Neighborhood resources and community change: A longitudinal analysis of arts presence and social disorganization in Boston, 1990-2010

Inequality is one of the dominant topics in today's policy discourse. Two key areas of concern are racial and ethnic and socioeconomic disparities. Inequality is not only a social justice issue, but also one of economic prosperity: communities with higher levels of inequality demonstrate decreased social stability and economic productivity. However, there is little agreement as to the best approach to reducing inequality. Economic development initiatives are commonly used to address urban inequality, but key challenge associated with economic development strategies is ensuring that the population that pays for the initiatives is the same population that benefits. Existing research suggests that cultural development strategies show promise in addressing equity goals such as supporting racial and ethnic diversity and improving socioeconomic indicators.;This study explored the hypothesis that the presence of small and medium nonprofit arts organizations correlated with decreased local social disorganization in the city of Boston between 1990 and 2010. Three indicators of social disorganization, racial and ethnic diversity, economic deprivation, and social fragmentation, were analyzed in conjunction with nonprofit arts presence using longitudinal multilevel regression techniques and data from the Internal Revenue Service, the United States Decennial Census, and the American Community Survey.;The results of this study did not support the hypothesis that the mere presence of arts organizations results in improved social and economic outcomes at the community level. Nonetheless, there were changes in statistical significance between small and medium nonprofit arts organization presence and both economic deprivation and social fragmentation when the socioeconomic indicators and the variable representing the presence of large nonprofit arts organizations were added, indicating the need for more research to explicate the effects of each individual variable on the outcome of interest. These findings indicate that arts policy solutions need to explicitly target social goals in order to effectively address societal issues such as inequality at the community level. Simply increasing the number of arts programs or organizations is not enough to decrease inequality; instead, policymakers need to encourage the development of organizations and programs that use strategies such as social capital building to unleash the arts' potential for combating inequality.