NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT IN THE METROPOLITAN ECONOMY - A POLICY REVIEW

This article introduces policymakers and scholars to several issues in the development of city neighborhoods and their residents. It constru cts a literature review around a tree diagram of problems and solution s, arguing that this is a,more useful way to organize information than the social science questions that typically interest academics, Follo wing this structured overview, I make the following arguments about sp ace and scale in neighborhood policy: (1) Even if we adopt an individu alistic model of economic behavior, we do not necessarily need to choo se ''people'' over ''place.'' (2) The rationale for the development of neighborhood export jobs remains weak. However, we may be able to ide ntify a ''preferred policy scale'' for job development and placement c onnections. This is defined as the scale at which the problem of spati al mismatch is not solved at the expense of broader economic developme nt considerations, and vice versa. The research agenda underlying this simple idea would require more sophisticated and policy-relevant work on commuting patterns and on the interaction behavior and other compe titive advantages of firms situated in intra-metropolitan space.