ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a research that examines the central-city neighborhood economies and analyzes the location patterns of various industries in response to neighborhood demographic, socioeconomic, labor force, and housing variables. Neighborhood labor force characteristics affect industry location through the level of participation in the labor market. The location of firms in many social service and personal service industries is hypothesized to follow a pattern similar to that of retail industry firms. The chapter employs three levels of analysis: descriptive analysis, a regression model, and a two-stage least square equation with a spatial lag specification. Throughout the analysis, postal zip codes as proxies for urban neighborhoods in the Ohio central cities are used. To facilitate the analysis, central-city neighborhoods were divided into five categories based on their poverty rates. They are less than 10 percent, middle-class neighborhoods; 10–19.99 percent, working-class neighborhoods; 20–29.99 percent, moderate-poverty neighborhoods; 30–39.99 percent, severe-poverty neighborhoods; and 40 percent and above, extreme-poverty neighborhoods.
