Low-income housing for the elderly in Baltimore : a spatial analysis of social policy
- Author
- Clark, Alex Rees, 1943-
- Published
- [Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified], 1979.
- Physical Description
- 252 leaves
- Graduate Program
- Summary
- In building housing for the low-income elderly,location analysis has been limited to aspects of site and micro-scale situation, whereas larger scale situational problems have been largely ignored. The present study finds that unpredicted problems of urban spatial organization may follow from this inattention to citywide perspective. The current generation of old-age housing programs, 1965 to 1975, combines conventional upper limits on income with large scale in project development. The effect is to concentrate low-income elderly even more than they were concentrated before becoming project residents. The increased concentration of low-income households may further erode the already small purchasing power in the project environs, which in most cases are already lower class areas. This means that the housing projects may serve to further segregate the urban population by age and class, in direct contradiction to the inequality-diminishing goals of public housing programs. This study adopts a holistic framework for analyzing the locations of housing projects in Baltimore. The preponderance of literature on the subject is nonspatially based. Theories of aging and theories of urban income distribution have weak spatial components as applied to this problem. Nonspatial theories are reviewed and possible spatial extensions are suggested. An ecological approach was employed to examine the locations of existing projects in Baltimore. The city was analyzed with respect to three important subsystems, social structure, housing morphology, and population. For each system, factor analysis was used to reveal the latent structure. By simulating the addition or deletion of project populations from the affected census areas, the effect of building the projects could be estimated. In most cases, the addition of the projects moved the locality toward lower status, higher density, and increased age segregation. Simulation of population change over the amortization period of the projects showed that their locations are generally in areas of diminishing elderly population and that their environs will become increasingly segregated by race, age and class. [author abstract]
- Related Titles
- Low-income housing for the elderly in Baltimore
- Dissertation Note
- Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University.
- Reproduction Note
- Microfilm (positive). 1 reel 35mm., (University Microfilms 79-15704).
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