Are your prospects in life determined by where you live? Probably not, suggests a new study of the impact of neighbourhood on a person's current and future life chances. Researchers examined a variety of issues ranging from income to mental health that may be influenced by where a person lives. "What we found," explains researcher Professor Simon Burgess, "is that your neighbourhood is more likely to influence your attitudes, for example who you vote for, than your prospects."
The study set out to investigate the frequently debated link between poverty and place. Put simply, does where you live influence whether you are poor or not? More importantly, is it that living in a poor neighbourhood blights a person's prospects in terms of their health, employability and attitudes? Or rather that, due to high costs of housing, poor people become concentrated in areas of low cost housing (in other words, 'poor' neighbourhoods).
Researchers used the British Household Panel Survey to track the relationship between income, individual circumstances, political attitudes and neighbourhood over a ten-year period. "Findings show, unsurprisingly, that those who live in poor areas are a great deal poorer than those who live in rich neighbourhoods," he states. "Interestingly, however, we discovered income growth over five years to be the same across the board - whether people live in poor or rich neighbourhoods. So your chances of income growth are equal regardless of where you live."
The important implication for policymakers is that anti-poverty measures which target individuals (through education, skills, training and health) may pay better dividends than neighbourhood investment aimed at, for example, better infrastructure or increased employment. "If resources were unlimited then clearly it would make sense to invest in neighbourhoods also," he points out, "but these results show the primary focus of policy should be on better training and skills for the individual."
Researchers further explored the link between neighbourhood and political participation and voting patterns. "In contrast to our other findings, here we detected clear evidence of a neighbourhood effect," explains fellow researcher Professor Ron Johnston.
Similar people, defined by such characteristics as their occupational class, their housing tenure and their age, tend to vote differently when they live in different sorts of neighbourhood: 31 per cent of owner-occupiers who lived in the least-disadvantaged fifth of all neighbourhoods voted Labour in 1997, for example, compared to 68 per cent of those who lived in the mostdisadvantaged fifth. "People tend to vote in the same way as the majority of those among whom they live, whatever their own social backgrounds, especially if they have a lot of contact with their neighbours," Professor Johnston concludes.