For this study, we focus our examination of the relationship between housing foreclosure rates, neighborhood reputations, and resident sentiment on a strategic location, Las Vegas, Nevada. The Great Recession, which officially began in December 2007 ( Muro et al.2009), triggered a housing foreclosure crisis throughout the US. To begin to examine this premise empirically, our study uses survey-based data during the most recent housing foreclosure crisis to analyze how objective neighborhood circumstances, together with measures of neighborhood reputation, influence individual assessments of the quality of their neighborhood. During times of neighborhood crisis-caused for example by natural disasters or sharp economic downturns-neighborhood reputations are more likely to be relied upon to guide the thoughts and actions of residents, and in the process, individual sentiments about their neighborhoods are apt to be altered in more favorable or less favorable ways as residents actively evaluate whether the purported reputation is living up to expectations. This article contributes to an emerging area of urban community and disaster research by advancing a thesis that helps explain how neighborhood reputations function during crisis periods, when residents are forced to reassess the correspondence between objective circumstances and their residential sentiments. 2006 Hipp 2009 Lovejoy, Handy, and Mokhtarian, 2010 Parkes, Kearns, and Atkinson 2002), but research on the dynamic processes that reinforce or alter residential sentiments during a crisis period are largely absent from the literature. Numerous studies examine the determinants that influence individual sentiments regarding neighborhood quality and residential satisfaction (e.g., Amerigo and Aragones 1997 Dassopoulos, Batson, Futrell, and Brents 2012 Galster and Hesser 1981 Grogan-Kaylor et al. 1982 Temkin and Rohe 1996), and potentially affect the resiliency of a community in the wake of catastrophe (e.g., Hartigan 2009). Once recognized, neighborhood reputations shape individual sentiments about neighborhood quality, these sentiments then guide residential mobility decisions (e.g., Lee, Oropesa, and Kanan 1994 Speare 1974), reinforce stigmas in urban communities and perpetuate urban spatial inequalities, influence growth machine politics ( Baldassare and Protash. Neighborhood reputations are based on common perceptions of neighborhood disorder and common perceptions about a neighborhood’s ability to cope with disorder ( Sampson 2012). The implications of these findings for community resiliency are discussed. In support of the foreclosure crisis hypothesis, foreclosure rates mediate the effects of neighborhood disorder on resident sentiment. In support of the neighborhood resiliency hypothesis, collective efficacy is positively associated with how residents feel about the quality of their neighborhoods, and this relationship is unaltered by foreclosure rates. The results provide qualified support for both perspectives.

Geo-coded individual-level data from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area Social Survey merged with data on census tract foreclosure rates are used to address this question. Of central interest are whether neighborhood reputations are durable in the face of a crisis ( neighborhood resiliency hypothesis) or whether neighborhood reputations wane during times of duress ( foreclosure crisis hypothesis). This study examines how two major components of a neighborhood’s reputation-perceived disorder and collective efficacy-shape individuals’ sentiments toward their neighborhoods during the foreclosure crisis triggered by the Great Recession.

Foreclosed homes 89104 statistics