Urban Affairs Review

Some recent municipal elections have been interpreted as indicating that America's cities are becoming more polarized on the dimension of race. It has been hypothesized that the results observed in Atlanta in 1981 and Chicago in 1983 presage an era of voting along racial lines. This article advances an alternative hypothesis: Voters who support candidates of their own race often do so simply because they have no particular reason not to. Specifically, there may be no issue-based reason to cross racial lines. Using both precinct-level and survey data from the 1981 Atlanta municipal elections, the analysis estimates the levels of racial voting (the coincidence of a racial tie between voter and candidate), racist voting (the vote for a candidate of one's own race when an issue-based motive exists to support a candidate of the opposite race), and crossover voting.

The concept of succession is well established in both ecological and economic models of urban residential change, yet much remains unknown about the determinants of succession in urban neighborhoods. Employing longitudinal census tract data for four cities, this article predicts racial composition of neighborhoods as a function of earlier-period racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and physical characteristics. There is support for aspects of the ecological and filtering models of succession, although many elements of the process are not generally applicable across time and place.

Previous sociological research concerning the effects of urban living upon city dwellers has not addressed the question of whether satisfaction with and attachment to one's urban neighborhood are related to the amount of local facility use and local social interaction a resident displays. Since blacks ordinarily perform fewer activities locally than do whites, it is also of interest whether their community attitudes are dependent on these activities to a different extent than might be the case with whites. This article reports findings indicating that blacks' neighborhood satisfaction and attachment depend very little upon the extent of their activity within their communities.

National survey data are used to test the relationship between urbanism and racial attitudes among whites, and a liberalizing effect of urbanism is found. The relationship is independent of differences in population composition occurring across the rural-urban continuum, and it operates largely in the same way in both the North and the South. Of the urban theories considered, the relationship is best explained by that portion of subcultural theory dealing with diffusion. Specifically, it appears that urbanism liberalizes racial attitudes by increasing equal-status, cooperative, and relatively personal contact between members of racial subcultures.

This article presents findings on changes in neighborhood composition during revitalization. It is based on interviews conducted with in-movers in two neighborhoods that had been revitalizing for approximately ten years at the time of the study. The results indicate that in-mover owners and in-mover renters constitute two relatively distinct populations. Owners fit the popular conception of "urban gentry"-young, highly educated persons employed in professional occupations. The majority of in-mover renters, on the other hand, have incomes low enough to qualify for federally assisted housing; they also continue to move into revitalizing neighborhoods, although many of them pay a large proportion of their incomes for rent. Many of the "pioneers" who purchased and renovated properties for their own use in the early years of revitalization have left the neighborhoods, many after relatively short stays. The revitalization has proved to be robust, however, as both neighborhoods continued to attract relatively affluent home-owners to replace the departed pioneers.

Little is known about the role of cable television systems as an element of the communications infrastructure of cities. This research looks at local cable systems in terms of households served, total channels and community-oriented channels per system, interactive capacity, and local origination programming. A considerable gap is found between the vision of the "wired city" and the current performance of cable systems on these measures. The findings suggest that there is serious question whether cable will ever provide an excess of broadcast capacity and interactive programming and services to a majority of residents in most communities unless such provision becomes a clear goal of public policy.

An examination of recent growth in suburban Chicago suggests that rates of population and housing increase tend to vary principally by age of housing, and secondarily by distance from the central city's business district. Population loss or small increases relative to housing gains typified the most centrally located older suburbs. Although much higher rates of population and housing increase characterized newer places, especially those between 21 and 30 miles from the CBD, their population gain was smaller than that accompanying comparably high levels of residential development in earlier periods.