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Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline

Using Multilevel Selection Theory

Russell C. Weaver & Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen

To cite this article: Russell C. Weaver & Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen (2014) Evolutionary Analysis of
Neighborhood Decline Using Multilevel Selection Theory, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 104:4, 765-783, DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.910088

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Published online: 02 Jun 2014.

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 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline
Using Multilevel Selection Theory
Russell C. Weaver∗ and Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen†
∗
Department of Environmental Studies, MS GIS Program, University of Redlands
†
Department of Geography, The State University of New York at Buffalo

This article proposes an analytical framework of neighborhood decline grounded in evolutionary multilevel
selection (MLS) theory. We demonstrate that MLS allows for the unification of at least two distinct theo-
retical approaches—the ecological and the political economy approaches—to analyzing urban change. From
these developments we generate three hypotheses about intracity dynamics. The hypotheses are tested with
longitudinal data using space–time regression, simulation, and spatial hedonic methods. The methodology and
results reveal that qualitative neighborhood change is endogenously determined through the actions of neigh-
borhood households, but such that household actions and neighborhood sociospatial organization are shaped by
externally driven sorting processes. Further, household behaviors are highly dependent on microlevel neighbor-
hood contexts. These findings suggest that existing schools of neighborhood change are not mutually exclusive.
Rather, their interplay at multiple spatial resolutions showcases the hierarchical and evolutionary nature of cities.
Such insights can be usefully incorporated into urban policy discourses. Key Words: decline, evolutionary urban
geography, housing, multilevel selection, neighborhood.

 (MLS) , MLS , 

—— 
,  
, , 
, , , 
, , , , 
 , , 

  : , , , , 

En este artı́culo se propone un marco analı́tico sobre la decadencia de los vecindarios, el cual se apoya en la
teorı́a de selección a nivel múltiple (MLS). Demostramos que la MLS permite la unificación de por lo menos
dos enfoques teóricos diferenciados – los enfoques ecológico y de economı́a polı́tica – para analizar el cambio
urbano. A partir de estos desarrollos, generamos tres hipótesis acerca de la dinámica intraurbana. Las hipótesis
son puestas a prueba con base en datos longitudinales mediante el uso de regresión espacio-tiempo, simulación y
métodos espaciales hedónicos. La metodologı́a y los resultados revelan que el cambio cualitativo del vecindario
está determinado endógenamente a través de las acciones de los hogares del vecindario, pero teniendo en cuenta
que las acciones de los hogares y la organización socio-espacial del vecindario están configuradas por procesos
clasificatorios controlados externamente. Más todavı́a, los comportamientos de los hogares dependen en alto
grado de contextos vecinales a nivel micro. Estos hallazgos sugieren que las escuelas existentes de cambio vecinal
no son mutuamente exclusivas. Mejor, su interacción a múltiples resoluciones espaciales refleja la naturaleza
jerárquica y evolucionaria de las ciudades. Tales descubrimientos pueden ser ventajosamente incorporados en
los discursos sobre polı́ticas urbanas. Palabras clave: decadencia, geografı́a urbana evolucionista, vivienda, selección a
múltiples niveles, vecindario.

M
ore than a century’s worth of social science
literature explores the processes that engen-
der qualitative change in U.S. cities (Burgess
1925; Temkin and Rohe 1996; Pitkin 2001; Kitchen
and Williams 2009). Researchers from a diversity of dis-
ciplines have advanced numerous models to explain the
economic, social, and physical downgrading of neigh-
borhoods (Galster 1987; Grigsby, Baratz, and Maclellan
1987; Rothenberg et al. 1991; Temkin and Rohe 1996,
1998; Pitkin 2001; Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega
2006; Somerville, van Beckhoven, and van Kempen
2009). These developments are generally classified into

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(4) 2014, pp. 765–783 C 2014 by Association of American Geographers
Initial submission, August 2013; revised submission, October 2013; final acceptance, October 2013
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
766 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen
one of three schools of thought—ecological, subcul-
tural, or political economy (Temkin and Rohe 1996).
One area of disagreement among the three schools in-
volves the relative importance of exogenous and en-
dogenous forces in neighborhood decline (Pitkin 2001).
For instance, an ecological model might contend that
decline occurs naturally through an exogenous factor
such as an aging housing stock (Hoyt 1933), whereas a
political economist would argue that decline is brought
about by external decisions that result in the retreat
of capital from a given neighborhood (Pacione 2003).
Contrary to these exogenous explanations, a subcul-
tural model might presume that decline occurs inter-
nally through the erosion of social capital among local
stakeholders (Firey 1945).
Although scholars frequently acknowledge that both
exogenous and endogenous forces are important in un-
derstanding neighborhood decline (Temkin and Rohe
1998; Galster, Cutsinger, and Lim 2007; Somerville,
van Beckhoven, and van Kempen 2009), there are
few attempts to strike a balance between them (Pitkin
2001). Furthermore, depending on which of the schools
of thought they fall into, most extant models of neigh-
borhood change are critiqued as being either entirely
micro or macro in nature and not integrating multi-
ple scales of analysis into a holistic framework (Pitkin
2001). Currently a growing body of research is begin-
ning to tackle these issues (Temke and Rohe 1998;
Galster, Cutsinger, and Lim 2007), although much work
remains to be done. Crucially, there is a need for a multi-
level framework of neighborhood change that produces
testable hypotheses and thus facilitates empirical analy-
sis at multiple geographic scales (Pitkin 2001). Empiri-
cal studies at the individual scale are especially needed,
insofar as data availability issues typically necessitate re-
search based on aggregated geographical units (Galster,
Hayes, and Johnson 2005; Galster and Tatian 2009).
It is toward these gaps that this article is directed.
Specifically, we propose an analytical framework of
neighborhood decline grounded in evolutionary mul-
tilevel selection (MLS) theory. MLS allows us to inte-
grate key themes from at least two of the existing schools
of thought into a unified construct, from which we gen-
erate three hypotheses about neighborhood dynamics.
The hypotheses are tested with longitudinal data us-
ing space–time regression, simulation, and spatial hedo-
nic methods. The methodology and results reveal that
qualitative neighborhood change is endogenously de-
termined through the actions of neighborhood house-
holds but such that household actions and neighbor-
hood sociospatial organization are shaped by externally
driven sorting processes. Further, individual household
actions are highly dependent on neighborhood con-
text. These findings demonstrate that distinct schools
of neighborhood change are not, in fact, mutually ex-
clusive. Rather, their interplay at multiple spatial res-
olutions showcases the hierarchical and evolutionary
nature of cities. Such insights can be usefully incorpo-
rated into the discourses of urban policymakers.
Neighborhood Change and Decline
As mentioned earlier, interdisciplinary literature on
neighborhood change and decline spans thousands of
pages and at least a century (refer to the reviews in
Temkin and Rohe 1996; Pitkin 2001; Kitchen and
Williams 2009; Somerville, van Beckhoven, and van
Kempen 2009). This section unpacks the research gaps
that inform our study by briefly exploring some unre-
solved issues from this body of research.
Among the earliest attempts at theorizing neighbor-
hood dynamics are the urban ecological models of the
Chicago School (Park and Burgess 1925). These mod-
els hold that cities exist as social organisms made up of
individuals who are in constant competition with one
another for urban space—a Darwinian-style “survival of
the fittest” in which households self-segregate “accord-
ing to their ability to [pay for] different sites and situ-
ations” (Knox and Pinch 2010, 157). One key feature
of these models, therefore, is their use of evolutionary
analogies. Urban ecologists view neighborhood change
as a natural process in which intraurban spatial com-
petition leads to invasion, dominance, and succession
(Burgess 1925). As tastes and consumption patterns
change with time, nonconformal (i.e., lower status)
households are able to invade, or move into relatively
homogeneous, higher status neighborhoods. Eventually
the invading household type becomes dominant in the
previously homogenous neighborhood, as erstwhile res-
idents relocate. Over time the spatial territory is suc-
ceeded by invaders, and the neighborhood again tends
toward homogeneity (Burgess 1925; Grigsby, Baratz,
and Maclellan 1987; Rothenberg et al. 1991; Sharma
2013).
Importantly, these “evolutionary” models came on-
line at a time when little attention was being paid to the
concept of “group selection” in the scientific literature
(e.g., Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013). As a result, ur-
ban ecologists conceptualize evolution as a process that
operates at a single scale where impersonal competition
between self-interested agents creates a favorable social
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory
environment for decline (Burgess 1925; Kolb 1954; see
discussion in Knox and Pinch 2010). This determinis-
tic outlook is criticized by adherents to the “subcultural
school” of neighborhood change, who contend that so-
cial cooperation and collective efficacy—that is, group
effects—often overpower the tendency toward decline
that accompanies impersonal competition for space
(Firey 1945; Goodwin 1979; Temkin and Rohe 1996).
Counter to the ecological models, this view proposes
that neighborhoods change endogenously through their
members’ actions (Ding and Knaap 2003). In this con-
text, decline is not the inevitable outcome of an aging
housing stock. Rather, neighborhoods decline, remain
stable, or even improve depending on the strength of
local social relationships (Temkin and Rohe 1998).
Due to its concern with intraneighborhood hetero-
geneity, the subcultural school is critiqued for having
a microlevel focus that is not well suited to empiri-
cal generalizations (Pitkin 2001). Moreover, its tenets
seemingly imply that strengthening social ties alone can
arrest or reverse neighborhood decline (Kitchen and
Williams 2009). In practice this conclusion is likely
untenable, for to some extent the capacity for collec-
tive efficacy depends on exogenous factors (Temkin and
Rohe 1998; Somerville, van Beckhoven, and van Kem-
pen 2009). This issue is implicitly recognized by the
third school of thought, political economy, which ex-
amines the interrelationships among capital mobility,
socioeconomic inequality, and the fate of neighbor-
hoods (Pacione 2003).
Like urban ecologists, political economists describe
neighborhood change mostly in terms of exogenous
forces (Pitkin 2001). Unlike the ecological school, how-
ever, decline is not natural and inevitable to a political
economist. Instead, it is brought about by failure of
the free market to produce equitable outcomes in, for
instance, housing opportunities (Sassen 1990). As Pa-
cione (2003) observed, “the differential use of space by
capital in search of profit creates a mosaic of inequal-
ity at all geographic levels” (316). From this vantage
point, fueled either by unbalanced power relations in
which urban elites control political institutions (Lo-
gan and Molotch 1987) or by urban restructuring in
response to globalization (Sassen 1990) or some com-
bination of these, market transactions inevitably pro-
duce a class of disadvantaged residents whose locational
opportunities are essentially limited to the spaces left
over after relatively wealthy urban households satisfy
their housing demands (e.g., Sassen 1990). The result
is self-reinforcing decline, manifested as spatially con-
centrated poverty and attendant conditions of substan-
767
dard property and low collective efficacy, among others
(Pacione 2003; Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega 2006;
Sharma 2013).
In sum, both the ecological and political economy
schools tend to view neighborhoods as containing rela-
tively homogeneous actors—considerations of within-
neighborhood diversity are “barely addressed” (Davis
1991). On the other hand, the subcultural school con-
cerns itself with identifying microlevel patterns of be-
havior in isolation of higher order processes (Kitchen
and Williams 2009). All three schools are therefore
subject to the same general criticisms: They have nar-
row theoretical foci on either internal or external in-
fluences, but not both, and inflexible empirical foci on
single geographic scales of analysis (Pitkin 2001).
Because of these limitations, scholars have proposed
more comprehensive theories of intraurban change
(Galster 1987; Grigsby, Baratz, and Maclellan 1987;
Temkin and Rohe 1998). Nevertheless, Pitkin (2001)
observed that although these and related developments
mark significant improvements over earlier models,
there is still a dearth of empirical research that ana-
lyzes the processes of neighborhood change and decline
at multiple geographic scales and from multiple the-
oretical perspectives. Pitkin (2001, 20–22) therefore
challenged urban social scientists to pursue a “balanced
understanding of neighborhood change” that (1) “is
flexible and open for testing and development,” (2)
“recognize[s] forces from both within and outside of
neighborhoods,” and (3) “analyze[s] change at mul-
tiple geographic scales.” Taking these guidelines into
consideration, we proffer an evolutionary framework of
neighborhood decline that synthesizes at least two of
the three existing schools of thought and is empirically
tested (testable) at multiple scales of analysis.
A Multilevel Evolutionary Framework
of Neighborhood Decline
Extant “evolutionary” models of neighborhood
change are critiqued for their deterministic conclusions
that impersonal competition for space disfavors cooper-
ation among households—regardless of their propensity
to share residential space—and that decline is there-
fore inevitable (see Knox and Pinch 2010). We con-
tend that this outlook misconceptualizes evolution as
a single-level process and that, when redeployed in a
multiscalar approach, evolutionary theory offers impor-
tant insights into the phenomenon of neighborhood
decline. Similar positions are increasingly being taken
768 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen
across the social sciences (Wilson and Gowdy 2013;
Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013).
Selection at the Individual and Group Scales
Subculturalists and social capital theorists observe
that intraneighborhood household-level cooperation
frequently counteracts the exogenous tendencies to-
ward decline implicated by the urban ecological school
(Firey 1945; Temkin and Rohe 1996, 1998). The idea
is that residents in neighborhoods with high capacity
for collective efficacy can use their own prosocial be-
havior to tacitly or overtly influence noncooperative
households to behave in cooperative manners (e.g.,
Wagenaar 2007; Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013). In
the evolutionary literature, an individual inheriting a
trait from a “parent” neighborhood in this way is a va-
riety of multilevel selection (Okasha 2006). MLS the-
ory proposes that evolution operates simultaneously at
multiple levels of a hierarchically structured population
(Okasha 2006). Hence, whereas evolutionary selection
at the individual level favors competition among neigh-
bors for space (e.g., Burgess 1925), selection at the
neighborhood level favors cooperation between neigh-
bors in space (e.g., Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013).
In practical terms, local collective action can prevent
neighborhood decline or even bring about improve-
ment (Temkin and Rohe 1998).
A convenient behavior with which to illustrate this
idea is property maintenance (e.g., Galster, Cutsinger,
and Malega 2006). Neighborhoods invariably decline
as property naturally deteriorates in quality with time
(Rothenberg et al. 1991). As subculuralists observe,
however, individual decision makers have the ability
to offset this tendency via their maintenance deci-
sions (Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega 2006). Of cru-
cial importance, maintenance decisions are spatially
linked (Bourne 1981). The actions of one household
affect the benefit of maintenance for nearby house-
holds. Unless neighbors coordinate their decisions so as
to prevent widespread deterioration and decline, poor
property conditions will spread throughout a neighbor-
hood when one or more households defer necessary
maintenance.
This suggests that property maintenance is a type
of spatial prisoner’s dilemma (Bourne 1981; Meg-
bolugbe, Hoek-Smit, and Linneman 1996). Preventing
property from becoming substandard is tantamount to
cooperating, and allowing it to fall into disrepair is
equivalent to defecting (Bourne 1981). MLS offers a
useful framework for studying this problem (e.g., Wil-
son and O’Brien 2009; Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013).
Assuming that maintenance is costly, households have
an inbuilt incentive to defect (Bourne 1981). On the
other hand, in neighborhoods where defection is stig-
matized or perhaps subject to formal or informal social
sanctions by prosocial residents, the ecological school’s
deterministic outcome need not apply. Quite contrarily,
group influences will plausibly increase cooperation in
a manner suggested by the subculturalists (e.g., Galster,
Cutsinger, and Malega 2006). In evolutionary terms,
the group trait (neighborhood norm of cooperation) is
heritable for individuals. Total evolutionary change in
maintenance behavior is therefore a function of house-
hold selection for defection and neighborhood selection
for cooperation (see Okasha 2006). In spaces where the
latter pressures are stronger than the former, neighbor-
hood decline is far from inevitable. Moreover, both sets
of pressures depend to some degree on higher level ex-
ogenous processes. This logic guides a series of empirical
tests later in the article.
Ultimate and Proximate Causation
Here we briefly turn to the pivotal distinction in
evolutionary theory between ultimate and proximate
causation. Ultimate causation refers to the function
of a given attribute, or why it exists (Lloyd, Wilson,
and Sober 2011). Proximate causation relates to the
attribute’s mechanism, or how it comes to manifest
(Lloyd, Wilson, and Sober 2011). One reason for focus-
ing our discussion of neighborhood decline on property
maintenance behavior is that a large body of literature
suggests that deficient property investment is a proxi-
mate cause of decline (Grigsby, Baratz, and Maclellan
1987; Brueckner and Helsley 2011; Weaver 2013).
Deficient maintenance causes properties to become
substandard, substandard property conditions devalue
affected areas, and these forces have self-reinforcing
feedback effects on each other and on the process of de-
cline in general (Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega 2006).
In the preceding section we link these circumstances
to a spatial prisoner’s dilemma wherein one’s deci-
sion to cooperate or defect is contingent on the ex-
pected or observed actions of one’s neighbors (Bourne
1981). This implies that as long as all households in a
given neighborhood comply with a shared set of prop-
erty maintenance norms, the outcome of decline is
avertable. Nonetheless, within-neighborhood capacity
for this type of collective action depends on exoge-
nous factors (e.g., Temkin and Rohe 1998). For that
reason the implication that strengthening social ties
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory
will singlehandedly increase local cooperative housing
maintenance behavior, and thus stymie decline, is not
practical in all neighborhoods.
One way to deal with this is to articulate a missing di-
mension of the evolutionary story. Namely, evolution-
ary explications involve both proximate and ultimate
causes (Weaver and Knight 2012). So far we have seen
that deficient property maintenance is regarded as a
proximate cause of neighborhood decline, but we have
not discussed the notion of ultimate causation. Evolu-
tionists impart that ultimate causation refers to the role
that a given attribute plays in its environment; that
is, the reason why it is adapted to existing conditions
(Lloyd, Wilson, and Sober 2011; Weaver and Knight
2012). In this sense, neither the ecological view that
decline is caused by natural processes such as an aging
housing stock nor the subcultural take that decline is
caused by weak social ties is a satisfactory ultimate cause.
They do not explicate why allowing the housing stock
to deteriorate or why failing to engage in cooperative
social interactions with one’s neighbors are successful
adaptations to urban environments.
To fill this gap we appeal to the political economy
school’s contention that market failures produce a class
of disadvantaged residents whose housing opportuni-
ties are constrained by low incomes (Pacione 2003).
Consider that substandard housing conditions make af-
fected areas less desirable residential locations, which,
in turn, implies that housing therein receives a discount
in the market (Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega 2006).
In the context of the political economy school, this
suggests that neighborhood decline is an adaptation to
economic inequality, such that urban areas affected by
substandard property conditions supply affordable hous-
ing to economically deprived households who lack the
means to establish residence in higher quality urban
spaces (Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega 2006). Consis-
tent with critics of the subcultural school, such house-
holds often possess insufficient resources with which
to solve collective action problems—for instance, co-
ordinating on, individually committing to, and locally
enforcing a level of property maintenance that coun-
teracts natural tendencies toward decline.
Theoretical Framework and Hypotheses
We have heretofore explored and discussed critical
components from each of the three major schools of
thought on neighborhood change using a multilevel
evolutionary perspective. This section extends such
discussions by integrating at least two of those three
schools of thought into a multilevel evolutionary frame-
769
work of intraurban decline. In this regard, responding to
the demand for a multiscale approach to analyzing ur-
ban change that considers both endogenous and exoge-
nous factors (Pitkin 2001), we describe neighborhood
decline in terms of two interconnected subprocesses
that bridge together the ecological and political econ-
omy schools. Observe that although we do not fully
integrate subcultural theories into the framework con-
structed here, we do take steps in this direction, and
thereby create sufficient space for future work to attend
to this task.
First, structural factors, including market failures as-
sociated with impersonal competition for space, pro-
duce patterns of sociospatial organization in which
households sort into relatively high- and low-quality
areas based on their willingness and abilities to pay for
different sites and situations (Knox and Pinch 2010).
An inequitable distribution of capital implies that dis-
advantaged residents tendentially locate in the low-
quality neighborhoods where, for example, substandard
property conditions depress the market price of housing
(Ding and Knaap 2003). This market-based concentra-
tion of poverty exacerbates initial neighborhood condi-
tions, for in general economically deprived areas have
inadequate internal capacity with which collectively to
act against decline (Pitkin 2001). In this manner, ex-
ogenous forces sketch out a landscape whereupon some
territories are more predisposed than others to decline.
Next, given the (1) state of the neighborhood, (2)
sociospatial configuration, and (3) pro- or antisocial
behavior of neighbors at time t, each household i takes
actions at time t + 1 that either contribute to or detract
from local collective efficacy. For reasons of empiri-
cal testing discussed later (e.g., Galster, Cutsinger, and
Malega 2006), we hereafter focus on the specific social
behavior of property maintenance (Figure 1). To the
extent that household i’s property maintenance deci-
sion at t + 1 is shaped by the actions of its neighbors
j during t, the neighborhood or group-level behavior
is “heritable” at the individual scale. MLS theory im-
parts that such individual heritability of a group trait
contributes to change in the total population of indi-
viduals (Okasha 2006). Within the spatial prisoner’s
dilemma used earlier to describe the interconnectiv-
ity of property maintenance decisions, the implication
is that individual households adjust their maintenance
behaviors according to local (collective) norms—for
example, cooperators in neighborhoods with many de-
fectors are likely to become defectors, and similarly for
defectors in highly cooperative localities.
The preceding suggests that intraurban decline
is endogenously determined through the actions of
770 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen
neighborhood households but such that household
actions and neighborhood sociospatial organization
are shaped by external forces. Implicit in the
framework—and articulated at various places in the text
to this point—are at least three observable implications
that we articulate as hypotheses (H) here:
H1: Housing in Low-Quality Neighborhoods Sells
at a Discount. Concerning property maintenance be-
havior specifically, H1 can be restated to say that the
price of residential housing is a decreasing function
of the fraction of neighboring defectors. H1 follows
from the proposition that the function (i.e., ultimate
cause) of decline is to produce spaces of low-cost hous-
ing that support disadvantaged residents (e.g., Galster,
Cutsinger, and Malega 2006). This observation leads
directly to H2.
H2: Entrants into Relatively Low-Quality Urban
Spaces Are Characterized by Correspondingly Low
Figure 1. A multilevel evolutionary
framework of neighborhood decline.
Incomes. Both H1 and H2 concern exogenous forces
of decline and are derived from the ecological and po-
litical economy schools. The third observable implica-
tion is associated with endogenous forces. Specifically,
neighborhood-level evolution of cooperation (adequate
property maintenance) or defection (inadequate prop-
erty maintenance) is a product of simultaneous evolu-
tionary selection at the individual and group scales. In
areas where group selection (for cooperation) is stronger
than individual selection (for competition), defectors
will be more likely to cooperate, and total neighbor-
hood cooperation will increase. The opposite is true for
areas where forces of impersonal competition outweigh
the capacity for collective action. It follows that H3 is
true.
H3: Household (Non)Cooperative Behavior is “In-
herited” from the Past Actions of the Given House-
hold and Its Neighbors. Formally, H3 says that at a
given time period, t + 1, household (non)cooperative
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory
behavior is a function of (non)cooperative behavior at
both the individual and group scales during an earlier
time period, t. Consequently, regressing the behavior
at t + 1 for household i on the same behavior at time
t for (1) household i and (2) its neighbors j, will pro-
duce nonzero and statistically significant coefficients
on both explanatory variables (Okasha 2006). The for-
mer relationship signifies individual-level heritability
of the trait, and the latter represents collective-level
heritability—both of which are necessary conditions
for MLS to usefully explain neighborhood change (e.g.,
Okasha 2006). Note that although H3 and the second
subprocess discussed earlier outwardly bear resemblance
to subcultural theory, we wish to stress that fully in-
corporating the subcultural school into our framework
requires more than simply recognizing that cooperation
(here, compliance) can act as a force that opposes de-
cline. In other words, a more comprehensive treatment
of the subcultural school entails explicating the ways
in which cooperation is built. Thus we claim here to
unify at least two theoretical approaches to analyzing
urban decline—the ecological and political economy
approaches—and we leave room for future work to more
thoroughly integrate the subcultural school—for exam-
ple, by bringing in developments from recent work in
evolutionary game theory and evolutionary psychology
(Skyrms 1996, 2004; Heinrich et al. 2004; Wilson and
O’Brien 2009; Nowak 2012; Nowak and Coakley 2013).
Study Area, Data, and Methods
The study site for this article is the U.S. city of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Milwaukee was selected for at
least three reasons. First, as a U.S. “rust belt” city
where deindustrialization and globalization forcibly col-
lapsed the manufacturing employment base, Milwau-
kee is continuously confronted with the challenges
of economic restructuring, disinvestment, and decline
(Schmidt 2011). To the extent that all modern, glob-
alized cities face these issues in some way (e.g., Sassen
1990), urban change in Milwaukee plausibly captures
processes that apply to urban areas somewhat gener-
ally. Second, many contemporary problems related to
concentrated poverty and poor property conditions in
Milwaukee have historical roots in city planning strate-
gies that were formulated within the theoretical frame-
work of the ecological school of neighborhood change
(Schmidt 2011). Accordingly, we view Milwaukee as
a suitable study location for our attempt to add new,
multilevel evolutionary perspective and insight to ex-
tant, single-level explications of decline. Third, various
771
municipal agencies in Milwaukee provide high-quality,
parcel-level property data to the public through an on-
line user interface. As discussed later, the nature of these
data allow for empirical testing of all three hypotheses
already set forth.
That being said, the data cover four total categories.
First, a geographic polygon layer of real property parcels
from the Milwaukee Geographic Information Services
Division contains the locations and unique tax identi-
fiers of all properties in the city.1 Second, data from
the Milwaukee Tax Assessor’s Web site provide in-
formation on all residential property sales transactions
from 2004 through 2012 (Appendix, Table A1).2 Each
record contains a tax identifier that can be linked to the
geographic parcel data. Third, the Milwaukee Depart-
ment of Neighborhood Services (DNS) Web site fur-
nishes data related to individual violations of the city’s
property code.3 Such information is of interest in that,
as indicated previously, deficient property maintenance
is a proximate cause of neighborhood decline (e.g.,
Brueckner and Helsley 2011). Because real property reg-
ulations establish the minimum standards to which land
and built structures must be held, code violations are
indicative of deficient property maintenance (Weaver
2013). For that reason, property code violations have
been used by urban researchers in related scientific in-
quiries to operationalize urban “blight” (Weaver and
Bagchi-Sen 2013)—a strategy that we follow here with
Milwaukee DNS data for all code violations observed
from 2004 through 2012. Finally, to evaluate the hy-
pothesis that entrants into declining urban neighbor-
hoods have relatively low incomes on average, we draw
on the most recent U.S. Census American Community
Survey (ACS) estimates for the fraction of a given cen-
sus tract’s inmigrant population that is characterized by
income below the poverty level (Table A.1). With all
of these data in hand, we are able to match our three
hypotheses to empirical tests.
Methods for Testing H1 and H2
H1 states that substandard property conditions re-
ceive a significant discount in the housing market. This
is so because substandard conditions signal low neigh-
borhood quality and, all else being equal, households
prefer higher quality residential spaces (Ding and Knaap
2003). Although low neighborhood quality and local
substandard property conditions are nonmarket goods,
and hence discounts therefore are globally unobserv-
able, their price effects can be straightforwardly derived
through hedonic analysis.
772 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen

Hedonic modeling is a revealed preference technique Table 1. Defectors per year, as a percentage of all parcels
for valuing nonmarket commodities (Sheppard 1999).
Year Number of defectors Percentage
The basic assumption in hedonic analysis is that glob-
ally heterogeneous goods such as housing, for which 2004 23,879 16.0
market prices are observable, are composed of relatively 2005 28,948 19.3
homogenous parts that are valued by buyers but not 2006 29,539 19.7
2007 30,163 20.2
explicitly priced in the market (Sheppard 1999). In a
2008 28,375 19.0
general sense, by modeling the final price of a house 2009 34,646 23.1
as a function of its component parts, the partial effect 2010 32,449 21.7
that each individual component has on the overall sales 2011 32,778 21.9
price is empirically ascertainable. This can be expressed 2012 31,819 21.3
as: Note: N = 148,718 parcels.

Pi,t = f (s i,t , li,t ), (1)

where Pi,t is the market price paid for house i
at time t, and s and l represent vectors of struc-
tural and locational attributes of house i, respectively
(Munroe 2007).
For our purposes, interest is in modeling residential
sales price as a function of substandard neighborhood
property conditions, controlling for common structural
attributes of the given house. Owing to our focus on
urban change, and by extension the influence of low
neighborhood quality on residential prices over time,
we rely primarily on the structural attributes contained
in the Milwaukee Tax Assessor records for our controls,
as these variables are available for the full temporal
extent of our data set (Table A1).
Perhaps due to difficulty with operationalization
(Weaver 2013), the plentiful hedonic housing litera-
ture is somewhat lacking in its treatment of neighbor-
hood substandard property price effects (Seo and von
Rabenau 2011). Whereas prior attempts to examine
this relationship have relied on “eyeball” estimations
and subjective measures of local substandard property
(Seo and von Rabenau 2011), we draw on our study
area’s objective real property regulations to determine
when a parcel is substandard (e.g., Weaver and Bagchi-
Sen 2013). Coupling these property code data to the
geographic parcel data set acquired from the city of
Milwaukee, we are able to assign every parcel in the
study area a status of either complier (not associated
with a violation) or defector (associated with a viola-
tion) for each year from 2004 through 2012 (Table 1).
With this information, we can calculate the fraction
of a residential property’s neighbors that were defectors
in the time period immediately prior to the sale of the
given property. In keeping with the view that prop-
erty maintenance decisions occur in a spatial prisoner’s
dilemma environment, we approximate the Moore def-
inition of a neighborhood that is common to mathe-
matical specifications of this game model by computing
the fraction of defectors for a given property’s eight
nearest neighbors (e.g., Nowak 2006). If the fraction of
neighboring defectors has a consistently significant and
negative relationship with sales price over time, then it
is reasonable to conclude that local substandard prop-
erty conditions (1) signal low neighborhood quality, (2)
receive a discount in the housing market, and thus (3)
facilitate residential sorting into high- and low-quality
neighborhoods.
Expanding on this, H2 states that the sorting pro-
cess brought about by the local substandard property
price discount will result in lower income households
concentrating into relatively low-quality spaces. To ex-
plore this relationship empirically, we examine the spa-
tial and Pearson correlations between the percentage of
a Milwaukee census tract’s inmigrant population with
income below the poverty level and the number of prop-
erty violations relative to total parcels in the given
census tract. The former quantity comes from the U.S.
Census ACS five-year period estimates for 2007 through
2011, and the latter is derived by summing the total vio-
lations observed in each census tract from 2007 through
2011, dividing that sum by five years so that it repre-
sents a period average comparable to the ACS data and
then normalizing that quantity by the total number of
parcels in each census tract.
Method for Testing H3
As mentioned in the preceding section, for this study
all property violation records are joined to their corre-
sponding real property tax parcels in a geographic in-
formation system (GIS). Thus, all citywide parcels can
be coded as either compliers or defectors for each year
covered by the data set. In a given year, defectors are
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory
parcels that were matched to a violation for that year,
and compliers are parcels that were not matched to a
violation. Translating this behavior into a binary vari-
able, defectors take on a value of 1 and compliers a value
of 0.
With that, GeoDa software (Anselin 2005) is em-
ployed to two ends. First, a spatial weights matrix is
constructed for the GIS polygon parcel layer using k-
nearest neighbors (k-NN), with k equal to eight so as
to approximate the Moore neighborhoods commonly
adopted in spatial prisoner’s dilemma models (Nowak
2006). Second, the spatially lagged average of viola-
tion behavior is computed for each year–parcel com-
bination (Anselin 2005). Because the adopted spatial
weights matrix is based on eight k-NN, the spatially
lagged average of violation behavior is tantamount to
the percentage of a given parcel’s neighbors that were
defectors in a given year. Illustratively, for a spatial lag
value of 0.0, all of the given parcel’s neighbors com-
plied during that year. A spatial lag of 1.0 means that
all of the given parcel’s neighbors defected. Intermedi-
ate values indicate the fraction of defecting neighbors
observed at the parcel.
H3 states that regressing parcel-level defection (com-
pliance) at time t on both parcel-level defection (com-
pliance) and the spatial lag of defection (compliance) at
t – 1 should produce statistically significant nonzero co-
efficients; these outcomes are implicative of multilevel
selection (Okasha 2006). This essentially describes a
space–time regression model (Anselin 2005) in which
the dependent variable is explained by a previous in-
stantiation of the behavior in both its neighbors and
itself. Because defection is binary coded, a limited de-
pendent variable regression method is the appropri-
ate modeling choice. Hence we construct and esti-
mate space–time probit regression models for each year
covered by the data set, such that:
 
Yi,t = f Yi,t−1 , wYi,t−1 , (2)
where Yi,t−1 is the observed dichotomous dependent
variable that takes on a value of 1 if parcel i defected
in year t and a value of 0 otherwise, and wYi,t−1 is the
spatially lagged average of defection behavior observed
for the neighbors of parcel i during year t – 1.
Estimation and Results
The functional form for the hedonic relation-
ship described in Equation 1 is commonly defined
in a way that enables least squares estimation. Ad-
773
ditionally, the dependent variable is regularly log-
transformed (Malpezzi 2002), so that the relevant hedo-
nic price equation for all i represented by Equation 1 is
given by:
ln yt = X t β t + εt (3)
where y is a vector of observed market prices during
time t; X contains all time-varying explanatory vari-
ables from Table A.1; β is a vector of the estimated
implicit prices for each attribute in X; and  is a nor-
mally distributed error term with a constant variance.
Considering our interest in urban change, we estimate
year-specific hedonic models in an attempt to uncover
a temporally consistent relationship between sales price
and substandard property conditions.
Following related housing studies (Munroe 2007),
Equation 3 is used as a starting point for our hedonic
analysis. Subsequently, we construct row standardized
inverse-distance spatial weights matrices (Wt ) that are
applied in ordinary least squares (OLS) estimations of
Equation 3 to compute diagnostics that test for spatial
dependencies in the data (Anselin et al. 1996). As the
OLS diagnostic output in Table A2 demonstrates, and
as is typical in housing price studies, there are significant
dependencies in the data set. In this case, the relative
magnitudes of the robust Lagrange multipler (RLM)
test statistics imply that the appropriate specification
for testing H1 is a spatial lag model (e.g., Anselin et al.
1996). The spatial lag model is given by:
ln yt = ρt W y t + Xt β t + εt (4)
where Wy is an endogenous product term that repre-
sents the spatially lagged dependent variable at time t;
y, X, β, and ∈ are defined as before, and ρ is a spatial
scalar parameter.
The results from estimating Equation 4 for year-
specific hedonic models ranging from 2004 through
2012 are presented in Table 2. First observe that
all of the controls consistently take on their ex-
pected signs from Table A1—with a few exceptions for
bedrooms—and that the majority of these relationships
are highly statistically significant over time. More im-
portant to this research, however, is that household- and
neighborhood-level substandard housing conditions
tend to have significant and substantive negative effects
on the price of residential housing. In the first place, all
else being equal, violating the city’s real property code
in the year immediately prior to being sold reduces the
market price of residential housing units in eight of the
774 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen

Table 2. Hedonic estimation results (dependent variable = natural log of sales price)

t= 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Age –0.001 –0.003∗∗∗ –0.005∗∗∗ –0.003 –0.002 –0.004∗ –0.007∗∗∗ –0.004∗∗

(0.001) (8.1e-4) (0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002) (0.002)
Age2 3.0e-7 1.1e-5∗ 2.2e-5∗∗∗ 1.2e-5 1.2e-5 2.3e-5 4.2e-5∗∗∗ 1.8e-5
(7.3e-6) (5.8e-6) (6.6e-6) (1.2e-5) (1.5e-5) (1.7e-5) (1.1e-5) (1.3e-5)
Air conditioning 0.089∗∗∗ 0.098∗∗∗ 0.112∗∗∗ 0.119∗∗∗ 0.127∗∗∗ 0.178∗∗∗ 0.166∗∗∗ 0.160∗∗∗
(0.008) (0.008) (0.010) (0.016) (0.019) (0.021) (0.026) (0.021)
Bathrooms 0.053∗∗∗ 0.055∗∗∗ 0.064∗∗∗ 0.070∗∗∗ 0.076∗∗∗ 0.100∗∗∗ 0.062∗∗∗ 0.121∗∗∗
(0.012) (0.011) (0.013) (0.018) (0.022) (0.022) (0.023) (0.020)
Bedrooms 0.013∗∗ 0.014∗∗ –0.004 0.034∗∗∗ –0.024∗ –0.015 0.014 –0.027∗
(0.006) (0.006) (0.007) (0.012) (0.015) (0.013) (0.016) (0.016)
Fireplace 0.075∗∗∗ 0.072∗∗∗ 0.078∗∗∗ 0.105∗∗∗ 0.074∗∗∗ 0.112∗∗∗ 0.122∗∗∗ 0.090∗∗∗
(0.009) (0.011) (0.014) (0.015) (0.021) (0.019) (0.027) (0.019)
Full basement 0.151∗∗∗ 0.138∗∗∗ 0.144∗∗∗ 0.177∗∗∗ 0.103∗∗ 0.043 0.063 0.197∗∗∗
(0.020) (0.019) (0.027) (0.047) (0.042) (0.038) (0.062) (0.047)
Garage 0.116∗∗∗ 0.081∗∗∗ 0.119∗∗∗ 0.223∗∗∗ 0.246∗∗∗ 0.247∗∗∗ 0.175∗∗∗ 0.172∗∗∗
(0.012) (0.013) (0.016) (0.031) (0.042) (0.044) (0.043) (0.043)
Square footage 1.6e-4∗∗∗ 1.7e-4∗∗∗ 1.9e-4∗∗∗ 1.3e-4∗∗∗ 2.2e-4∗∗∗ 1.9e-4∗∗∗ 1.4e-4∗∗∗ 1.8e-4∗∗∗
(1.7e-5) (1.5e-5) (1.8e-5) (2.7e-5) (3.3e-5) (3.3e-5) (3.3e-5) (3.3e-5)
Spatial lag of price 0.733∗∗∗ 0.736∗∗∗ 0.676∗∗∗ 0.686∗∗∗ 0.763∗∗∗ 0.669∗∗∗ 0.680∗∗∗ 0.648∗∗∗
(natural log) (0.019) (0.019) (0.022) (0.034) (0.041) (0.037) (0.033) (0.037)
Own violation in –0.034∗∗∗ –0.023∗ 0.003 –0.040 –0.089∗∗∗ –0.076∗∗∗ –0.048∗ –0.081∗∗∗
t–1 (0.013) (0.012) (0.015) (0.025) (0.031) (0.029) (0.026) (0.026)
Fraction of –0.153∗∗∗ –0.106∗∗∗ –0.181∗∗∗ –0.212∗∗∗ –0.355∗∗∗ –0.301∗∗∗ –0.415∗∗∗ –0.229∗∗∗
neighbors with (0.030) (0.029) (0.038) (0.064) (0.089) (0.078) (0.076) (0.074)
violations in t – 1
Constant 2.602∗∗∗ 2.664∗∗∗ 3.399∗∗∗ 2.981∗∗∗ 2.145∗∗∗ 3.284∗∗∗ 3.289∗∗∗ 3.454∗∗∗
Pseudo R2 0.625 0.582 0.567 0.573 0.586 0.652 0.722 0.683
Spatial Pseudo R2 0.409 0.370 0.457 0.431 0.384 0.485 0.552 0.473
N 8,079 7,364 5,161 2,785 2,461 1,553 1,314 1,443

Note: White’s robust standard errors in parentheses.

∗p < 0.10.
∗∗p < 0.05.
∗∗∗p < 0.01.

nine years covered by the data set, and this relation-
ship is statistically significant for seven of those eight
models. Thus, there is a consistent discount for (linger-
ing or recently passed) substandard conditions at the
housing unit scale, above and beyond neighborhood-
level effects. Relatedly, there is a consistently large and
statistically significant negative relationship between
sales price and neighborhood-level substandard prop-
erty conditions. Supporting H1, increasing the fraction
of a housing unit’s neighbors that were defectors (associ-
ated with property violations) in the year immediately
prior to the unit’s sale considerably reduces its price,
and this relationship is both observed and highly statis-
tically significant for all years covered by the data set.
Within the context of H2, these estimation results
potentially suggest that the observed discount for sub-
standard property conditions enables residential sorting
into high- and low-quality spaces—with low-income
households tending to contract for cheaper housing in
low-quality spaces that have more substandard prop-
erty conditions. Figure 2 depicts scatterplots and least
squares fit lines that reveal significant Pearson correla-
tions and significant spatial cross-correlations between
the poverty status of incoming residents and property
code violation rates at the census tract level. Figure 2A
illustrates a highly significant and positive relationship
between these measures for the ACS time period from
2007 through 2011. Plotting incoming poverty status
against the spatially lagged property violation rate for
2007 through 2011 in standardized space (Figure 2B;
see Anselin 2005) further reveals that inmigrant house-
holds who have income below the poverty level tend to
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory 775

Figure 2. (A) Percentage of incoming

residents below the poverty line ver-
sus property code violation rate (Pear-
son correlation = 0.477, p < 0.01;
regression slope = 0.943, p < 0.01,
R2 = 0.224). (B) Incoming poverty ver-
sus spatially lagged property code viola-
tion rates (Moran’s I = regression slope
= 0.406, p < 0.01, R2 = 0.244; stan-
dardized values). (Color figure available
online.)

enter urban areas that are situated in broader geographic
concentrations of property violation rates. Because in-
coming poverty data are only available at aggregated
census geographies, it is not possible to state conclu-
sively that homes sold in relatively low-quality neigh-
borhoods during the study period were purchased by
low-income households, but the statistically significant
relationships pictured in Figure 2 are highly suggestive
of such a sorting pattern.
Concerning H3, insofar as the property violation
data set covers the years 2004 through 2012, it is possible
to estimate eight space–time models of the form spec- 
ified in Equation 2; that is, for t ∈ 2005, . . . , 2012 .
The results from estimating these models are presented
in Table 3, where each row is associated with a single,
year-specific model.
As anticipated, the probit estimation yields nonzero
and highly statistically significant coefficients on both
776 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen

Table 3. Probit estimation results

Individual defection in Spatial lag of (neighbor)

prior year coefficient defection in prior year Intercept Estimate N = 148,718
Year (SE) coefficient (SE) (SE) McFadden R2

2012 1.166∗∗∗ (0.006) 1.048∗∗∗ (0.019) –1.391∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.175

2011 1.185∗∗∗ (0.009) 1.120∗∗∗ (0.019) –1.385∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.184
2010 1.079∗∗∗ (0.009) 1.194∗∗∗ (0.019) –1.414∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.168
2009 1.044∗∗∗ (0.009) 1.197∗∗∗ (0.020) –1.232∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.146
2008 1.113∗∗∗ (0.009) 1.273∗∗∗ (0.020) –1.483∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.183
2007 1.113∗∗∗ (0.009) 1.328∗∗∗ (0.020) –1.433∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.185
2006 1.120∗∗∗ (0.009) 1.417∗∗∗ (0.020) –1.465∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.192
2005 1.060∗∗∗ (0.010) 1.437∗∗∗ (0.021) –1.3647∗∗∗ (0.006) 0.160

Note: Robust standard errors are given in parentheses. Estimation carried out with the probit model for Zelig written by Imai, King, and Lau (2013a).
∗∗∗p < 0.01.

predictor variables for all years under examination. Fur-
thermore, all predictor coefficients are positive, indicat-
ing that the outcome variable (code violation status) is
an increasing function of the given “parent” behav-
ior (violation status) observed at both the individual
and neighborhood levels. The results therefore support
the notion that maintenance behavior is “heritable” at
these two scales, implying that a multilevel evolution-
ary framework is suitable for describing neighborhood
decline.
Next, because probit coefficients are not conve-
niently interpretable, it is useful to extend the anal-
ysis beyond Table 3. Particularly, simulation draws can
be taken on the estimated probit models to generate
distributions for various quantities of interest to bet-
ter communicate the results (King, Tomz, and Witten-
berg 2000). Quantities that are of particular interest
here are the first differences in the expected values of
the year t outcome variable for (1) defecting parcels in
t – 1 located in relatively high- and low-quality neigh-
borhoods and (2) similarly for complying parcels in t – 1.
Such information offers insight into how group effects
shape individual behavior for similar parcel (household)
types. For example, consider two households that com-
plied in t – 1, and suppose that zero of the first house-
hold’s neighbors defected in t – 1, but all of the sec-
ond household’s neighbors defected. The MLS logic of
this article and the probit regression results from earlier
jointly imply that the probability of observing defection
in period t for these households should be higher for the
latter household than for the former. This is so because
variation in the group trait meaningfully contributes
to change in the individual trait (e.g., Okasha 2006).
Mathematically, the first difference between these

Table 4. Simulated expected values and selected first differences

Household defected in previous year Household complied in previous year

Quantity of neighbors that defected in previous year

First
difference First difference
Year All Half None (All – None) All Half None (All – None)

2012 0.795 0.618 0.411 0.384 0.365 0.193 0.082 0.283

2011 0.821 0.641 0.421 0.400 0.395 0.205 0.083 0.312
2010 0.805 0.603 0.369 0.436 0.413 0.207 0.079 0.334
2009 0.844 0.659 0.426 0.418 0.487 0.263 0.109 0.378
2008 0.817 0.605 0.356 0.461 0.417 0.199 0.069 0.348
2007 0.843 0.634 0.374 0.469 0.458 0.221 0.076 0.383
2006 0.858 0.642 0.365 0.493 0.481 0.225 0.071 0.410
2005 0.871 0.661 0.380 0.491 0.529 0.259 0.086 0.442

Note: All first differences, including those not listed in relation to the intermediate (“Half”) category, are significant at p < 0.01.
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory
expected probability values should be nonzero and sta-
tistically significant.
Here a first difference is calculated by setting the ex-
planatory variables from the estimated probit models
to theoretically meaningful values and then simulat-
ing the expectations of the outcome variable and, by
extension, the differences between them (King, Tomz,
and Wittenberg 2000). The expected value of the out-
come variable is a simulation of the predicted prob-
ability of observing a violation over m trials, given a
draw of the estimated coefficients from their sampling
distributions (Imai, King, and Lau 2013b). To extend
the analysis in this way, we set the explanatory vari-
Figure 3. (A) Simulated probability of de-
fecting for households that defected last
year. (B) Simulated probability of defect-
ing for households that complied last year.
(Color figure available online.)
777
ables to selected meaningful values (e.g., for defectors
in neighborhoods in which all neighbors were defec-
tors, Yi,t−1 and wYi,t−1 are set to 1) and draw m = 1,000
observations of the outcome variable to determine the
expectations under the different scenarios. Here we ex-
amine six scenarios for each year, the results of which
are presented in Table 4. Table 4 also highlights one
of the most interesting first differences for these ex-
pected values: between similar parcel types located in
completely defecting (wYi,t−1 = 1) and completely co-
operating (wYi,t−1 = 0) neighborhoods. Figure 3A and
3B graphs the expected values from Table 4 for defec-
tors and compliers, respectively, to visualize the t – 1
778 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen
neighborhood influences on behavior in t. It is clear
from Figure 3 that neighborhood context and group
selection matter.
Observe that in all cases the probability of defecting
changes significantly for similar households depending
on the neighborhood context.4 From the 2012 model,
for example, households that did not defect in 2011
(Yi,t−1 = 0) are expected to have a 36.5 percent prob-
ability of defecting in 2012 ( Yi,t = 0.365) given that
all of their neighbors defected in 2011, whereas in a
neighborhood of zero defectors the same type of house-
hold is expected to have only an 8.2 percent prob-
ability of defecting—a statistically (and practically)
significant 28.3 percentage point first difference. The
corresponding first difference for households that de-
fected in 2011 is a staggering 38.4 percentage points.
Similar relationships hold for all eight probit models
(Table 4, Figure 3). It follows that the cooperation-
suppressing or cooperation-enabling context of a par-
ticular neighborhood, operationalized as the fraction
of a household’s neighbors that violated the municipal
property code during a given time period, substantively
contributes to change in the amount of compliance (de-
fection) in the total population. In the terminology of
MLS, group selection is a significant force of neighbor-
hood change in the study area.
Conclusions
Cities are complex, dynamic systems that are com-
posed of comparably complex individuals who are sorted
into ever-changing neighborhoods (Wagenaar 2007).
This labyrinthine, multiplex sociospatial environment
creates an infinite set of complications for social scien-
tists who wish to generalize over the processes of intra-
urban change and decline (Somerville, van Beckhoven,
and van Kempen 2009). Notwithstanding the difficul-
ties involved, developing a general understanding of
how neighborhood conditions deteriorate is crucial for
effectively managing real-world decline (Pitkin 2001).
As it stands, however, the existing schools of thought
on the subject tend to be too rigid, narrowly focused, or
empirically untestable to provide urban managers with a
comprehensive framework in which to operate and for-
mulate public policy (Pitkin 2001). For these reasons,
there is a need for a multiscalar framework of neigh-
borhood decline that takes into account hierarchical
population structures, as well as both endogenous and
exogenous forces of change (Pitkin 2001).
In this article we argue that evolutionary MLS theory
is well suited to meet these demands. For our purposes,
MLS is used to demonstrate that the existing schools of
thought on neighborhood change are compatible and
almost certainly interrelated. Although we rely princi-
pally on the ecological and political economy schools
to perform our analyses, and thus we do not fully un-
pack subcultural theories within the MLS framework
proffered earlier, we point to recent developments in
evolutionary game theory and evolutionary psychology
that can likely be used to accomplish this end in a
more comprehensive manner (e.g., Skyrms 1996, 2004;
Heinrich et al. 2004; Wilson and O’Brien 2009; Nowak
2012; Nowak and Coakley 2013).
Along these lines, the introduction of MLS to the ur-
ban decline literature represents a new theoretical con-
tribution that facilitates the integration of erstwhile
competing ideologies (e.g., Wilson and Gowdy 2013;
Wilson, Ostrom, and Cox 2013). We portray neigh-
borhood decline as a multilevel evolutionary process
whereby (1) individual stakeholders inherit (non) co-
operative behaviors from their immediate social envi-
ronment; (2) noncooperative or antisocial household
behaviors (e.g., insufficient property maintenance) sig-
nal relatively low neighborhood quality in urban areas,
and for that reason they receive significant discounts
in the residential housing market; and (3) propelled by
economic inequality, these discounts fuel a residential
sorting process by which conditions of poverty spatially
concentrate into low-quality, declining neighborhoods
characterized by low collective efficacy.
Next, much like the schools of thought that it seeks
to integrate, absent empirical testing at multiple geo-
graphic scales, our framework’s suitability for explaining
intraurban decline is indeterminate. We therefore focus
our research on a specific neighborhood social behav-
ior (property maintenance) and propose a methodol-
ogy for evaluating the explanatory power of the frame-
work using three interrelated hypotheses. First, spatial
hedonic models estimate that local substandard prop-
erty conditions receive significant discounts in the res-
idential housing market and that this relationship is
highly consistent over time. We contend that these dis-
counts engender a residential sorting process such that
low-income households occupy housing in relatively
low-quality urban spaces, wherein substandard property
conditions are fairly abundant. Statistically significant
spatial and aspatial correlations between the poverty
status of entrants into a given neighborhood, and sub-
standard property conditions therein, are highly sup-
portive of this assertion. These findings add to existing
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory
evidence of the empirical association between poverty
and low neighborhood quality (Galster, Hayes, and
Johnson 2005; Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega 2006;
Galster, Cutsinger, and Lim 2007; Sharma 2013). Fi-
nally, microlevel space–time models of real property
conditions demonstrate that evolutionary selection op-
erates at both the individual and group scales. Con-
cerning the latter, high collective defection gives rise
to more defecting individuals, whereas high collective
cooperation leads to more cooperating individuals in
the next time period, regardless of individual behavior
in the previous period.
More formally, in regressing parcel-level property
maintenance behavior during the current time period,
t, on (1) maintenance behavior during t – 1, and (2)
the fraction of the given household’s neighbors that
defected in t – 1, we show that individual households
tend to take on—or “inherit”—neighborhood charac-
teristics. To support this finding, simulation draws are
taken from the space–time regression models to esti-
mate the expected values of defecting (violating the
property code) in time t given household behavior and
neighborhood context in t – 1. The results from this
exercise establish that regardless of individual behavior
in t – 1, households whose neighbors predominantly
defected in t – 1 were significantly more likely to defect
in t than households whose neighbors predominantly
cooperated. It follows that defectors living in highly co-
operative neighborhoods were significantly less likely
to defect in period t and cooperators living in highly
noncooperative neighborhoods were significantly more
likely to defect.
The totality of empirical evidence produced strongly
implies that neighborhood decline is not inexorable
(ecological), nor is it strictly determined by household
social ties, nor still is it driven exclusively by market
failures and uneven capital development (political
economy). Rather, the interplay of these processes at
multiple spatial resolutions creates evolutionary urban
environments in which neighborhoods experience
qualitative change as a result of both internal and
external forces. Concerning the internal forces, neigh-
borhoods where the capacity for collective efficacy
is high have greater success at averting decline than
neighborhoods where individual-level competition
undermines this outcome. Furthermore, because
successful collective efficacy hinges on the availability
of social and economic resources (e.g., Temkin and
Rohe 1996), external forces tendentially concentrate
low-income households into relatively low-quality
spaces in a self-reinforcing fashion.
779
Unlike prior controversial applications of evolution-
ary theory to urban decline (see Knox and Pinch 2010
for a discussion), the framework proffered in this ar-
ticle conceptualizes evolution as a multilevel process.
This important distinction leads to dramatically differ-
ent policy implications relative to earlier (single-level)
models. Critically, the ecological school proposition
that cities are made up of agents engaged in impersonal
competition for space presupposes that households are
rational and self-interested (Kolb 1954). Consistent
with this view, a common policy approach to managing
decline is to impose economic or physical sanctions on
property code violators (Vitale 2008). Punitive strate-
gies increase the costs associated with having substan-
dard property, suggesting that rational economic agents
will act so as to avoid the penalty (Vitale 2008). Our
research shows that this ideology is problematic for at
least two reasons. First, substandard property conditions
tend to be disproportionately located in low-income
spaces, meaning that those households that are most
likely to receive economic sanctions are those that are
least capable of financially absorbing them. Second, not
all households in a city share common maintenance
norms (Knox and Pinch 2010). Enforcing a fixed set
of property maintenance norms for all households in a
given city thus imposes rigidity on an evolving, context-
dependent property of the urban environment—which
is perhaps one reason why such policies are reiteratively
associated with suboptimal outcomes in practice (e.g.,
Vitale 2008).
These issues highlight a need for socially inclusive
measures that focus on rehabilitation and facilitating
collective action (Vitale 2008). Recently a handful
of U.S. and European cities have begun working to-
ward such goals by, for example, implementing pro-
grams to shift urban power relations in ways that grant
decision-making authority to citizen leaders (Wagenaar
2007). Our findings that household behavior is shaped
by neighborhood context offer strong empirical support
for this type of policy goal; formally empowering citizens
to reach consensuses on neighborhood norms, and then
to self-police those norms, satisfies a critical core de-
sign principle for efficacious collective action (Wilson,
Ostrom, and Cox 2013).
Future research is needed to identify and evaluate the
policy options and associated outcomes that are impli-
cated by a multilevel evolutionary perspective, but one
point is immediately clear: Fully understanding evolu-
tionary processes enables policymakers to become “wise
managers” of them (Wilson 2007, 11). The evolution-
ary pictures painted by earlier schools of neighborhood
780 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen
change have suggested policies that, for example, ne-
glect “unsavable” neighborhoods (Schmidt 2011) or
impose economic sanctions on substandard property
conditions (Vitale 2008); however, these single-level,
deterministic outlooks are known to lead to suboptimal
outcomes (Schmidt 2011). We submit that this is due
to an incomplete conceptualization of evolution and
that, by integrating multiple schools of thought and
geographic scales into a comprehensive multilevel evo-
lutionary framework, researchers and policymakers will
develop the tools and empirical evidence required to
find and manage key leverage points in the process of
decline.
Notes
1. See http://city.milwaukee.gov/DownloadMapData3497.
htm
2. See http://assessments.milwaukee.gov/mainsales.html; su-
pplemental structural attributes (dichotomous variables
in Table A2) were obtained from the Master Property
file also available on the city of Milwaukee Web site at ht
tp://city.milwaukee.gov/DownloadTabularData3496.htm
3. See http://city.milwaukee.gov/DNSNSS. Property viola-
tion records from 2004 through 2012 were requested at
this URL and supplied to the authors in Microsoft Excel
format by the Milwaukee DNS Information Technology
Systems Coordinator.
4. For clarity, all of the first differences that can be calculated
given the simulated expected values from Table 4 and
Figure 3 are not listed; however, interested readers can
compute them by subtracting one expected value from
another as is done in the fifth and ninth columns of Table
4. All of the computable first differences from Table 4 are
statistically significant at α = 0.01.
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782 Weaver and Bagchi-Sen

Appendix
Table A1. Description of variables

Description and hypothesized relationship

Time-varying variable to price (+ or –) Sourcea

Structural attributes
Age Age of house in years (–) Tax assessor
Age2 Age in years squared (+) b
b
Air conditioning 0 or 1, presence of air conditioning (+)
b
Bathrooms Total full and half baths (+)
b
Bedrooms Total number of bedrooms (+)
b
Fireplace 0 or 1, presence of a fireplace (+)
b
Full basement 0 or 1, presence of a full basement (+)
b
Garage 0 or 1, presence of a garage (+)
b
Square footage Amount of living space, (+)
Neighborhood decline attributes
Own violation in t – 1 0 or 1, the given residential unit had a property code Milwaukee DNS
violation last year (–)
Fractions of neighbors with violations in t – 1 Fraction of a given unit’s neighbors that had property Computed using k-NN
code violations last year (–)

Static variable Description and descriptive statistics Source

In-migrant poverty rate Percentage of all inmigrants to a given census tract with U.S. Census ACS
income below the poverty level, 2007–2011
M = 0.407
SD = 0.229

Property violation rate Average number of property violations observed in a Computed using GIS
given census tract for the period 2007–2011,
normalized by the total number of parcels
M = 0.245
SD = 0.116

Note: DNS = Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services; k-NN = k-Nearest Neighbors; ACS = American Community Survey; GIS = geographic
information systems.
aSee Notes 1–3 in text.
bSame as above.
 Evolutionary Analysis of Neighborhood Decline Using MLS Theory 783

Table A2. Ordinary least squares estimation results and diagnostics (dependent variable = natural log of sales price)

t= 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Age –0.003∗∗ –0.005∗∗∗ –0.006∗∗∗ –0.004∗∗ –0.002 –0.002 –0.005∗∗ –3.6e-4

(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.002) (0.002) (0.003) (0.002) (0.002)
Age2 8.0e-7 1.4e-5∗∗ 2.5e-5∗∗∗ 1.8e-5 9.9e-6 8.0e-6 3.9e-5∗∗ 1.4e-6
(8.5e-6) (6.6e-6) (7.7e-6) (1.3e-5) (1.7e-5) (2.0e-5) (1.7e-5) (1.7e-5)
Air conditioning 0.218∗∗∗ 0.230∗∗∗ 0.220∗∗∗ 0.245∗∗∗ 0.258∗∗∗ 0.250∗∗∗ 0.329∗∗∗ 0.219∗∗∗
(0.010) (0.010) (0.012) (0.019) (0.024) (0.027) (0.034) (0.029)
Bathrooms 0.077∗∗∗ 0.067∗∗∗ 0.078∗∗∗ 0.082∗∗∗ 0.109∗∗∗ 0.126∗∗∗ 0.096∗∗∗ 0.177∗∗∗
(0.016) (0.014) (0.015) (0.022) (0.025) (0.029) (0.032) (0.028)
Bedrooms –0.003 –0.007 –0.022∗∗ 0.010 –0.074∗∗∗ –0.033∗ –0.028 –0.083∗∗∗
(0.008) (0.007) (0.009) (0.014) (0.017) (0.017) (0.024) (0.022)
Fireplace 0.183∗∗∗ 0.166∗∗∗ 0.180∗∗∗ 0.168∗∗∗ 0.160∗∗∗ 0.237∗∗∗ 0.251∗∗∗ 0.192∗∗∗
(0.013) (0.015) (0.018) (0.022) (0.028) (0.027) (0.038) (0.028)
Full basement 0.176∗∗∗ 0.161∗∗∗ 0.182∗∗∗ 0.187∗∗∗ 0.141∗∗∗ 0.079∗ 0.091 0.205∗∗∗
(0.024) (0.022) (0.029) (0.052) (0.050) (0.044) (0.082) (0.061)
Garage 0.224∗∗∗ 0.172∗∗∗ 0.203∗∗∗ 0.322∗∗∗ 0.316∗∗∗ 0.377∗∗∗ 0.248∗∗∗ 0.177∗∗∗
(0.015) (0.015) (0.019) (0.037) (0.052) (0.053) (0.059) (0.061)
Square footage 2.5e-4∗∗∗ 2.7e-4∗∗∗ 2.9e-4∗∗∗ 2.6e-4∗∗∗ 3.3e-4∗∗∗ 2.5e-4∗∗∗ 2.9e-4∗∗∗ 3.2e-4∗∗∗
(2.2e-5) (1.8e-5) (2.1e-5) (2.8e-5) (3.9e-5) (4.4e-5) (4.7e-5) (4.1e-5)
Own violation –0.103∗∗∗ –0.081∗∗∗ –0.076∗∗∗ –0.136∗∗∗ –0.228∗∗∗ –0.171∗∗∗ –0.163∗∗∗ –0.215∗∗∗
in t – 1 (0.015) (0.014) (0.017) (0.029) (0.037) (0.033) (0.035) (0.032)
Fraction of –0.433∗∗∗ –0.297∗∗∗ –0.454∗∗∗ –0.568∗∗∗ –1.053∗∗∗ –0.920∗∗∗ –0.980∗∗∗ –0.623∗∗∗
neighbors with (0.036) (0.035) (0.042) (0.071) (0.102) (0.094) (0.104) (0.098)
violations in t – 1
Constant 11.023∗∗∗ 11.186∗∗∗ 11.163∗∗∗ 10.815∗∗∗ 10.878∗∗∗ 10.804∗∗∗ 10.810∗∗∗ 10.737∗∗∗
R2 0.381 0.359 0.403 0.379 0.347 0.441 0.471 0.426
RLMa (Lag) 777.3∗∗∗ 651.7∗∗∗ 583.6∗∗∗ 300.3∗∗∗ 300.8∗∗∗ 210.1∗∗∗ 227.5∗∗∗ 172.4∗∗∗
RLMa (Error) 47.5∗∗∗ 23.3∗∗∗ 3.4∗ 0.2 1.0 0.5 5.7∗∗ 10.3∗∗∗
N 8,079 7,364 5,161 2,785 2,461 1,553 1,314 1,443

Note: White’s robust standard errors in parentheses.

aRobust Lagrange multiplier (RLM) tests for spatial econometric specifications; the greater of the two RLM statistics is used to select final model specification

(see Anselin et al. 1996).

∗p < 0.10.
∗∗p < 0.05.
∗∗∗p < 0.01.