Reconsidering Deinstitutionalization: The Relevance of Space and the Poverty Threshold for the Presence of Organizational Resources

In 2006, Mario Luis Small and Monica McDermott published, "The Presence of Organizational Resources in Poor Urban Neighborhoods: An Analysis of Average and Contextual Effects" in Social Forces. Cited by several proceeding works as a challenge to a widely supported theory of inner city ghetto deinstitutionalization presented by William Julius Wilson and others, the authors quantitatively tested the proposition that poverty inhibits neighborhood organizational resources. Re-examining their findings using disaggregated data and adjusting for non-linearity, we find evidence in support of both their findings as well as Wilson's original hypotheses. While poverty is in fact positively associated with organizational density for low-poverty neighborhoods, this effect reverses and becomes negative for high-poverty neighborhoods. Moreover, the effect of poverty within poor, inner city urban neighborhoods is universally negative. This empirical finding emphasizes a wider need within urban sociological research to identify the levels at which key independent variables of interest exert their effect. Indeed, rather than engage in wholesale refutation or vindication of competing theories, our methods allow us to hypothesize and evaluate where particular theories should be expected to hold. Finally, we argue that neighborhood change is a key aspect to understanding available resources for the urban poor.