When the Neighbors Complain: Correlates of Neighborhood Opposition to Sheltered Care Facilities

Neighborhood resistance to unwanted land uses is a much heralded but insufficiently investigated feature of recent decades. This paper investigates local opposition to sheltered care for a people with mental disabilities. Using data gathered in a 12 year follow-up of a probability sample of sheltered care facilities in California, the study looks at changes over time in local opposition and at correlates of local reaction. It concludes that opposition is not related to typically proposed factors such as social class, inner-city location, or neighborhood cohesion but instead to the amount of disability of the residents, the ties of the operator to the neighborhood and location in an outer suburb.