Social capital and neighborhood stability: An empirical investigation

Abstract There is a growing consensus among urban analysts that inner‐city neighborhoods suffer from a lack of social capital. Because these areas do not have a strong social infrastructure in place to support successful revitalization efforts, urban policy recommendations now call for developing social capital in the worst‐off parts of our cities. However, this consensus has been reached without any empirical analysis of the effect of social capital on urban neighborhoods. Moreover, there have been few, if any, efforts to show how to measure social capital at a neighborhood level. This article proposes a social capital model of neighborhood change that measures social capital as a function of two constitutive elements: sociocultural milieu and institutional infrastructure. In addition, we present a theoretical model to show how social capital affects neighborhood stability and an empirical analysis that provides evidence of the positive effect social capital has on neighborhood stability.