Geo-Social Complexity

In the past, we have wrote about using spatial statistics to detect clusters of housing abandonment and demolition in Buffalo, NY as a macro level for the entire city. Now, moving from the city to the household level, we ( Li Yin , Robert M. Silverman and myself) have developed an agent-based model to capture the emergence of housing abandonment patterns from bottom up.  Particularly, the model captures individual households' decision-making process with respect to housing abandonment by including factors such as the housing attributes (e.g., lot front size, building age, housing sale prices) and neighborhood characteristics (e.g., existence of abandonment properties in the neighborhood, adjacency to anchor institutions, and 311 reports). The beauty of agent-based model (of course, our model as well) lies in its ability to capture interactions between agents. Specifically, in our model, each household's decision-making on keeping their house or not can affect their neighbor...

Li Yin , Robert M. Silverman and myself, we have published a article entitled "Spatial clustering of property abandonment in shrinking cities: a case study of targeted demolition in Buffalo, NY’s African American neighborhoods" in Urban Geography.  Abstract Many low-income and minority-concentrated neighborhoods have been struggling for decades with the acute problem of endemic abandonment in shrinking cities. Using high-resolution spatial– temporal data, this study attempts to extend our understanding of the influence of abandonment on future abandonment and the impact of interventions such as demolition by identifying spatial patterns of housing abandonment and demolition in Buffalo, New York when the city invested heavily in an aggressive 5-in-5 demolition plan targeting predominantly African American neighborhoods with high rates of abandonment. Our results confirmed that the clustering of abandoned properties has been consistently confined to the city’s majority African...