Why the Lowest Income Families Might Care the Most About Their Neighborhoods

Because of the run-down and sometimes violent nature of poor urban neighborhoods, we often assume that the people who live there don't care that much about where they live. A lot of academic research has gone into trying to understand the connection between perceptions of neighborhood safety and community cohesion, most of it finding that people are less invested in their community the more dangerous they think it is.

An interesting study, published recently in the journal Race and Social Problems, adds a surprising wrinkle to what we know about these places. The researchers, Ronald O. Pitner, ManSoo Yu, and Edna Brown, were trying to assess "levels of community care and vigilance" among 70 black adults, most of them women, living in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods in an unidentified large Midwestern city.