Where do neighbourhood reputations come from? Analysing Chicago community areas using a systematic neighbourhood reputation score, 1985–2020

A longstanding maxim of urban research is that neighbourhood reputations matter. The subjective narratives and stereotypes about a neighbourhood influence a range of consequential processes, outcomes and inequalities. Yet, there remains considerable ambiguity regarding the primary drivers of the neighbourhood status hierarchy. What are the primary factors responsible for neighbourhood reputations? How and why do reputations change over time? Unfortunately, efforts to answer such questions have been hampered by methodological limitations, most notably the lack of a universal measure allowing comparisons between every neighbourhood in a given city. In an effort to address this shortcoming, this article offers a novel computational approach for generating a systematic measure, which we refer to as a ‘neighbourhood reputation score’. Leveraging a sentiment analysis method to examine every newspaper article published by the Chicago Tribune mentioning at least one of Chicago’s 77 community areas across five decades, we find that neighbourhood reputation scores are negatively associated with the proportion of Black residents in a neighbourhood. Although the strength of the relationship between ethno-racial composition and reputation increases over time, neighbourhoods in Chicago did not experience sufficient compositional shifts to assess whether demographic changes lead to reputational changes. These findings represent the most systematic evidence to date in support of the theory that ethno-racial stigma is the most influential driver of the neighbourhood status hierarchy.