Neoliberalization and urban redevelopment: the impact of public policy on multiple dimensions of spatial inequality

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of public policy on different dimensions of spatial inequality. We not only study residential segregation but also housing market access and inequality in terms of neighborhood status. We chart the impact of urban redevelopment policies in two Dutch cities—Amsterdam and Rotterdam—through a unique longitudinal and full-population dataset that enables us to distinguish the contributions of demolition, new construction, and tenure conversion to various dimensions of spatial inequality. We find that policy measures that reduce segregation may reduce access to housing (as happened in Amsterdam) while measures that promote upgrading may exacerbate inequalities between neighborhoods (as happened in Rotterdam). Distinguishing between different kinds of policy measures and dimensions of spatial inequality, we argue, allows for a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of urban redevelopment and better insight into the trade-offs involved in policy decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial inequality
• segregation
• urban policy
• neoliberalism
• Amsterdam
• Rotterdam

Acknowledgments

We thank Thijs Bol, Petter Törnberg, and Wouter van Gent for their comments and Takeo David Hymans for his textual edits. We also gratefully acknowledge feedback from colleagues at University of Amsterdam’s Center for Urban Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use the rankseg Stata module to calculate the H^R index (Reardon & Townsend, 2018).

2 We should expect the spatial stratification index to return lower scores than the Gini index since the former runs from -1 to 1 and house prices are more evenly distributed than wealth or income. Furthermore, we calculate the SSI over data aggregated to the neighborhood level. We are less interested in the absolute value than in the direction of change (more or less inequality) and the impact of policy interventions.

3 The sum of individual interventions does not necessarily equal the impact of interventions taken together, e.g. due to conversions from owner-occupation to rental (buy-to-let).

Additional information

Funding

Cody Hochstenbach acknowledges the financial support of a VENI grant (VI.Veni.191S.014, “Investing in inequality: how the increase in private housing investors shapes social divides”) from NWO, the Dutch Research Council. This work was supported by NWO (Dutch Research Council).