ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the children who are living in those neighborhoods, without having chosen to live there and without the legal or practical freedom to leave on their own, the balance tips the other way. It proposes on: Relying on criteria of neighborhood quality, including rates of poverty, violent crime, condemned properties, vacancy, evictions, home ownership, single-parent households, and unemployment, health care, and healthy food and government at the state or local level could identify the worst residential areas for children within its jurisdiction. The primary liberal idea for addressing the "neighborhood effect" has been a large redistribution of wealth in the form of government spending on "revitalizing" America's worst urban areas, in the hope that this will eliminate crime, poverty, substance abuse, etc. Beyond injecting consideration of neighborhood into individualized family-law decision-making, the legal system could simply declare that some neighborhood environments are unsuitable for children and no child may live there.
