“Broken windows” and Self-Esteem: Subjective understandings of neighborhood poverty and disorder

In response to recent empirical research suggesting that how a person perceives his or her neighborhood translates into a number of psychological outcomes, this study seeks to assess the relative roles of (perceptions of) neighborhood disorder and objective levels of neighborhood poverty in influencing individuals’ self-reported self-esteem. Utilizing a series of structural equation models and data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, this paper lends support to the presence of perceived neighborhood disorder as a mediating factor in the relationship between neighborhood poverty and self-esteem. Although disorder does not significantly and entirely replace the relationship between poverty rate and individual self-esteem, resident perceptions of neighborhood physical disorder are shown to be significantly related to self-esteem and are stronger in magnitude than the effect of poverty rate. Moreover, the models demonstrate that two of the pathways through which this effect operates are via civic engagement and compromised physical health. Although resident perceptions of neighborhood disorder do not unequivocally erase the effect of neighborhood poverty levels in explaining variance in self-esteem, the models do provide evidence of the crucial, non-trivial role of neighborhood disorder in shaping self-esteem. This research supports prior theory that has suggested that blighted and decaying urban neighborhoods are read as disinvestments both by residents and by city governments, and therefore, these images are internalized and incorporated into residents’ psychological makeup.