Introduction

There is a widely held belief by government, policy makers and academics that living in deprived neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. There is a large body of literature on these so-called neighbourhood effects and neighbourhood effects have been claimed in relation to a variety of outcomes: school dropout rates (Overman, 2002); childhood achievement (Galster et al, 2007); transition rates from welfare to work (van der Klaauw and Ours, 2003); deviant behaviour (Friedrichs and Blasius, 2003); social exclusion (Buck, 2001); and social mobility (Buck, 2001). The current interest in the assumed negative effect of living in deprived neighbourhoods was stimulated by Wilson (1987, 1991), and several theoretical explanations of neighbourhood effects have been developed in the last two decades. These explanations include role model effects and peer group influences, social and physical disconnection from job-finding networks, a culture of poverty leading to dysfunctional values, discrimination by employers and other gatekeepers, access to low-quality public services and high exposure to criminal behaviour (for an overview see van Ham and Manley, 2011: in press).

Policy makers embraced the concept of neighbourhood effects because if concentrations of poverty can make individuals poor(er), then reducing concentrations of poverty would solve the problem. Creating neighbourhoods with a balanced socioeconomic mix of residents is an often used strategy to tackle assumed negative neighbourhood effects. Mixed housing tenure policies are frequently espoused as a vehicle to create more socially mixed neighbourhoods. The idea is that mixing homeowners with social renters will create a more diverse socioeconomic mix in neighbourhoods, removing the potential of negative neighbourhood effects (Musterd and Andersson, 2005). Mixed housing strategies – often involving large-scale demolishment of social housing estates – have been explicitly adopted as part of neighbourhood improvement schemes by many governments including those in the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, France, Finland and Sweden (Atkinson and Kintrea, 2002; Kearns, 2002; Musterd, 2002).

Despite the apparent consensus that neighbourhood effects exist, there is a growing body of literature that questions the status quo (see Oreopoulos, 2003; Bolster et al, 2007; van Ham and Manley, 2010; van Ham et al, 2011: in press).