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When a city experiences a decline in income or population, do all neighborhoods within the city decline equally? Or, do some neighborhoods decline more than others? What are the characteristics of the neighborhoods that decline the most? We answer these questions by looking at what happened to neighborhoods within Detroit as Detroit experienced a sharp decline in income and population from the 1980s to the late 2000s. We find patterns of changes in income and population that are consistent with the model and empirical patterns of gentrification presented in Guerrieri, Hartley, and Hurst (2011), only playing out in reverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Charles Caryle Colby, a geographer. Colby was born in Romeo, Michigan, on April 13, 1884. After a B.S. from the University of Chicago he became instructor and Head of the Department of Geography at Minnesota State Normal School in Winona, Minnesota. Charles Colby was an idea man, whether in the classroom, in the discussion of possible dissertations with students, in professional meetings, or in consultation with governmental agencies or on public issues. Colby was interested particularly in the people, places, and problems he knew personally. He had an intense loyalty to his own region and to his own discipline.

This article discusses economic expert John Kain's observation regarding the effect of residential segregation on relative Afro-American employment in various neighborhoods of Chicago, Illinois and Detroit. In 1956, Afro-Americans were distributed among the residents of Chicago, and they have an accumulation of more jobs. According to Kain, the residential segregation of the Afro-Americans within a metropolitan area has two types of relative employment effects. Kain's work has been argued that it suggest a nonlinear relationship between employment ratio and the residence ratio.

The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that residential segregation and job decentralization combine to adversely affect the employment opportunities of minorities. While employment is increasingly located outside of central cities, residential segregation prevents minorities from moving closer to suburban jobs. Although this hypothesis has intuitive appeal, there is little consensus regarding its empirical validity. This study (1) constructs detailed geographic measures of changes in employment opportunities, (2) estimates a fixed-effects model of changes in the unemployment rate over time, and (3) accounts for spatial correlation in the error term. Neighborhood-level employment data from 1980 and 1990 are used to measure changes in the distance to jobs from census tracts in the Detroit and Chicago metropolitan areas. In both cities, the decentralization of employment and the loss of manufacturing jobs resulted in substantial changes in the spatial distribution of employment. The empirical results indicate that a decline in the spatial proximity to employment is associated with an increase in the unemployment rate for blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]