The 2000 Census identified changes in immigrant settlement patterns and the emergence of new immigrant gateways during the 1990s; however, few immigration studies to date have studied the intra-urban or local residential mobility of immigrants in metropolitan areas or the forms of spatial assimilation taking place. This dissertation examines the recent trends occurring in intra-urban mobility, immigration, and urban settlement patterns in Texas gateways, which have attracted an unprecedented number of Mexican immigrants since the 1970s. (More)

This dissertation examines the design of Hope SF, an innovative program in San Francisco that addresses both the physical decay of public housing properties and the social exclusion of public housing residents. Hope SF builds on the model of HOPE VI. Like HOPE VI, it attempts to remedy concentrated poverty and poor design by replacing class homogenous, dilapidated public housing sites with economically integrated, mixed-income communities. Projects achieve income diversity through increased density, phased development, and the one-for-one replacement of public housing units rather than the dispersal of residents. Because the program emphasizes integration, not relocation, every public housing family remains onsite. Service plans move public housing residents from their current condition of alienation and exclusion to their future as residents of new economically mixed neighborhoods. (More)

In the past 15 years, we have seen an important transformation in concentrated poverty. The dissolution of large-scale public housing in Baltimore has resulted in great social turmoil and the displacement of the city's poorest and most vulnerable population, many of whom are youth. The vertical ghetto-the high-rise public housing development-has remade itself into the horizontal ghetto-the concentration of Housing Choice Voucher users in moderately poor neighborhoods. Federally assisted housing comprises 20 percent of the rental market in Baltimore, and Section 8 vouchers make up 5.4 percent, one of the highest rates of any city more than 500,000 in the United States. These "Section 8" neighborhoods are also characterized by extremely high residential churning, and by high rates of crime and violence. Will the social ills that plagued America's public housing over the past 30 years follow the poor as they relocate to new neighborhoods? It is imperative that we learn more about the neighborhoods families are moving to, the forms of social organization that exist there, and the consequences these contexts have for the young adults who grow up in these areas. (More)

In the past 20 years, the geographic pattern of immigrant settlement in the United States has decidedly broadened, shifting from ethnic neighborhoods in central cities to places that have not been home to new immigrants for generations: suburban municipalities. Scholars now recognize suburbia as a diverse patchwork with significant pockets of rising economic inequality, deteriorating housing stock, and racial diversity. This dissertation will compare two suburban municipalities to explore how the processes of integration for the children of low-skilled Mexican immigrants are influenced by key structural factors and the social organization of the suburbs. (More)

This ethnographic case study examines what happens when pregnant and parenting teens come under the authority of a residential living program for young homeless families. Spawned by the de- institutionalization movement in the 1960s, transitional independent living programs operate within an "empowerment" paradigm. (More)