individualistic model of economic behavior, we do not necessarily need to choose “people” over “place.” (2) The rationale for the development of neighborhood export jobs remains weak. However, we may be able to identify a “preferred policy scale” for job development and placement connections. This is defined as the scale at which the problem of spatial mismatch is not solved at the expense of broader economic development considerations, and vice versa. The research agenda underlying this simple idea would require more sophisticated and policy-relevant work on commuting patterns and on the interaction behavior and other competitive advantages of firms situated in intra-metropolitan space.