How Inner-City Decay Affects Metropolitan Regions and the Nation

Award Year: 1995	Investigator: Rodrick Wallace	Budget: $191,939	Categories: Urban Health
Abstract: Research shows that inner city problems such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and violent crime are not contained within disintegrating urban minority communities where they are most concentrated. Rather, they diffuse outward along the commuting field connecting the city to the suburbs and the suburbs with each other. Dr. Wallace builds on earlier studies using sophisticated methods adapted from population and community ecology and quantitative geography to analyze publicly available, routine administrative data sets. He: 1) extends analysis of urban-to-suburban diffusion beyond eight metropolitan regions (containing 54 million people) previously studied; 2) expands to Harlem and Washington D.C. earlier work in the Bronx on the disintegration process fueling this diffusion; and 3) broadens the analysis to the national travel net, examining the hierarchical spread of inner city markers between metropolitan regions.