Publications

:This paper focuses on three areas of civil rights policy: housing, education, and employment. The authors describe the current state of discrimination and/or segregation and analyze their costs, diagnose past failures of public policies, and propose new strategies. Both antidiscrimination and prointegration policies are recommended. The authors argue that one cannot proceed effectively without the other. They show how interconnections between the housing, education, and employment components form a racist metropolitan structure that exacts high social costs and must be attacked with a comprehensive civil rights strategy.

:Questions have been raised about the wisdom of low-income homeownership policies for many reasons. One potential reason to be skeptical: low-income homebuyers perhaps may be constrained to purchase homes in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is a potential problem because home purchases in such neighborhoods: (1) may limit appreciation; (2) may reduce quality of life for adults; and (3) may militate against reputed advantages of homeownership for children. Our study examines the neighborhood conditions of a group of 126 low-income homebuyers who purchased their first home with assistance from the Home Ownership Program (HOP) operated by the Denver Housing Authority. Our approach is distinguished by its use of a comprehensive set of objective and subjective indicators measuring the neighborhood quality of pre-move and post-move neighborhoods. Do low-income homebuyers sacrifice neighborhood quality to buy their homes? Our results suggest that the answer to this question is more complex than it might at first appear. On the one hand, HOP homebuyers purchased in a wide variety of city and suburban neighborhoods. Nonetheless, a variety of neighborhood quality indicators suggest that these neighborhoods, on average, were indeed inferior to those of Denver homeowners overall and to those in the same ethnic group. However, our analyses also revealed that their post-move neighborhoods were superior to the ones they lived in prior to homeownership. Moreover, very few HOP destination neighborhoods evinced severe physical, environmental, infrastructural, or socioeconomic problems, as measured by a wide variety of objective indicators or by the homebuyers' own perceptions. Indeed, only 10% of HOP homebuyers perceived that their new neighborhoods were worse than their prior ones, and only 8% held pessimistic expectations about their new neighborhoods' quality of life. Finally, we found that Black homebuyers fared less well than their Latino counterparts, on average, in both objective and subjective measures.

C. Institute of University of “-i.7 Business and California, ~ qA Economic Research Berkeley CENTER FOR REAL ESTATE AND URBAN ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER SERIES WORKING PAPER No, 87-331 SUBSIDIES FOR REHABILITATING SINGEE- FAMILY DWELLINGS: A BENEFIT-COST ANALYSIS ' ray GEORGE» C. 'GALs:'r=:ER Thes are Pfeiiminary in nat e; 'r purpose ' to stimulate discussion comment. Therefore. they are not to b ‘ted or quoted ' ny pub ' ‘on with t express permissio the author. GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Identifying a few indicators that summarily tracked key dimensions of neighborhoods would be invaluable for neighborhood monitoring and measuring impacts of interventions. The goal of this article is to search empirically for such robust, parsimonious indicators. In five cities, the authors analyze the interrelationships among a broad set of census tract indicators related to mortgage market activity; home prices; jobs and firms; demographic, socioeconomic, and housing stock characteristics; crime; and public assistance and health. Through factor analysis, they identify four to six neighborhood dimensions among these indicators that are common across cities. Using regression, the authors identify a parsimonious number of indicators that are inexpensive, annually updated, and available for all U.S. communities yet robustly capture significant variation in these neighborhood dimensions. Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data on mortgage approval rates, loan amounts, and loan applications and Dunn and Bradstreet data on businesses comprise such a set for four of the dimensions.

provide a careful, scholarly critique of palpable policy relevance.Their analysis reflects the consistent pattern that their past productive collaboration has established: a thoughtful amalgam of legal, historical, economic, and statistical expertise that yields provocative conclusions.It is thus my privilege to have the opportunity to comment upon it.The fundamental claim of Schill and Wachter's article is that past and current federal housing law and policy (especially as they relate to public housing and mortgage markets) intensify the concentration of low-income families in inner-city neighborhoods, either intentionally or unintentionally. 2 Fortunately, they argue, many of these mistakes are capable of remediation through new federal initiatives.Much of the historical evidence Schill and Wachter offer to support their claim is compelling.Although this is familiar territory to scholars, as Schill and Wachter's footnotes show, the authors present the material succinctly and powerfully.To their credit, they bring to bear econometric methods to supplement the historical analysis, and find evidence related to the geography of public housing and the rejection patterns of mortgage lenders that they claim buttress their case.My response to Schill and Wachter's analysis essentially is that important aspects of their argument are either conceptually and/or empirically inconclusive.Furthermore, their discussion of "current" federal housing policy pays insufficient attention to recent initiatives of the Clinton Administration that go a long way in the directions advocated by the authors.I will first consider Schill and Wachter's arguments that relate to public housing, then those that relate to t

This chapter summarizes the major themes of the book, which has aimed to enhance our understanding of the mutually causal roles in which our neighborhoods and we are intertwined. On the one hand, we make our neighborhoods. We as residential developers and property owners invest the resources to build, maintain and modify dwellings and their supportive infrastructure. Collectively, our neighbors and we tautologically constitute the profile of residents in our neighborhood. Finally, we make our neighborhoods through the local social interactions in which we engage. On the other hand, neighborhoods start to make us once we occupy them. They influence our physical and mental health by shaping our exposures to pollutants and violence and our accessibility to health care services. They influence our attitudes, especially our satisfaction with the quality of our lives. They influence the information we receive about the world, and how we interpret, evaluate and respond to it. They influence when we move and which neighborhood we will move to next. They influence our major life decisions that shape our education, fertility, work, and legal and illegal activities. Unfortunately, the market forces that drive neighborhood dynamics are inefficient and inequitable from a societal perspective.

Dam removal in the United States has grown exponentially, yet we do not know whether the pattern of such removals comports with principles of environmental justice. This exploratory study investigates the spatial pattern of dam removals across the United States to ascertain whether there were any geographic areas where the probability of removal was correlated with the racial or ethnic composition of the environs. We analyze dam removals since 2010 using national data on existing dams, removed dams, and demographics. We estimate multivariate probability models of dam removal stratified by census region and dam ownership to pinpoint contexts where significant spatial-racial patterns occur that cannot be attributed to dam characteristics. Our exploration reveals only a few such contexts. After controlling for dam purpose, construction type, age, and height, the probability of a dam being removed since 2010 is positively associated with the proportion of nearby White residents for dams owned by local or state governments in the South. The probability of removal is negatively associated with the proportion of nearby White residents for dams owned privately or by state or local governments in the West. Future case studies should probe these contexts of clear spatial–racial patterns from an environmental justice perspective.

The U.S. mortageg finance system has made great strides, especially in the 1990s, to increase homeownership opportunities for all Americans. A combination of lower interrest rates and higher incomes have contributed to a record 1999 homeownership rate of 66.8 percentaeup from 64.0 percent in 1993. This increase is due, in part, to the large increase in the number of low- and moderate- income families that have become homeowners in the past ten years. And both Fannie Mae and Freddie mac, by changing their guidelines and introducing new technologies, have made it easier for many lower income and minority families to become homeowners. Yet, lower income and minority families still are much less likely to own homes than are higher-income and white families.

For decades it has been widely believed that owners occupied higher quality dwellings than renters, and that a major reason for this difference was the superior investments in home maintenance undertaken by owner-occupants.' Grigsby (1963, pp. 235-6), Sternlieb (1966, pp. 176, 227), Taggart (1970, p. 123), Sternlieb and Burchell (1973, pp. 306-8), Peterson et al. (1973, pp. 46-47, 63), and Schafer (1977) have found that owner-occupants generally spent more on maintenance and engaged in maintenance activities more frequently than their absentee-owner counterparts. The implications of these studies are ambiguous, however, since a variety of other factors besides tenure, which could have explained the observed differences, were not controlled for. Recently, this conventional wisdom has been challenged in a rigorous empirical study by Ozanne and Struyk (1976, pp. 54-77), which examines dwelling conditions in a multivariate analysis. They claim that:

Capitalists, managers, unions and government today have espoused employee ownership and participation in order to further their own selfish ends. By so doing, they unwittingly usher in full workers' democracy, and concomittant radical transformations of the socioeconomic system which, ironically, will curtail their power. These transformations would stem from our populist ideological roots and would promote profound changes in the distribution of political power and in the way the society deals with technology.

A theory of residential satisfaction is developed and used in the specification of a path model wherein compositional characteristics of households and the context of the dwelling and neighborhood in which they live influence various dimensions of satisfaction. Relationships are estimated for 767 households sampled in Wooster, Ohio, in 1975, using two-stage least-squares techniques. Results show that certain households demonstrate less satisfaction in any residential context, and that certain dwelling and neighborhood contexts elicit dissatisfaction across the full sample. Only a few such contextual factors prove significant in most compositional subsamples, indicating that different household types differently evaluate and/or adapt to similar contexts.

No abstract is provided for this article.

We quantify how young adult employment and educational outcomes for low-income African Americans and Latinos relate to their adolescent neighborhood conditions. Data come from surveys of Denver Housing Authority (DHA) households who lived in public housing scattered throughout Denver County. Because DHA allocations mimic random assignment to neighborhood, this program represents a natural experiment for overcoming geographic selection bias. We use the neighborhood originally offered by DHA to instrument for neighborhood experienced during adolescence. Our control function logistic analyses found that higher percentages of foreign-born neighbors predicted higher odds of no post-secondary education and (less reliably) neither working nor attending school. Neighborhood occupational prestige predicted lower odds of young adults receiving public assistance and (less reliably) neither primarily working nor attending school. Effects differed for African Americans and Latinos. We consider potential causal processes underlying our results and suggest why they differ from those from the Moving To Opportunity demonstration.

Many western European housing policies have tried to increase the residential mix of advantaged and disadvantaged groups. Unfortunately, policymakers have given little consideration to how these groups will interact as neighbours. There are numerous theoretically grounded mechanisms by which the social mix of a neighbourhood may influence socio-economic outcomes of its residents. These mechanisms differ on the basis of which group is generating the social externality in the neighbourhood, whether this externality is positive or negative, whether it affects all residents equally, and whether the marginal externality generated by adding one more member of a particular group is constant, proportional, or is characterized by a threshold effect. This paper demonstrates that a social mix housing policy can be justified only under a circumscribed set of the preceding parameters. Indeed, depending on the mechanism assumed, social efficiency implies that neighbourhoods should be either: equally mixed, have the disadvantaged group dispersed as widely as possible, or rigidly segregated; for other mechanisms, mix becomes irrelevant. Thus, for formulating and justifying a mixed housing policy on either efficiency or equity grounds it is crucial to understand exactly what sort of neighbourhood effect(s) is operating in neighbourhoods.

:Twelve conceptually distinct dimensions of land use patterns are operationalized for 50 large US metropolitan areas using a battery of indices. Common patterns of variation in these indices across metropolitan areas are discerned using correlation and factor analyses. We find that: (1) seven principal components best summarize the dimensions of housing and employment land uses, (2) metro areas often exhibit both high and low levels of sprawl-like patterns across the seven components, and (3) housing and employment aspects of sprawl-like patterns differ in nature. Thus, land use patterns prove multi-dimensional in both theory and practice. Exploratory analyses indicate: (1) little regional variation in land use patterns, (2) metro areas with larger populations are more dense/continuous with greater housing centrality and concentration of employment in the core, (3) older areas have higher degrees of housing concentration and employment in the core, (4) constrained areas evince greater density/continuity, and (5) inter-metropolitan variations in several dimensions of land use patterns are not well explained by population, age, growth patterns, or topographical constraints on development. Results imply that policymakers must carefully unravel which land use dimension is causing undesirable outcomes, and then devise precise policy instruments to change only this dimension.

No abstract is provided for this article.

This paper develops a conceptual synthesis of six competing positions about the causes of inordinately high rates of poverty among urban African-Americans. This framework guides the specification of a six-simultaneous-equation econometric model, wherein both the pattern and the extent of racial residential segregation, inter-class residential segregation within the African-American community, school racial segregation, school performance, and poverty rates are endogenous. The potential roles of housing market discrimination are emphasized.