Changing neighborhoods, changing times

In the 1970s, Flushing in Queens, New York, was a matrix of asphalt and low-rises dotted with parks and playgrounds, where Pentecostals and Hindus might take the same bus line. To a young Lance Freeman, it seemed like the center of the world.

Freeman grew up in an apartment there; his was the last stop on the 7 train. He liked the dense environment, meeting lots of different people. In warm weather, he’d head out with friends to play baseball or flag football in the park; when it was closed, they’d head to a rec center, or shoot pool.

Now as a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor of city and regional planning and sociology with appointments in the Weitzman School of Design and School of Arts & Sciences, Freeman studies neighborhood dynamics, motivated by how data can be used to build equitable space. His current projects use smartphone data to look at residential mobility and neighborhood change, and he hopes this research will inform policy by predicting long-range regional outcomes.

Freeman came to Penn from Columbia in 2022, teaching courses on the sociology of housing, fair housing, segregation, and law. He says the PIK Professorship at Penn gave him the unique opportunity to work across disciplines and to be affiliated with the sociology department, bridging his varied interests.

He was recognized in 2023 with the Robert and Helen Lynd Lifetime Achievement Award given by the American Sociological Association in recognition of his work in both community and urban sociology. Freeman previously served as the editor of the Association’s urban sociology journal, City & Community. 

Since he was a child, Freeman was curious about the city and its systems. He liked architecture, gravitating to the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center, impressed by tall buildings surrounded by open space.

And he had questions. “Why are all the tall buildings in Manhattan? Why is everybody jamming up there? Why do people think that’s the center of New York? Seems like the center is more in Queens,” Freeman remembers thinking. “Why do the Black neighborhoods look poor? Why do groups of people live in the same apartment buildings? Why do some neighborhoods have better services than others?

“If you want better services, you have to demand it,” his mother would say. That played into her desire to move to Flushing, a more diverse area. There was a debate about where to live, Freeman remembers, with his father favoring staying in a more homogeneous Black neighborhood.

Although Flushing was a mix of populations, Freeman noticed that the neighborhood was still fairly segmented into different groups. He might walk by a synagogue and two Hindu temples on his way to his Catholic elementary school, but he only knew Black people living in his apartment building. “Even with the diversity, it was pretty segregated at the block or building level,” Freeman says.

“I was really interested in the city, in terms of both the architecture and cities operate as a system, or why they’re laid out the way they are and why you have disparities across space, across neighborhoods,” he says.

As a young man, Freeman earned a business degree from the University of Buffalo and worked as a mortgage servicer in a bank. But he was still thinking about cities, so in 1990 he headed back for a master’s in city planning at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He returned there to complete his Ph.D. after a two-year break when he worked for the New York City Housing Authority.

At the Housing Authority, Freeman got to interact with other departments, city agencies, and the New York City mayor. Along with a team, he would work with architects, sketching out project plans and making site visits.

“Working at the New York City Housing Authority got me interested in academia,” Freeman says. “We got to see how some policies were being informed by research. This was at a time when public housing fell out of favor, and we were receiving a lot of pushback in terms of people not wanting it in their neighborhoods, thinking it was, you know, terrible. I was interested in studying the topic; what causes public housing to be viewed this way and does it really have a negative impact? What could we do better?”

After completing his doctorate, Freeman specialized in neighborhood access and change, focusing on planning, affordable housing, and the impact of gentrification on Black neighborhoods. “Some of the early work I did looks at how individuals are able to access different types of neighborhoods. What are some of the social and individual-level factors that influence that?”

Following stints at the North Carolina Institute of Minority Economic Development, Mathematica Policy Research, and the University of Delaware in Newark, Freeman joined the Planning and Preservation Department in the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University in 1999.

While at Columbia, Freeman collaborated with Frank Braconi, then the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council in New York City, studying displacement and analyzing data, finding that gentrification can both threaten long-established communities and offer a better life, Freeman found.

Freeman’s first book “There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up,” looked at gentrification from the residents’ point of view in two predominantly Black New York City neighborhoods. The book offered an opportunity to examine the gentrification question from the vantage point of the people experiencing it, Freeman says. “A lot of the studies that had been done, although they were talking about the people, sometimes advocating on their behalf, they didn’t necessarily actually give voice to those people to see what they what their thoughts were.”

Expanding on this work with “A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America,” Freeman traced the history of Black communities in northern cities and offered planning and policy recommendations. He drew on newspaper articles and historical documents “to try to paint a picture of what’s happening and how the people who are living there thought about these spaces.”

At Penn, while continuing to study neighborhood change, Freeman says he is “most excited at this stage of my career at helping prepare the next generation of practitioners and scholars who will be in the vanguard of making our cities more just and livable spaces.”