UCLA

While it is widely recognized that urban organizations can influence neighborhood effects and spatial inequality in the United States, it often remains unclear how and how much organizations matter. This dissertation advances a flexible approach to analyzing organizational determinants of urban inequality. Applicable upstream and downstream, this approach can clarify how organizations broker goods, services, and social ties within communities and how organizations govern communities and allocate resources across places. The dissertation’s foundation is a suite of metrics for neighborhood organizational resources (NORs) that reflects the porous nature of neighborhood boundaries, captures contact between residents and organizations, and distinguishes between organizational quantity and size. Seven novel measures are introduced, compared to conventional metrics, and applied empirically to organizational action at multiple levels. One set of analyses uses smartphone mobility data to capture how routine organizations facilitate micro-level interactions and transactions, including the case of grocery stores and disparities in food access. A second set of analyses turns to macro-level organizational action in the housing and community development sector, testing whether nonprofit housing developers influence the spatial distribution of new low-income housing subsidized by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Estimating spatial models on a novel dataset spanning 30 American metropolitan areas over 14 years, at most weak evidence emerges of a causal link between NORs and subsidy allocations. This dissertation brings organizational determinants of urban inequality into sharper focus through attention to spatial boundaries, the relationships that connect organizations to individuals, and dynamics of dependence among organizations.