325 publications from this institution
This report details the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) response to the major 1994 earthquake in southern California. It documents the policy response to the earthquake, synthesizes the evaluative impressions of individuals involved in formulating and implementing those policies, and distills the potential lessons and unresolved issues that will be of value for future disaster response. Also discussed is HUD's rapid development of three new policies for emergency relief?the Section 8 Emergency Certificate Program, the Mobility Program, and the HELP Program. An appendix presents a content analysis that examines the role played by five local newspapers played in shaping, documenting, and influencing HUD's efforts.
This chapter argues that the metropolitan housing market primarily drives neighborhood change. It models this market as an interconnected array of submarkets segmented by housing quality. Within each submarket, there is latitude for independent adjustments of demand and supply but submarkets also are interconnected by actions of households, owners and converters of existing dwellings, and builders of new dwellings. Exogenous shocks impinging initially on one submarket create signals that eventually lead to systematic but non-uniform repercussions throughout the submarket array. These adjustments of demanders and suppliers fundamentally engender the neighborhood change process, which manifests itself in alterations in the composition of residents and the physical character of the dwellings. If such changes are persistent and consistent across a number of neighborhoods, there will be second-round effects on the local retail sector and the fiscal capacity of the local public sector. These impacts, in turn, feedback to magnify the initial impetus of neighborhood change. The chapter presents the first fundamental proposition of this book, the proposition of externally generated neighborhood change. It states that most forces causing neighborhoods to change originate outside the boundaries of that neighborhood, often elsewhere in the metropolitan area.
We quantify how social detachment (measured as neither working nor attending school) of low-income African-American and Latino young adults relates to their teen neighborhood conditions. Data come from retrospective surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households. Because DHA household allocation mimics quasirandom assignment to neighborhoods throughout Denver County, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. Our multilevel, mixed-effects logistic analyses found significant relationships between neighborhood safety and population composition and odds of social detachment of low-income, minority young adults that can be interpreted as causal effects. The strength of these relationships was often contingent on gender and ethnicity, however. We draw conclusions for macroeconomic, income-support, subsidized housing and community development policy.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Many policies in several Western European countries and the U.S. aim to counter spatial concentrations of deprivation and create more socio-economically mixed residential areas. Such policies are founded on the belief that neighbourhoods have a strong and independent effect upon the well-being and life-chances of individuals. The adequacy of the evidence base to support this position has been the subject of spirited debate on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary purpose of this book is to contribute to this policy-relevant discussion by presenting new scholarship from many countries that rigorously quantifies various sorts of neighbourhood effects through the use of cutting-edge social scientific techniques. The secondary purpose of this book is to introduce these techniques to a wider array of housing and planning researchers and to show how a variety of disciplines have offered insightful, synergistic perspectives. Research on neighbourhood effects has over the last 15 years led to a body of knowledge extending far beyond the sociological urban research where it originated. The problem of quantifying neighbourhood effects and the use of associated methodologies (like multi-level analysis, instrumental variables) has attracted scholars from criminology, sociology, social geography, economics and health science, and thus serves as a critical locus for interdisciplinary scholarship. This book was previously published as a special issue of Housing Studies.
Neighborhood poverty experienced over time by low-income households is a topic of increasing interest and public policy importance. We employ sequence analysis of neighborhood poverty rates to identify distinct patterns among the 18- to 22-year longitudinal residential trajectories of 389 low-income households in the United States who formed households during 1988–1992, as represented in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our most striking finding is the important role of poverty in their first neighborhood to the probability that low-income households ultimately reside in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there are a wide variety of neighborhood poverty trajectories that low-income American households experience. However, those with felicitous neighborhood trajectories were almost entirely White households. The majority of Blacks formed households in high-poverty neighborhoods and were unlikely to live in any other sort of neighborhood for the next two decades when they are typically raising children. In addition, both in-place neighborhood changes and residential mobility have likely led to this racial variation in low-income neighborhood trajectories. We contribute to the evidence base about the role of place in perpetuating socioeconomic and racial inequalities.
This paper examines whether criminals commit more crimes when living among other offenders. We estimate a fixed-effect, negative binomial model of individual reoffending using a quarterly panel data set across a decade for 693 neighbourhoods in Glasgow, which provides plausibly causal relationships. The concentration of recently active offenders has positive effects upon the subsequent number of property and violent crimes committed by resident offenders both inside and outside the neighbourhood. The concentration of young males also has a positive effect upon both crime types in both locations. Further understanding of peer influences by crime type and location, and of the effects of offender concentrations on processes of social control are required. The deconcentration of offenders is justified on social equity grounds.
Public housing authorities (PHAs) are entering a brave new world. Major proposed changes to the public housing program will force PHAs to compete with private sector providers for tenants. To succeed, they will have to act more like entrepreneurial market participants: to change their management practices, the types of tenants they house, and the kinds of developments they operate, and to attract private capital for the development and operation of public‐private public housing ventures. PHAs must confront the challenges of transformation while pursuing four mutually conflicting goals: housing the neediest, achieving diversity of tenantry, cross‐subsidizing by attracting unsubsidized tenants, and attracting private capital. Success, or even survival, may require sacrificing one or more of these goals. Whether PHAs can increase housing production to such an extent that they can provide sufficient housing for the neediest while fulfilling the other goals as well remains unclear. Keywords: Low‐income housingPolicyMarkets
A cross-sectional simultaneous equation model is specified wherein metropolitan-wide levels of racial residential segregation, housing discrimination, interracial occupational dissimilarities, and black/white mean incomes are endogenous. Parameters are estimated via two-stage least-squares for a 1980 sample of 40 SMSAs. Results support the hypothesis of mutually causal interrelationships among the aforementioned urban racial phenomena. Simulations suggest that narrowing occupational differentials played a major role in reducing interracial income differences and segregation during the 1970s. Hypothetical policy simulations indicate the efficacy of an economic opportunity strategy for indirectly promoting desegregation, although direct approaches such as fair housing and dispersal of moderate-cost housing are also predicted to yield large reductions in segregation.
Metzger fails to define or distinguish key concepts related to neighborhood change theories and policy and instead mischievously treats them interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. The intellectual history he presents is distorted and myopic. Unsupported assertions, distortions, and citations taken out of context characterize his use of evidence. No wonder he erroneously deduces that a monolithic, unchallenged neighborhood life‐cycle theory, promoted by an intellectual conspiracy headed by Anthony Downs, held sway in academic, planning, and policy‐making circles for the past half century.
George Galster explains how children are harmed by growing up in predominantly poor neighborhoods. He also recommends ways to improve federal and state housing programs to avoid high concentrations of poverty. George Galster is an Urban Institute Affiliated Scholar and the Clarence B. Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University.
No abstract is provided for this article.
We explore urban earnings premiums gained by native individuals born 1979 to 1981 in rural Norway who, after completing their education and starting fulltime work, moved from a rural to an urban area. We employ for the first time in this field the adjusted interrupted time-series (AITS) model, which offers a superior means of controlling for selection than conventional fixed effects and difference-in-differences estimators because it controls for pre-move level and trajectories of earnings. We find that estimates produced by conventional specifications understate the static premium and overstate the dynamic premium because they fail to account for the upward trajectory of earnings that urban migrants (regardless of gender and education) evince before they move. Parameters estimated from AITS models jointly stratified by gender and education also reveal more heterogeneity in urban earnings premiums than has typically been revealed. Better-educated workers get larger static earnings premiums when they move to the city, men gain more from such a move than women with the same education, and the gender gap for those with less education is much larger. If our results may be generalized, they would suggest that cities primarily generate wage premiums through agglomeration-based efficiencies that are heterogeneously distributed across urban employers according to their capital and knowledge intensivity.
