City & Community

This study seeks to investigate the ways in which local religious institutions shape mechanisms of informal social control within one of the largest Arab ethnic enclave communities in the northeastern United States, where a high concentration of working-class Muslim immigrants reside. The study draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 58 first- and second-generation Muslim-Arab immigrants and 10 community agency members who work in local institutions. The findings reveal the pivotal role two local mosques played in facilitating and mobilizing collective efficacy among Muslim residents to confront neighborhood crime. In addition to promoting social organization and boosting various levels of social control within the community (e.g., private, parochial, public), the analysis shows that local mosques also contributed to the physical revitalization of the Arab neighborhood by investing in vacant land and run-down properties, further improving the physical and economic conditions in and around the ethnic enclave. This study extends the immigrant revitalization perspective by elucidating the distinct ways in which the spatial concentration of Muslim immigrants, along with their religious institutions, can reshape disadvantaged urban spaces.

Research on group threat has identified the racial composition of neighborhoods as significant for understanding spatial variation in racial bias and discrimination. A distinct but related strand of research has found disproportionate rates of arrests of non-Whites in predominantly White neighborhoods. This past work has generally operationalized racial composition in residential terms. Here, I explore the role of the racial composition of everyday mobility patterns in predicting racial threat. I propose that just as White neighborhoods experiencing growing non-White residential populations exhibit patterns of group threat, the same dynamic may occur in White neighborhoods experiencing large influxes of non-White everyday visitors. Drawing on arrests and cell phone mobility data from New York City, I find that in predominantly White neighborhoods, Black arrest rates are 150 percent higher when the share of Black visitors exceeds the share of Black residents by 10 percentage points. Similar but smaller patterns also appear for Hispanic visitors and Hispanic arrests. These heightened inflows of non-White visitors into these predominantly White “threatened” neighborhoods help explain why predominantly White neighborhoods sometimes exhibit especially elevated non-White arrest rates. Overall, this study offers a novel perspective on how policing practices intersect with the racialized control of space in urban environments.

Sociologists have long debated whether the concentration of immigrants in some neighborhoods exacerbates or mitigates disadvantage. This study extends this inquiry to investigate residential stability in poor immigrant neighborhoods. Quantitative analyses show that poor immigrant neighborhoods nationwide have an eviction rate 26 percent lower than similarly poor non-immigrant neighborhoods. Ninety in-depth interviews with landlords and tenants in two neighborhoods, Boston’s Chinatown and Houston’s Gulfton, demonstrate how co-ethnic owners and property managers engage in informal practices that provide flexibility to households at risk of displacement. However, in Chinatown’s enclave housing market, efforts by co-ethnic landlords and community organizations further suppress rents; in Gulfton’s secondary immigrant housing market, low rents (and low evictions) come at the cost of dilapidated housing. This article connects immigration and housing studies by underscoring how the protective qualities of some poor immigrant neighborhoods extend to housing dynamics, shielding their residents from evictions in a precarious housing market.

How does real estate development relate to order maintenance policing patterns? I argue that real estate developers influence low-level policing to protect their investments, tracing the history of funding and financial incentives to police redevelopment. I use development permits as a tangible metric of spatially rooted investment and construct a dataset of census tracts in New York City from 2009 to 2019. I find that areas with more new residential development are associated with more order maintenance arrests in the following year, net of crime, calls to police, and area demographics. This relationship is largest for corporate-owned redevelopment, suggesting that increasing corporatization may uniquely relate to policing patterns. I find that this relationship is present not only in areas at risk of gentrification, but also in wealthier and Whiter tracts, where development-directed policing functions to protect increasing investment in already-wealthy areas. Spatial Durbin models show that redevelopment may have an even greater effect on the policing patterns in the surrounding area. By quantifying the influence of physical reinvestment on disorder policing, this article highlights the relationship between urban economic investment and formal social control.

This article examines how people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles navigate prolonged waiting for permanent housing within a highly constrained and opaque service system. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show that enrollment in housing waiting pools often signals formal inclusion but rarely results in housing, producing instead varied strategies of waiting rather than reliable pathways to placement. Participants respond to this uncertainty through practices such as bypassing queues, hustling staff, and performing compliance with service requirements—strategies shaped by unequal resources and prior exposure to homelessness services. Rather than determining housing outcomes, these practices shape how clients become legible to street-level bureaucrats and influence staff perceptions and patterns of engagement under conditions of scarcity. By situating waiting as a relational and administrative process, this article contributes an analytic framework for understanding how urban service systems reproduce inequality through the management of time.

This article uses the unique case of low-income renters who have participated in tenant rights education to understand how an increased understanding of their rights and responsibilities shaped tenant strategies for addressing destabilizing housing conditions. We find that tenants varied in their responses with some demanding repairs or rent reductions and others resigning themselves to their housing situations. This variation was not random: the strategies tenants adopted after rights education reflect social vulnerabilities, particularly the formality of rental arrangements and legal status to live in the United States. Tenants incorporated what they learned into their plans for next steps which helped some avoid, or at least delay, displacement in the short term and improved their capacity to advocate for repairs. However, tenants with multiple social vulnerabilities or whose situations fall in legal gray areas were resigned to their situations. They avoided displacement but that avoidance came at the cost of requesting repairs or contesting unfair rent increases. A subset of tenants felt no need to alter how they approached housing issues but planned to use the information in the future, either for themselves or others in their community. Tenant rights education influences strategizing for low-income renters in positive ways, but to truly disrupt housing precarity, rights education must be combined with ongoing legal support and policies that reduce rent burdens.