Did Central Cities Come Back? Which Ones, How Far, and Why?

Abstract

:Much has been made of the revival of distressed cities during the 1990s, yet how much of this asserted revival really worked its way down to residents? We find that residents of distressed central cities were generally worse off in 2000 than in 1980. We construct an index of the economic well-being of central city residents for the 98 central cities that had at least 125,000 residents in 1980 with metropolitan area populations of at least 250,000. We then compare the change in the economic well-being of residents of the 33 cities with the lowest index scores in 1980 against (1) their own performance over this time period, (2) the performance of the 65 non-distressed central cities, and (3) the performance of the nation. In the third section we build regression models of change in the index and of each index component to determine what explains the change in economic well-being of city residents.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.