This study uses Providence, Rhode Island, and its surrounding metropolitan communities as a case study to examine how federal housing policy is implemented at the local level. This work contributes to a new body of urban scholarship that analyzes housing policy as part of a state-building process. Such scholarship explores the development of 20th century federal housing policies that resulted in our current two-tiered system of direct and indirect aid that disproportionately has benefited the White non-poor through mortgages, tax breaks, and infrastructure development programs. (More)

Though they represent a small proportion of the total immigrant population in the United States, refugees play a significant role in many cities and towns that have recently received substantial numbers of refugees but have little experience with immigrants. Despite their access to temporary resettlement services funded by the federal government, refugees experience constant and intense needs that are rarely fulfilled by formal assistance alone. Since most refugees lack strong social networks, they typically rebuild their social networks and use them for informal support after they arrive in the United States. Because refugees are such extreme cases, I argue that focusing on their experiences offers important insights into how individuals create and use social capital, and what effect it has on various outcomes in their lives. (More)

Focusing on a resident council of a public housing community in southwest Virginia and building on a 2-year ethnographic case study of the council, the purpose of this research is to describe and analyze from multiple perspectives the effectiveness of the resident council for building community in a public housing setting. (More)

This dissertation investigates the spatial distribution of affordable housing and the locations where vouchers can be used. (More)

The objectives of this research are to assess whether residents of scattered site housing units expressed greater satisfaction with their homes and neighborhoods and recorded higher scores of well being relative to residents living in an aggregate public housing development. (More)

This dissertation attempts to gain a more complete and sophisticated understanding of how current federal housing policy initiatives, with emphasis on those related to homelessness, affordable housing, and fair housing, are being implemented in and between three entitlement jurisdictions. (More)

Many urban revitalization programs focus policy resources on spatially defined target neighborhoods. The impacts of these programs can include direct effects in the neighborhood chosen for intervention and spillover effects in other neighborhoods. These unintended and sometimes unpredicted effects may be positive or negative. This dissertation argues that without analyzing the urban spatial structure as a set of interrelated housing submarkets, planners will not be able to adequately predict and evaluate the effects of revitalization policy. In doing so, the research investigates the theorized nature of the housing market in space. (More)

My research provides a more in depth examination of our nation's low rent vacancy rates, and as a result suggests a different interpretation of the nation's relationship between the vacancy and homeless trends. (More)

The census of single mothers participating in any of three social safety net programs (public housing, TANF and Food Stamps) from 1995 to 1998 in North Carolina and the rigorous methodology enables me to derive substantive recommendations on individual transition patterns toward self-sufficiency. I will simulate changes in policies to evaluate their effectiveness in facilitating individual progress towards self-sufficiency. (More)

Responsibility for establishing minimum parking requirements for new development largely falls on local governments. Unfortunately, many municipalities do not create parking standards that are appropriate to the various uses and locations that they regulate. Local parking standards are rarely derived from parking utilization studies, and are instead based on small, nationwide samples drawn from varying land use contexts offering varying transportation options. The standards applied to a particular development often do not depend on its physical environment. (More)

Traditionally, economists have relied on econometric models to estimate housing demand. Most of these studies focus on calculating income and price elasticities to relate changes in household income and dwelling prices to changes in the demand for housing. This dissertation research introduces an alternative approach to assessing the dynamics of a regional housing market, in particular, and its impacts on a statewide economy, in general, using the example of New York State. (More)

The federal Housing Choice Voucher program represents the nation's predominant low-income housing strategy. The program maintains two goals: to reduce barriers for low-income households to find and lease safe, decent, and affordable housing; and to support the location decisions of assisted households with the hope that the subsidy will open up better quality communities to low-income renters. A hallmark of the program is voucher portability--the ability for assisted households to search and move nationally with their voucher. While specialized programs such as the Gautreaux Consent Decree and the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing demonstration program have shown the potential for residential mobility to generate positive outcomes for households moving with vouchers, the effects of mobility on outcomes for the general voucher-assisted population are not clear. This dissertation examines the dynamics of residential mobility for all voucher-assisted households in Illinois between 2000 and 2007, with the goal of understanding not only when and where such mobility resulted in positive outcomes, but also understanding the types of institutional and interpersonal relationships that create barriers and supports to successful mobility. (More)

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program provides low-income families with a subsidy that pays a portion of the rent of a housing unit that the family chooses from the private housing stock. This dissertation develops a structural model of household consumption decisions over housing, leisure, and non-housing goods that is used to evaluate how the Section 8 program affects the consumption and labor supply decisions of participating families. A major contribution of this work is that it develops a methodology whereby sophisticated models of how social programs affect behavior can be estimated using a combination of administrative and other data. (More)

This dissertation will examine the HOPE VI sites in various cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, and Washington, D.C., to see if these sites influence housing prices in their surrounding communities. (More)

How do impact fees affect the price of starter homes in comparison to larger homes? What effect, if any, do impact fees have on the supply of new homes of different sizes that get built within urban housing markets? Do impact fees disproportionately burden lower income households and lead to increased racial segregation? These questions are of critical importance as impact fee use across the United States has increased rapidly over the past three decades. (More)

Immigration has been one of the fundamental forces that shape urban America. While the society urges immigrants to become "real" Americans, assimilation is rarely smooth. Immigrants' assimilation is well manifested in their housing outcomes, because housing is central to the American Dream and is a critical element of federal policies. (More)

Homeownership may form a foundation from which low-income and minority households realize other opportunities. Because homeownership is associated with positive outcomes for the average homeowner, it is thought that low- and moderate-income households will receive similar benefits. Yet neither researchers nor policymakers knows much about how homeownership affects low- and moderate-income households. (More)

The goal of this research project is to increase our understanding of the homeownership experiences of low-income families. HUD has made a commitment to increasing the nation's homeownership rate, as well as increasing homeownership among low-income and minority families. However, we know comparatively little about the experiences of low-income homeowners and the extent to which homeownership contributes to their economic and social success. (More)

While the nation's diversity is undoubtedly growing, local-level diversity is still rarely sustained. Much less is known about communities whose integration has been steady than about communities that remain segregated. Examining these communities and their active residents has the potential to address questions about the sustainability of diversity in these communities. Further, examining how active residents in these communities talk and think about race has the potential to expand what is known about color-blind and diversity discourses and how they are concretely applied in local settings. In this project, I examine 3 of the nation's 14 stably diverse communities, seen through the lens of their most active residents. I conducted 41 qualitative interviews with residents of the adjoining Rogers Park, Edgewater, and Uptown on Chicago's Northeast Side, asking open-ended questions about their housing history, history of neighborhood involvement, and any relevant community issues that emerged as important to them along the way. (More)

The resolution of the U.S. retail finance crisis in the post-1989 period altered the landscape of central city mortgage markets by spurring the growth of new financial actors while these developments are widely hailed as making mortgage markets more stable and efficient, there is now consensus on whether these changes have increased opportunities for "historically underserved markets" - low-income and minority households and the neighborhood where they are concentrated. (More)

How did Northwest One become a ghetto? (More)

In this dissertation project, I investigate the effect of foreclosure on households and the metropolitan region. I examine: 1) the geographies of post-foreclosure households by analyzing households' movement after foreclosure; and 2) households' recovery processes. This research employs a case study of a metropolitan region in order to examine household recovery experiences and how these differ across neighborhoods, how a diversity of social networks and individual strategies and tactics can contribute to processes of recovery, and how and why foreclosed households move across metropolitan space. (More)

I will fill this research gap by undertaking analytical case studies, focusing on the demographic and market value impacts which have resulted from recent light rail system development in Baltimore, Buffalo, Portland and Toronto. (More)

This ethnographic case study examines what happens when pregnant and parenting teens come under the authority of a residential living program for young homeless families. Spawned by the de- institutionalization movement in the 1960s, transitional independent living programs operate within an "empowerment" paradigm. (More)

My dissertation will examine the effects of California's Housing Element law on low-income housing production. California evaluates the law by annually enumerating the municipalities that maintain compliant housing elements. Yet, no agency can quantitatively state how the law has affected low-income housing inventory; my dissertation responds to this need. (More)

When first introduced, disorder was considered a "slippery concept" (Skogan 1990, p. 4), where lines between order and disorder were definitionally blurred. Unfortunately, little has been done to systematically arrive at a cohesive definition of disorder (Kubrin 2008). Critiques of disorder have questioned both the definitions of order and disorder (Harcourt 2001) and the causal relationship between disorder and crime (Sampson and Raudenbush 1999), though no critique has yet addressed a core assumption of disorder theory - individuals cohesively perceive and interpret disorder. Most conceptualizations of disorder assume that: 1) individuals within the same neighborhood have similar levels of perceptions of disorder; and 2) the meanings individuals attach to disorder are homogenous within neighborhoods. (More)

A study that examines the effectiveness of small business and microenterprise development programs was carried out using both descriptive and quantitative analyses. A variety of methods including site visits, participant observation, classroom evaluations, focus groups and periodic reports were used to gather data. (More)

On September 15, 1931, President Herbert Hoover announced his plan to hold a national conference on homebuilding and homeownership in the United States. The conference would investigate the obstacles to homeownership, according to Hoover, “with the hope of … inspiring better organization and the removal of influences which seriously limit the spread of homeownership, both town and country.” Hoover used the announcement of the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership to remind the country of the benefits of homeownership, both to communities nationwide and to the country at-large. Homeownership made for better family life, greater social stability and improved citizenship, according to the President’s announcement. (More)

Universities are increasingly involved in numerous urban development practices, including economic, community, social, knowledge-producing, and physical land development. Empirical and narrative evidence continues to be produced to describe the crucial role that universities play in the economic vitality and competitiveness of their cities. The current federal administration, private corporations, and foundations have all shown interest in such “place-based” institutions, such as universities, by funding and partnering with them to improve their communities. Thus, it is increasingly important that more precise information is collected and disseminated regarding the impact universities have on the communities they serve. (More)

Leaders in Philadelphia are concerned about the economic future of the city and the obvious disparities that exist across the city's neighborhoods. As Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love," defines a means of becoming a globally competitive city, many of its institutional leaders have looked to the public schools to help them reach their goals. They are in agreement that many of the schools are preventing the local economic development of the city, by failing to successfully compete with suburban school districts for middle-class families, and are cementing low-income children into a future of low-wage work and continued poverty in the urban core. As cities like Philadelphia embark upon fast-paced development to help them compete in the global economic market, leaders are calling upon increased civic engagement among citizens to help them improve the city. (More)

Today in the United States 35 million households have one or more people with a disability, and aging baby boomers, injured soldiers returning from two protracted wars, and so forth, continue to build demand for the development of housing that maximizes independence for people with disabilities. On the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), however, architects have only reluctantly accepted the code-mandated requirements for disabled access, perceiving them as both arcane and banal in ways that provoke anxiety and dampen creativity. This dissertation examines the architectural attitudes towards the human body that professional responses to mandated disabled access have revealed. In particular, it will focus on the role that architecture plays in constituting the category of disability. (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the ways in which the public realm of neighborhoods encourage or inhibit daily travel behaviors, social behaviors, lifestyles, and community sentiments of neighborhood residents. (More)

This indepth study of a cohort of chronically homeless street dwellers at risk of death will assess the effectiveness of medical and substance abuse services in connecting this group to the local homeless Continuum of Care (CoC) and permanent housing. (More)

This dissertation will scrutinize the formulation of policy regulating residential land and structures in early 20th century Los Angeles, then examine changes resulting to a long-ignored but critical part of its urban development—multifamily housing. Historical analysis will uncover the complex political, economic, and social problem of accommodating dense, urban rental housing in a city striving to project a distinctly suburban image of a homeowner's paradise. (More)

The primary objective is to explain the growing appeal of residential mobility of the inner city poor as a policy aim and suggest why federal policies to encourage residential mobility and deconstruction of poverty proved in practice to be conflictive and difficult to sustain. (More)

This dissertation examines the meaning of residential segregation in the United States between 1920 and 1964. I focus on a period in which dramatic historical shifts take place, when class and racial ideologies undergo important reconfigurations and new social articulations result. (More)

This dissertation examines the economic impact of casino gambling. The dissertation proceeds in three main parts. First, the impact of casinos on housing prices is estimated using data from the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and Housing. Second, the casino location decision is formally modeled. Finally, a matching estimator is constructed to generate a randomized experiment for assessing the impact of casinos on key economic variables. (More)

My research will examine the economic interdependence of central cities and suburbs both theoretically and empirically. The theoretical section will bridge the gap between two divergent groups of models: urban growth and urban simulation models. Urban growth models emphasize urbanization economies at the metropolitan level, and generally conclude that center cities and suburbs grow together—the complementary view. (More)

This dissertation examines the economic and policy relationships between center cities and their suburbs. It makes several contributions to the existing urban literature. (More)

This research examines the dynamic and significant shift in citizen participation (CP) that has occurred in the United States over the past 40 years, permeating all aspect of community development. Since the era of The Great Society in the 1960s, local governments' broad and widespread CP in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) Model Cities Program (MCP) has evolved into more narrow, function-oriented representation by nonprofits extensively employing the resources of HUD's Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. (More)

This dissertation explores the impact of community culture on the success of cross-sectoral collaboratives addressing homelessness in Omaha, Nebraska, and Portland, Oregon. A comparative case study approach is used to build theory about how the environment helps to make conditions conducive or challenging to collaboration between government, business, and nonprofit organizations. The concept of community culture is operationalized by including three interrelated factors - social capital, community power, and political history - to assess two cities. (More)

The proposed research seeks to introduce new understandings of the specific issue of recovery houses—particularly in reference to the ways in which recovery house networks provide affordable housing alternatives; strengthen communities; prevent homelessness; and meet the needs of persons suffering from chemical dependency. (More)

This dissertation research has comprehensively investigated how mass media and Internet-driven network media help shape low-income housing policy, programming, and civic participation in a U.S. local urban community-Madison, Wisconsin. This study has demonstrated that the policy formation process and the outcome of local low-income housing policy are social products resulting from the interaction between local urban politics and the communication media ecology. For this, a local urban politics is investigated, and the public discourses in both local mass media and network media communication spaces regarding the policy are assessed from ecological and relational social scientific approaches, both of which are concerned with complex social relations and their transformations among individuals and organizations in the social environment over time. (More)

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between neighborhood context, parolee reintegration and success, and local neighborhood changes in social and economic characteristics. More than 800,000 inmates were released onto parole in 2007 alone, and parolees and the communities to which they return must navigate through the many challenges associated with offender reintegration. The process of parolees returning to communities raises critical questions about public safety, proper supervision of parolees, and the ability of communities to incorporate re-entrants into the neighborhoods to which they return. Underlying these challenges are questions regarding which parolees are likely to recidivate, what community factors might contribute the most to their re-offending, and the impact that parolees might have on the neighborhoods to which they return. (More)

To understand the housing needs of foreign-born minority elderly and their utilization of community services, this dissertation aims to examine Korean American elderly as one case of minority elderly. (More)

Place-based development strategies are being increasingly utilized to address the complex, localized problems in distressed urban neighborhoods. Although economic development is one of the critical concerns of these programs, determining the most effective economic strategy for impoverished communities is problematic. (More)

This dissertation looks at the production of Low-income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC)-financed housing production in three U.S. cities, to explain the variation in the level of production and the organizational configuration of the producers by looking at relevant organizational factors and their relationship to the local political regime and the local housing market. In doing so, this project will illuminate dynamics of organizational adaptation and change, transformations in the provision of social welfare. (More)

Differences in class and race have been shown to have a complex yet substantial effect on the integration of low-income minorities who move into majority White middle-class communities through affordable housing programs. Previous research has identified and outlined key variables and outcomes in the integration process, focusing on the nature and quality of network ties and performance indicators such as educational and occupational outcomes. However, the sociological literature fails to provide an understanding of the mechanisms by which the context of the social structure of suburban communities can affect the measured outcomes. The impressions, traits, and influence of social actors are conceptualized too statically. (More)

The dissertation has two objectives: 1) to identify how different political institutions (for example, Congress, the courts, administrative agencies) choose to define alcohol and drug problems and 2) to investigate factors influencing how these different political institutions arrived at their decisions. (More)

In the last 30 years, the South Bronx has transformed from a national symbol of urban crisis and dystopia to a model for new forms of urban redevelopment. But the nature of this renewal, and who it benefits, is deeply contested. Capital is returning to the South Bronx, and some claim that community-driven "renewal without displacement" is producing a new, economically diverse South Bronx. But critics point to the area's continuing poverty and racialization, and some residents fear that renewal will lead to gentrification and displacement. (More)

The intersection between community technology programs seeking to close the “digital divide,” and community building efforts aimed as alleviating poverty, holds tremendous possibilities, as both domains seek to empower individuals and families, and improve their overall community. Ironically, approaches that combine these areas have received very little attention in theory and practice. (More)

This dissertation provides an intervention model to help close the gap in social inequities of access to health care resources with the goal of augmenting the existing welfare-to-work initiative. (More)

Through a $40 million Urban Revitalization Demonstration Implementation Grant from HUD, the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee (HACM) will revitalize Hillside Terrace, a housing project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (More)

This dissertation investigates the creation of a national urban policy and an American ideology of cities in the context of Great Society policymaking and the urban turmoil of the 1960s. The aim of the project, most broadly stated, is to document the process by which policy thinking, originating either from the offices of federal policymakers or in meetings convened by street organizers, leads to social action that succeeds in changing urban conditions. To pursue this question, I examine the creation of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD), the formulation of Model Cities, HUD's first major policy initiative (created by the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Redevelopment Act of 1966), and its implementation in the neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. (More)

This research examines relationships among residential satisfaction, mobility intentions and actual moving behavior based on a nationwide representative sample from the American Housing Survey and a four-year observation period (1985-89). (More)

The "Section 8" Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program subsidizes the private market rents of nearly 2 million low-income households nationwide. This dissertation is a mixed-methods examination of HCV program neighborhood locations, focusing on concentration and neighborhood quality outcomes for voucher holders in 315 metropolitan areas coupled with an in-depth analysis of move preferences for a sample of voucher holders in Seattle, Washington. (More)

The purpose of this study was to explore factors affecting the desire to age in place among Korean American elders. (More)

In recent years, communities around the United States have been faced with an obdurate problem of rising homelessness, dwindling resources, and increasing numbers of tent cities within municipal limits. In this moment of U.S. upheaval, we have a chance to rethink what home means and how local policies can better meet people’s needs of home, particularly for those considered homeless. A common thread unites all community conflicts and decisions about shelters, transitional centers, tent cities, and other institutionally created housing for the homeless—core beliefs about what “home” and “homelessness” mean. How we think about “home” and what that means for housing impacts how people without access to those dominant types of housing are conceptualized. National approaches to home have implications for all citizens, but particularly for those who find themselves unable to afford the types of accommodations associated with “home.” (More)

In this dissertation, Gundersen, uses direct measures of well-being to broaden the understanding of poverty and expand our policy prescriptions. (More)

In dozens of cities across the United States, public housing projects characterized by intense concentrations of poverty, high crime rates, and extensive physical deterioration are being revitalized through a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program called HOPE VI. This dissertation investigates whether the HOPE VI program, when implemented as intended, better serves or further exacerbates the housing needs of low-income households in the United States. (More)

This dissertation hopes to prove that the Community Reinvestment Act has substantially strengthened community-based organizations' capacities to influence residential credit availability in their local housing markets. (More)

This proposed dissertation is a comparative empirical study of the impact of state EZ policies on firms' location and production decisions. (More)

Since the late 1990s, neighborhood housing market typologies (NHMTs) have become a popular policy tool used by cities to evaluate neighborhood housing markets. NHMTs support place-based interventions, and are used to guide municipal investments as cities target resources based on neighborhood conditions. The assumption is that the effectiveness of local investment strategies to trigger neighborhood change is linked to existing neighborhood conditions. However, this assumption has not been tested explicitly in terms of neighborhood housing markets. This study examines the following key question: does the impact of public investments on nearby home sale prices vary across neighborhood housing markets? (More)

In 1998 The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recognized the importance of community capacity by publishing a report titled "Identifying and Defining the Dimensions of Community Capacity to Provide a Basis for Measurement." Planning professionals have long claimed broad social benefits of participatory processes in community planning. Many of the benefits they claim closely fit the definitions in the CDC report. (More)

Building on two years of ethnographic research with the homeless community in Santa Barbara, California, this dissertation examines the newest addition to this transient population: RV and vehicle dwellers. (More)

Several high-tech regions today show signs of displacement and exclusion of low-skill workers from the employment and wage benefits of a booming economy. Whether high-tech activities are responsible for these trends or if the ex ante characteristics of the region could predispose its residents to exclusion, in the absence of high-tech growth, are issues that regional scientists have left largely unexplored. Understanding what low-skill and high-skill workers undergo in the presence of this activity, and how that compares to the reality of those who reside in regions whose economy is not dependent on knowledge-intensive sectors, provides a backdrop for policymakers to evaluate industry-choice decisions in the interest of economic growth and social equity in regional development. To provide that backdrop, I empirically answer: How are the benefits of high-tech development distributed between less- and more-educated workers? How does this distribution compare to that of regions that do not follow an education-intensive development path? Are social equity and sustained growth possible under these conditions? (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine homeowner associations politically – how these subgovernmental organizations function and how they interact with and impact local public institutions, and socially – what kind of communities homeowner associations create and promote. (More)

The primary objective of this thesis is to measure, through empirical analysis, the social and economic equity of the distribution of urban transportation services. The analysis examines the impacts of personal transportation system benefits from highways and public transit on owner-occupied residential property values for metropolitan Atlanta. (More)

In the first paper of this dissertation, I use the panel Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a national panel of local-level fiscal data to test a lifecycle variant of the Tiebout model. I test whether moves by empty-nest households—presumed to be out of fiscal equilibrium—yield fiscal realignments in the expected direction. (More)

When a borrower defaults on his or her home mortgage, the lender may attempt to recoup the losses by repossessing and selling the house. This process, called a foreclosure, is governed by state laws. (More)

In recent years, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and urban policymakers have made significant changes to subsidized housing policy with the hopes of allowing low-income rental housing subsidy recipients access to better neighborhoods, revitalizing distressed neighborhoods, and/or deconcentrating poverty. Included in these changes are a shift in emphasis from the traditional public housing program to the Housing Choice Voucher program (HCV or "vouchers")--a demand-side subsidy that theoretically allows for greater neighborhood choice--and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC)--a supply-side subsidy that offers tax credits to developers of low-income rental housing. (More)

The recent, dramatic declines in house prices have drawn attention to our ability to forecast house prices. In this essay, I directly address two questions: 1) could econometric forecasts have predicted the recent downturn in house prices before any declines in house prices were actually observed; and 2) when did house price forecasts that predicted house price declines first warn us that a decline in house prices was imminent? (More)

Despite the vast literature on poverty, social scientists have all but ignored the significance of eviction in the lives of the urban poor. Eviction is perhaps the most understudied process affecting the lives of the urban poor today. Yet it is a major cause of residential mobility, material hardship, and homelessness; also, as I document below, it is a common occurrence in inner-city neighborhoods. (More)

This is a qualitative investigation of community life among different socioeconomic groups within a HOPE VI community located in New Orleans, Louisiana. This study examines social interaction among residents who live in subsidized housing and in private market rentals/owner-occupied units; it is motivated by theoretical underpinnings that suggest incorporating higher income earners into former public housing developments will help eradicate social dislocations associated with concentrated poverty. The purpose of this study is to identify the processes and mechanisms that shape social interaction and also explain the limited neighborhood effects observed in previous studies aimed at assessing self-sufficiency indicators among publicly subsidized individuals. (More)

This study proposes to examine the extent to which barriers in the urban environment, such as housing conditions and affordability, neighborhood conditions and amenities, and transportation problems limit the amount of time, energy, and resources (personal, social, informational, and financial) that parents in low-income neighborhoods in Oakland, California, have to be engaged in their children’s learning and education. The study is based on education research that establishes parental involvement as a crucial factor in student achievement but that multiple barriers prevent parents from being more actively involved. These barriers include a parent’s educational experiences and attitudes, housing instability, long or irregular work hours, transportation problems, limited access to enrichment activities, lack of school communications, and other constraints related to neighborhoods, household care, and health. But while the research on barriers is comprehensive, the solutions have been narrower: the focus is often on actions within the realm of educators and connected social service providers. The neighborhood effects research on impacts to childhood development, social capital, and employment outcomes provides insight into addressing these barriers, but this research is limited on addressing the effects related to the parent’s role in children’s formal and informal learning and development. (More)

My research seeks to illuminate the connection between race, location, and policy to explain and quantify the differences in the outcomes for Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) applicants. While the vast majority of research on vouchers and race has focused on either differences in locational outcomes or the "success rates" of groups attempting to utilize a voucher, comparatively little research has been done on outcomes prior to receiving a voucher. Studies on locational attainment and success rates are important; however, success or failure in using a voucher only captures a small part of an interrelated temporal process that includes application, voucher issuance, and, if successful, length of stay in program. Although all parts of the process are conceptually distinct, the outcomes at each stage converge into a single measurable effect: applicant wait time. Consequently, applicant wait time serves as a focal point for this research. Thus, observed racial disparities in average wait time among voucher applicants are explained though the critical intersections among local application rates, wait line dropout, success rates, and attrition. (More)

This dissertation has four objectives: document the status of a new organizational form, evaluate the contribution of CDVC's to community economic development, detail the creation of the CDVC field and the roles various institutional actors have played in bringing it to fruition, and use the CDVC example to formulate a model. (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to illustrate the effect that corporate political strategies have on a community's shift from extractive industry (coal mining) to a more sustainable economic base. My hypothesis is that the strategies that extractive labor communities evolve for coping with the decline of extractive industry and its consequences parallel the closed corporate community features elaborated by Eric Wolf (1956, 1957, 1986), including features such as shared power, economic egalitarianism, and a pronounced social integration of the community. (More)

In recent years, cities worldwide have employed various tactics to control homeless people's use of urban space. Yet such measures never fully accomplish their goal, because homeless people develop ways to adapt to hostile landscapes. In so doing, they not only respond to tactics of spatial control but they also create their own conceptions of urban space that serve to compensate for the structural systems that fail or even punish them. Thus, just as legal categories of property ownership leave homeless people without access to private spaces, they in turn create their own concepts of ownerships and continually seek to privatize public space. (More)

The purpose of this study is to explore the interaction between the contextual environment and organizational characteristics that influence access to human services by ethnic minorities living in low-income urban areas. Informed by community and organizational theories, this study uses cross-sectional data from the Los Angeles Nonprofit Human Services Survey conducted by the School of Public Policy and Social Research at the University of California Los Angeles (Hasenfeld, Mosley, Katz, and Anheier, 2002) to answer the following research questions: What are the contextual and organizational factors associated with the percentage of ethnic minority clients served? (More)

This dissertation addresses the question of how federal social welfare, drawing upon philosophy, public finance theory, and the record of congressional rhetoric on grants. (More)

This grant will support my dissertation research, which compares African-American-led faith-based and secular community development corporations (CDCs) in order to explore the hypothesis that although faith-based and secular CDCs appear to be similar, several factors may contribute to differential project outcomes. (More)

This dissertation explores the applicability of the Political Process Model (a social movement framework) to community building initiatives. I hope to identify participant characteristics (including faith-based organization affiliation) and explain their relationship to the level and quality of individual participation in community development programs (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to fill some of the current knowledge gap concerning the role of faith- and community-based organizations in housing and community development by conducting an empirical study. Using New York City as the study area, this dissertation will investigate the organization, institutional capacity, neighborhood context, and associations with related community institutions of faith- and community-based organizations providing temporary and permanent housing for low-income individuals in the 1920s and the 1990s. (More)

Small cities in the Upstate New York region utilize funding allocated by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) through the Housing and the Community Development Act (HCDA) and Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding to expand local economic opportunities through housing and jobs. (More)

This research aims to specify the relationship of residential space to social and community outcomes such as crime and social interaction via the investigation of the mano dura policies. The study will use a series of quantitative and qualitative methodologies to evaluate the impact of the mano dura interventions on crime and social and community behavior. The study calls into question theories and practices that manage social behavior of housing residents via interventions to their built environment. (More)

Despite the current strong economy, urban residents with low skills continue to have difficulty finding good jobs, particularly when they are minorities living in poor neighborhoods. (More)

This study finds that federal legislation has had an effect on the modal outcomes of transportation infrastructure and that there are links between these modal outcomes and the sustainability of a region. (More)

After the credit market deregulation of the late 1980s, Wall Street increasingly became a major investor in mortgages providing liquidity to the growing subprime mortgage market, introducing new stakeholders and reconfiguring existing housing market stakeholders. The fallout from the resulting minimally regulated surge in mortgage lending (that is, the current foreclosure crisis), continues to impact and destabilize neighborhoods across the country, disproportionately hitting communities of color (Reid 2009). Policymakers are responding in a variety of ways, including proposing a reconfiguration of the housing finance system. But we have limited data about the contemporary set of housing market stakeholders, their social relations and the implications for policy. This lack of information will likely limit the effectiveness of policymakers' attempts at restructuring the housing market. Additionally, there are no comprehensive studies of the foreclosure sales process that could help policymakers in their responses to short term needs for neighborhood stabilization. (More)

The dissertation synthesizes recent developments in urban research and seeks the new methods and ways to examine the issues of sprawl, metropolitan governance, and economic development. A number of quantitative methods will be employed in both operationalizing the variables and analyzing the relationships between them. (More)

The decades-long expansion of law and order prison policies across the United States has led to historically high rates of incarceration and has had repercussions far beyond the prison walls. With more than 600,000 inmates returning back to their home communities each year, prisoner reentry reform has recently become as an important strand of penal policy innovation intended to address the barriers that former offenders face when returning home. Consequently, community organizations and corrections have been unified in an effort to assist former inmates. In the reorganization of the relationship between community and prisons that reentry requires, housing plays a central role. The success of reentry programs hinges on the establishment of workable housing scenarios that meet the needs of former inmates and of the surrounding residents who are asked to incorporate them into their communities. My study examines this process and the challenges and opportunities that are created by new reentry dynamics, specifically the challenges posed for these new rehabilitative programs by the lack of affordable housing. (More)

While there is consensus that African-Americans are overrepresented in the homeless population, there has been little research explaining why this is the case. Previous researchers have suggested that residential segregation combined with a declining supply of affordable housing serves to push low-income African-Americans into homelessness and greater access to homeless shelters serves to pull them into homelessness at greater rates than Whites. In this dissertation, these hypotheses were tested and the local cultural forces that influence where affordable housing and homeless services are placed were explored. (More)

This dissertation research examines the role of community-based organizations (CBOs) in regional economic development. Research focuses specifically on the institutional relationships between these neighborhood institutions with local and regional government and examines that factors that influence how and when neighborhood-based strategies shift scales between neighborhood, local, and regional levels. (More)

What can policymakers and scholars learn from studying the patterns of civic engagement developed by squatters? Squatters are a predominantly low-income population who typically work actively, yet outside of the labor market and most housing programs, to produce sustainable housing and contribute in little-understood ways to the strength and self-sufficiency of urban communities. Their practices of civic engagement are unusual, and thus challenge mainstream social science and urban planning paradigms. For these reasons, as the housing crisis continues and government and nonprofit agencies work to support affordable, sustainable housing and strong communities, ethnographic research into the past, present, and future of squatting is essential, yet almost nonexistent. (More)

The real cost of public sports facilities is significantly higher than popularly reported, and as a result, governments and taxpayers underestimate the magnitude of their financial commitment. Specifically, land, infrastructure, the ongoing public costs associated with the operation of the facility, and forgone property taxes are routinely ignored. (More)

This dissertation will investigate how the process of neighborhood change, taken here as gentrification, is associated with changes in housing and neighborhood context(that is, the habitat), and individual and community health and wellness outcomes. The overall goal of the proposed research is to better understand the relationship between gentrification and health, in particular by examining plausible health-related mechanisms of the habitat (that is, housing and neighborhood context). (More)

This project explores the process of neighborhood change/stability. I am interested in how dramatic changes in the neighborhood environment are perceived and reacted to by local residents. (More)

This dissertation examines gentrification and why the level of African American displacement varies across sixty-three highly populated U.S. cities during the 1980 to 1990 time period utilizing a multivariate analysis and a case study of two cities, Buffalo and Cincinnati. (More)

With the continuing influx of a large number of immigrants in the United States, the urban labor market segmentation along the lines of race/ethnicity, class, and gender has been drawing considerable attention in recent years. This dissertation focused on the phenomenon of "ethnic niches," that is, industries and occupations dominated by a particular race/ethnic group. (More)

During this turn of the 21st Century a major shift has occurred in American poverty policy from simply providing material support and some job training to complex strategy of “transforming” the poor into self-reliant citizens by the means of poverty-to-work programs. (More)

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was enacted in 1977 to encourage banks to reinvest into the low-to-moderate income (LMI) areas from which they received their deposits. I exploit an enforcement increase in 1989 to determine whether: 1) the CRA succeeded in increasing mortgage credit to targeted areas, 2) increased homeownership improves neighborhoods through decreased crime, and 3) compliance with the CRA affected bank profitability. (More)

Approaching the study of local brownfield decision making through a policy coalition framework, this research is based on the idea that cooperation among heretofore incompatible actors from the public and private sectors, and from cities and suburbs, is essential to produce successful redevelopment of brownfield sites. (More)

Understanding the reasons why towns restrict development of high-density housing is critical to mitigating any negative effects of the regulations. Previous empirical studies of the causes and effects of land use regulation have been hampered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate, timely data on regulations. In the dissertation, I will examine how the political motivations and fiscal constraints of municipalities affect the type and stringency of multifamily housing regulations adopted. (More)

Scholars attest to the expanded role of the criminal justice system in the lives of the urban poor. Staggering incarceration rates coupled with recidivism approaching 70 percent, nearly 700,000 ex-offenders annually released from prisons, and millions more from jails across the country, highlight the importance of prisoner reentry for urban communities. These concerns are especially salient in Illinois, a leader in sentencing disparity and recidivism, where 80 percent of arrests were drug related and, in Cook County, the most populous and diverse region in the state, African Americans represent 80 percent of all felony convictions. Finally, the ratio of persons incarcerated to those released is 1:1, with slightly more inmates discharged than admitted, the majority returning to just 7 of 77 Chicago community areas. (More)

Enacted in 1992, the HOME Investment Partnership Program works towards increasing the supply of affordable housing through flexible federal housing block grants. (More)

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a risk factor for homelessness among women. Homeless IPV victims often use domestic violence (DV) and homeless shelters for safety and temporary housing. Knowledge about their patterns of shelter use both within and across shelter systems is limited. Guided by the tenets of bounded rationality (March & Simon, 1958) and feminist theory (Reinharz, 1992), the investigation aimed to determine patterns of shelter use among IPV victims who use DV and homeless shelters, assess differences among IPV victims according to shelter type, and determine if individual-level and shelter-use variables are associated with shelter users' risk of a repeat stay. (More)

My research will examine the differential effects of three predominant HOPE VI relocation strategies on several outcomes. First, I will examine how relocation type (moves within the public housing development, to other public housing developments, or to other communities through Section 8) may differentially affect residents' social networks. (More)

In late 1992 Congress created the HOPE VI program to address the concerns raised by the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing earlier that year. One of the goals of HOPE VI is to help low-income families achieve economic self-sufficiency by moving them out of an environment of concentrated poverty and by providing them with supportive services. This study uses qualitative and quantitative methods to look at the relocation of families living in a public housing development in Philadelphia. (More)

Despite the recent downturn in housing markets nationwide, housing costs remain high in many urban areas, such as New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington. One key reason why affordability problems are so severe is the high cost of developing new housing in dense, built-out areas, where vacant land is relatively scarce and the cost of acquiring land right for residential development can be considerable. (More)

This dissertation will examine the employment effects of subgroups of formerly homeless, public assistance households in New York City. Though an extensive body of research has assessed the effects of housing assistance on labor, human capital, child development, and health outcomes, there is little research on the relationship between ending homelessness with time-limited housing assistance and its effect on employment outcomes. This research on households in homelessness and on public assistance who receive two years of rental subsidy from New York City will support knowledge and understanding of time-limited housing assistance as a policymaking tool and its impacts on labor market participation for work capable households. These findings may assist policymakers in their efforts to maximize housing stability and the attainment of self-sufficiency for vulnerable households. (More)

This dissertation argues that political variable such as intergovernmental relationships, interest groups, and the preferences of elected officials influence local policy and program development. The debate between public choice theorists and the political perspective continues in the literature. (More)

In this dissertation, I examine two major policy reforms in subsidizing housing programs. (More)

This dissertation examines the relationship between social networks and access to opportunity in scattered site and clustered public housing. Are differences in neighborhood networks associated with differences in job-finding networks? (More)

This dissertation focuses on one problem facing many communities today: redeveloping closed military bases. (More)

Using a national sample of enterprise zones, in this disseration I test for zone effectiveness in promoting growth as well as reducing poverty and unemployment and improving housing conditions. (More)

I examine the importance of (1) objective socioeconomic disparities; (2) housing market perceptions and information; (3) mutual preferences for same race neighbors; and (4) prejudice and negative stereotypes in understanding of persisting residential segregation. (More)

Homeownership is a desirable goal for most Americans and is considered an integral part of the American Dream. Empirical studies indicate that homeownership has many positive outcomes. In addition, homeownership is regarded as a major means of assets accumulation. While government aims at promoting homeownership and narrowing wealth and racial inequalities, many public policies have been criticized as failing to accomplish this task. (More)

This study is about the role if immigrants and minority businesses in a recent community development initiative administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The Federal Renewal Community, Empowerment Zone, and Enterprise Community (RC/EZ/EC) programs spanned the Clinton and Bush administrations and promised to be a synthesis of the two poles of community development policy in that the federal government would invest in people in a particular place. The regulatory goals of this program are to develop community- and faith-based partnerships, promote economic opportunity, and advance sustainable community development. Local governments applied for and won the first wave of 8 EZ and 65 ECs in 1994. Later, HUD designated 15 urban EZs in 1998 and in the year 2001 designated 8 EZs and 40 RCs. Meanwhile, the immigration to the United States had increased dramatically through workers, refugee inflows, and family reunification. (More)

In the 21st century, with the number of immigrant households predicted to increase to an all-time high in the United States, housing provision, which takes advantage of cultural characteristics of immigrant groups, may provide extremely useful models to overcome social and economic constraints in the housing market. (More)

In the past 20 years, the geographic pattern of immigrant settlement in the United States has decidedly broadened, shifting from ethnic neighborhoods in central cities to places that have not been home to new immigrants for generations: suburban municipalities. Scholars now recognize suburbia as a diverse patchwork with significant pockets of rising economic inequality, deteriorating housing stock, and racial diversity. This dissertation will compare two suburban municipalities to explore how the processes of integration for the children of low-skilled Mexican immigrants are influenced by key structural factors and the social organization of the suburbs. (More)

Asset-based policy has provided an important new frame for social policy for families (McKernan and Sherraden, 2008; Oliver and Shapiro, 1995; Sherraden, 1991) in which to enhance their "long-term economic stability and social protection." Asset theory and research, however, does not address the role of rental housing, despite the fact that the majority of low-income families rent rather than own their homes (Rice and Sard 2009). Given the recent foreclosure crisis and tightening of credit, it can be expected that –especially in high cost environments- the percentage of renters will grow (Clement 2009). The families with children who live in these rental units need them to be safe, decent, stable, and affordable, among other attributes if they are going to be able to take steps to build their families' assets. The research continues to mount that families without such housing have health risks (Acevedo-Garcia 2000; Smith, Easterlow et al. 2003; Lubell, Crain et al. 2007), have poor school achievement ((Tucker, Marx et al. 1998; Crowley 2003; Lubell and Brennan 2007), and difficulty with work outcomes (Cove, Turner et al. 2008) among other issues. These difficulties translate into families- adult and child members- who are challenged in their ability to build assets for the future. Lowincome female headed households represent an important case to explore both because they are extremely vulnerable and two generations are at risk. (More)

This dissertation examines the community reinvestment lending activities of prime lenders during the period of subprime industry growth. For the purposes of this dissertation, community reinvestment lending is defined to encompass the lending programs and products used by regulated lenders to meet their obligations under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). While a substantial and growing literature scrutinizes the subprime market, far less attention has been given to the development of community reinvestment lending by prime institutions. Each of the essays in this dissertation explores a different aspect of the interaction of community reinvestment lending with the subprime market. (More)

Affordable housing is asked to address a broad spectrum of physical and social needs and to achieve goals ranging from shelter to family improvement. The United States spends millions of dollars annually developing, financing, and operating affordable rental housing for low-income households. However, there is no policy for what government-subsidized housing should accomplish for residents and little understanding of potential tenant outcomes. The lack of a comprehensive theory of affordable housing means that policies are made, funds spent, and units developed without goals anchored on sound theory. What then should be expected as the return on affordable housing investments, particularly given the discontinuity between its basic physical goal (decent shelter) and expanded social expectations (self-sufficiency)? Should only direct standard-of-living impacts (safety net outcomes like better and cheaper housing) be expected or should a deeper set of quality-of-life outcomes be expected? (More)

This study analyzes how state and civil society stakeholders constructed conceptions of the public good and substantive policy solutions for post-9/11 New York City. It also investigates why decisionmakers adopted some of these policy solutions and rejected others. It links the theoretical frameworks of post-catastrophe agenda setting, urban governing coalitions, and civil society to analyze how macro events, organizational arrangements and coalition building allow actors to advocate for alternatives to dominant conceptions of the public good. (More)

This is an ethnographic study of intergroup relations in a neighborhood of approximately 1,000 residents adjacent to a public university (2010 student enrollment of 5,470) situated in an Appalachian city (2010 population of 9,002). The study’s purpose is to describe the culture of a neighborhood where diverse residents must negotiate norms in spite of the fact that they share neither a common sense of community (McMillan & Chavis, 1986) nor the same degree of attachment to place (Low & Altman, 1992). (More)

This dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the spatial distribution of poverty among the white and black populations of the Detroit and Pittsburgh metropolitan areas using 1990 Census data. (More)

This research is intended to increase understanding of informal housing, which has been little explored in the United States and other advanced industrialized nations, but which is a growing phenomenon and of increasing concern to urban planners and policy makers. (More)

This dissertation examines how neighborhood change discourse was initially shaped by American cultural preferences for social and spatial segregation in the 1920s, and how it continues to function as a tool that utilizes spatial location to establish and reify individual identity. (More)

Two important issues face the banking industry today: discrimination in lending and banking industry mergers and acquisitions. Although financial economists have frequently written about these two issues independently, an abyss exists at their intersection. This dissertation begins filling this void in three important ways. (More)

The 2000 Census identified changes in immigrant settlement patterns and the emergence of new immigrant gateways during the 1990s; however, few immigration studies to date have studied the intra-urban or local residential mobility of immigrants in metropolitan areas or the forms of spatial assimilation taking place. This dissertation examines the recent trends occurring in intra-urban mobility, immigration, and urban settlement patterns in Texas gateways, which have attracted an unprecedented number of Mexican immigrants since the 1970s. (More)

The purpose of this research is to understand the relationship between neighborhood revitalization planning and social capital, and the impact of those relationships on residents’ readiness for transformation of the community into a neighborhood of Choice. Specifically, this research aims to identify how Shreveport, Louisiana’s Choice Neighborhood planning initiative will impact the civic economy and perceptions of social capital in the Allendale/Ledbetter Heights neighborhoods. (More)

This research tests the relationship between each of four smart growth principles and the supply of affordable housing for low-income households. The four principles are higher residential density, a variety of housing options, mixed land use, and the preservation of open space. The relationships are tested at the neighborhood level in two different types of metropolitan regions, those with an urban containment policy to combat sprawl and those without. Four regions were chosen to represent two pairs. Each pair consisted of two regions which had similar urban containment policies at one point in time and different policies at a second point. By comparing regression analyses from these two points in time, the research design can detect the influence of urban containment on the relationships among the specific smart growth principles and the supply of affordable units. (More)

Immigrant enclaves used to be portrayed as poor and isolated but now are often seen as poor and close-knit. Using a networks framework to assess these portrayals of immigrant relations, this dissertation compares the number and composition of strong social ties of immigrants to those of the native born in Boston and Los Angeles. (More)

This article describes the experience of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI), a single revitalization program that has aimed to jump-start languishing downtown Los Angeles neighborhoods since 1994. This experience will be discussed against the backdrop of two putative public policy tensions: people versus place prosperity and needs versus assets. (More)

The dominant discourse about the adoption and diffusion of information technologies is surrounded by diverse and sometimes contentious debates regarding their capacity to ameliorate social and economic inequities. As academic debate continues, technology adoption and use by grassroots groups continues to grow rapidly. Although cyberutopians are quick to point to technology adoption by nontechnical users and community-based groups as an indicator of community empowerment, the linkages between technology use by grassroots groups and the overall development and empowerment of these communities remain tenuous. (More)

People of Latin American origin or descent are the fastest growing and poorest population in the United States. As the second generation of immigrants comes of age, many scholars have expressed concern about the prospects for social mobility of those who are living in poverty. This dissertation research, therefore, focuses on the life experiences and opportunities of first- and second-generation Latin-American immigrant women residing in public housing. (More)

Community schools are public, primary or secondary schools that expand their educational mission to include an explicit focus on community development. (More)

This research project proposes to fill a significant gap in knowledge by describing salient characteristics of the institutional population of LHAs, investigating characteristics contributing to institutional survival and policy success, and drawing normative lessons from LHAs, for LHAs, for other special districts, and for public administration practitioners and scholars. (More)

The broad objective of this research is to gauge the importance of relaxing the full information assumption in revealed preference models when decisions are made in complex, public information environments. This thesis focuses on housing markets. An information acquisition process is outlined that describes why homebuyers are often less informed than sellers for some housing attributes when they face more stringent information search and processing constraints. (More)

This article considers how the Fair Housing Act and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) structure local housing advocacy. Although both laws aim to reduce housing discrimination, they offer different sets of resources to these groups, thereby shaping the strategies, activities, and strength of these groups. This study compares CRA advocacy with fair housing advocacy in Denver, Colorado, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the 1990s. (More)

Inequalities in the United States are often rooted in place. Researchers have convincingly demonstrated that persistent racial and economic segregation constrains social mobility, access to opportunities, and efforts to achieve a higher quality of life. Many advocate increased residential integration as a policy goal. However, the long-held view of heterogeneous communities as unsteady and conflict-ridden suggests that such communities are vulnerable to resegregation. Integration, the conventional wisdom goes, is desirable but not sustainable. Yet demographic trends (globalization, immigration, decreased segregation) are contributing to increases in the number and stability of diverse neighborhoods. Because these increases are relatively recent, the processes contributing to the durability of neighborhood heterogeneity have received little scholarly attention. (More)

This research proposes to examine and evaluate the access to local shopping and service establishments available to residents of low-income neighborhoods in the Austin, Texas metropolitan area, and to identify the consequences that poor access has on residents and the strategies that they devise to cope. (More)

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In recent years, a growing number of international, national, state, and local initiatives have started working to make existing communities more aging friendly. This interest in changing the physical and social environment of existing communities to improve the health and well-being of older adults and help them age in place is a reaction to a confluence of factors, including the aging of the U.S. population, a projected increase in disability and chronic disease in future cohorts of older adults, and an inadequate long-term care system. Aging-friendly communities share three characteristics: Individuals can continue to pursue and enjoy interests and activities; supports are available so that individuals with functional disabilities can still meet their basic health and social needs; and older adults can develop new sources of fulfillment and engagement (Lehning, Chun, and Scharlach, 2007). Framed by an internal determinants and diffusion model, this study uses a sequential explanatory mixed-methods research design to explore: the extent to which 101 cities in 9 countries in a geographically and economically diverse metropolitan area have adopted aging-friendly policies, program, and infrastructure changes in the areas of community design, housing transportation, healthcare and supportive services, and opportunities for community engagement; and the diffusion factors, community characteristics, and government characteristics associated with such adoption. (More)

The purpose of the current study is to examine the choices made by local authorities in two cities, to analyze how these cities have arrived at distinct means of implementing the Section 8 Certificate and Voucher Program, and assess how and why policy outcomes may diverge from the objectives of proponents of the voucher approach. The study expects to illuminate the ways in which local political and institutional dynamics have affected the implementation of the voucher program. (More)

This dissertation has two goals. One is to contribute to the development of a location theory for business and professional services. The other is to identify strategies for economic transformation of American central cities from manufacturing to services. (More)

This dissertation investigates the social, political, and economic consequences of downtown loft conversions, focusing on the case of Los Angeles's Skid Row. Through loft conversions, aging industrial and commercial buildings are transformed into residential apartments or condominiums. Lofts are seen as a promising mode of urban revitalization for city governments faced with tightening budgets, stiff intercity competition for capital investment, and problems with homelessness and decaying infrastructure. While such developments may make economic sense from cities' perspectives, the juxtaposition of housing and services for marginalized groups and relatively wealthy loft dwellers poses challenges. The needs and priorities of long-time residents of distressed neighborhoods are often very different from those of their loft resident neighbors. City-sponsored loft conversions raise concerns of exclusion and social injustice, as well as questions about for whom and for what interests city policies and plans function. (More)

Despite the failures associated with the modern housing movement initiated during the inter-war period of the 20th century, the past 15 years have shown that government involvement in the production of affordable housing can be stimulating and beneficial. This study examines different aspects related to one such beneficial program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) initiated in the United States as a result of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. In particular, this research focuses on lease-purchase, single-family housing projects developed from 1987 to 2000 in Louisville, Kentucky, as part of the LIHTC program. (More)

Using San Francisco as a case study, this dissertation examines housing reform efforts and public housing in the first seven decades of the 20th century. The San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), the local institution that administered the federal program, has planned, built, and maintained public housing in the county of San Francisco since 1938. (More)

The results of this research will enable conclusions about the most effective strategies through which institutions of higher education can: 1) be a more comprehensive resource for the community, 2) provide community access to university resources, 3) improve relations between universities and their communities and address pre-existing conflicts and cultural barriers, and 4) improve the capacity of the community and contribute to urban revitalization. The research will also build upon the larger question of which institution provides the most effective structure to influence successful revitalization. (More)

Since the beginning of the modern age of downsizing and outsourcing in the 1980s, the nonprofit sector has expanded to fill the gaps created by the push for smaller government. State policy is translated through contracting agencies to their clients, with the nonprofits operating as the intermediary between citizens and the government. Although contracts require adherence to laws and regulations set forth by the government agency, the contractors still maintain some flexibility in creating programs and providing services. In effect, these contractors are creating policy and representing the government to clients. At the same time, nonprofits serve as advocates for their clients by seeking funds for services. When government relies upon nonprofits to provide services to citizens, these organizations play an important role in promoting civic engagement and serving as the voice of its clients to policymakers. As the border between the government and nonprofit sectors blurs, the study of public engagement in government must include client participation in nonprofit organizations. This research studies participation of clients in the decisionmaking of homeless shelters and domestic violence agencies in North Carolina, Michigan, and Washington. It uses models of bureaucracy and collectivism to classify organizational structures and creates a scale of participation to compare engagement practices. (More)

The importance of neighborhoods in shaping residents‘ wellbeing and behavior has long been recognized by social scientists and policymakers and heated debates periodically reignite about the adequate measurement of neighborhoods. This dissertation contributes to the neighborhood effects and urban inequality literatures by moving the focus beyond the neighborhood to examine the extent to which the spatial context of the neighborhood matters for individual wellbeing. It makes the case that, independent of how we define neighborhoods, people often navigate a geographic and cultural space that cuts across neighborhood boundaries. It investigates: a) how the urban geography of inequality and cumulative spatial disadvantage shape the wellbeing of the inner-city poor; b) racial/ethnic disparities in residential mobility trajectories; and c) the extent to which space, place, collective processes, social networks, job densities and local organizations interact to affect individuals, focusing in particular on adult mental health and obesity and on youth risky behavior and delinquency. (More)

The goal of my dissertation is to propose and test a comprehensive theoretical framework of the determinants of individuals' responses to changing environmental conditions and to pollution-induced declines in housing values. My research focuses on communities around Superfund sites as these sites undergo clean-up. (More)

The successful research question under which conditions subsidized housing generates spillover effects for values of neighboring single-family homes is extended in two ways: 1) By incorporating unsubsidized rental housing in the context of single- and multifamily zoning, and 2) by exploring in how far spatial dimensions of the data, research design, and methodology affect the reliability and precision of impact results from state-of-the-art adjusted interrupted time series/difference-indifference (AITS-DID) models. Although these models are widely applied, little systemic research exists that identifies and assesses potentially remaining sources of bias. (More)

This dissertation examines the utility of the multi-family housing sector on housing consumption and tenure choice by contrasting the various individual an market characteristics of the single-family housing sector. (More)

The fundamental purpose of this dissertation is to address issues regarding the timing of HECM reverse mortgage terminations so as to increase investor confidence in holding this instrument in portfolio and thus expand the secondary market for them. (More)

Owner-occupied housing plays a central role in the portfolios of many households. Recent work has explored the connection between a household's position in home equity and the demand for risky assets in the financial portfolio. This dissertation examines the role of the mortgage contract on the definition of and demand for housing wealth. (More)

This dissertation is a multi-method study of the relocation process under the Chicago Housing Authority's (CHA's) implementation of federal redevelopment policies intended to decrease the racial and economic isolation of public housing tenants. It combines quantitative and spatial analysis of program administrative data, interviews with "expert respondents," and qualitative semi-structured interviews with public housing relocation households to explore the settlement patterns and housing-choice decisions of very-low-income African-American households as they move out of public housing and into the private market using tenant-based Section 8 rent subsidies. (More)

The central purpose of this research is to investigate multi-worker households' commuting and residential location choice behavior, and the constraints arising from socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds as well as exogenous employment distributions, faced by multi-worker families, especially low-income minority households in their choices of housing and residential locations. (More)

This study examines the experiences of families participating a housing relocation program in Los Angeles, California. (More)

High rates of crime and violence in public housing developments over the past two decades led to a dramatic shift in housing policy for low-income families. High-rise public housing developments were demolished and replaced with low-density mixed-income communities, forcing thousands of families to relocate into the private market. Underlying these changes is the notion that neighborhood disadvantage causes negative outcomes for children. The three empirical studies of this dissertation examine this relationship. (More)

Eradicating homelessness and housing those currently or at risk of becoming homeless is a policy priority shared broadly in the United States by entities including HUD and the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Ten-year plans to End Homelessness have been established in more than 300 municipalities throughout the United States, including a plan in the city of Chicago that was initiated in 2003. The Chicago Plan, as well as the others, adheres to a Housing First approach to end homelessness, and represents a shift in the city's homelessness system from a shelter-based to a housing-based model. (More)

There is a significant movement across the country for the development of retirement communities linked to colleges and universities - college/university linked retirement communities (Pastalan and Schwarz, 1994; Pastalan and Tsao, 2001). The motivation of seniors returning to campus is qualitatively different from those who choose traditional retirement communities. It is obvious that there is a hunger for something more than warm weather, comfortable surroundings, excellent food, and good healthcare (Pastalan, 1999). It is fundamentally about personal growth, the development of more meaningful roles, and an enabling culture that fosters the creation of new models for retirement. (More)

The purpose of this study is to examine innovations in urban design and its implications for public policy. The focus of the research is on the supply side story or urban development scenario to examine how reformist ideas such as New Urbanism are formed. (More)

This dissertation explores family homelessness and shelter policy in Westchester County, New York. (More)

This research contributes to scholarly understanding of the labor market activity of women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods in large U.S. cities, the group most affected by 1996's welfare reform legislation. Welfare reform tightened eligibility for means-tested assistance programs, forcing many women to seek employment despite daunting personal obstacles. This research uncovers the extent to which this subset of women found steady employment in standard, living-wage jobs as well as the reasons why many have not. Unlike most work in this field, it incorporates measures of neighborhood disadvantage to further explore the spatial barriers to employment faced by this demographic group. I ask whether neighborhood context matters for employment outcomes, beyond individual characteristics and circumstances. (More)

This dissertation consists of three related chapters. Together they can be used to assess the effectiveness of filtering as a housing policy. The first and second chapters develops an index of affordability that takes into account the physical condition of the unit, as well as the needs and resources of the household. The third chapter identifies the factors associated with transitions. (More)

The development of affordable housing often involves a contentious siting process. Proposed housing developments frequently trigger concern among neighbors and community groups about potential negative impacts on neighborhood quality of life and property values. Advocates, developers, and researchers have long suspected that some of these concerns stem from racial or class prejudice, yet, to date, these assumptions lack empirical evidence. My research seeks to examine the roles that perceptions of race and class play in shaping opinions that underlie public opposition to affordable housing. (More)

The objectives of this research were several. They are: 1) to identify important food and nutrition care indicators (FANCI) in assisted living facilities (ALFs); 2) to develop a checklist to assess food and nutrition service qualities in ALFs; 3) to develop a consensus service style in food and nutrition services in ALFs based on views of national experts and the practicing dietitians who worked in ALFs; 4) to assess the degree of consensus within the national experts panel on six key food and nutrition service areas; and 5) to examine the association among both the national experts’ and the practicing dietitians’ backgrounds and personal views, and their ratings of the relative importance of services styles. (More)

This dissertation investigates the markets served and the production of "goods" (for example, rental housing services) by subsidized for-profit and nonprofit developers. Do the sectors work in different neighborhoods; and what characterizes the communities in which they work? And, looking deeper into sector distinctions - Do community-based nonprofit developers employ distinct planning and construction management techniques in their (re)development of projects? And to what extent are these distinctions tied to their community-based orientation or more generally to their nonprofit status? I investigate the provision of subsidized affordable housing funded under New York City's $5.3 billion Ten Year Plan over the period from 1987 to 2000, with a focus on the production of rental housing through the rehabilitation of city-owned properties. (More)

While the causality of inner-city unemployment is complex, many of the poor clearly remain unconnected to employment opportunities in terms of knowing people who can provide information and assistance to facilitate the job search. For welfare mothers seeking work, using personal intermediaries may help to alleviate employers' concerns about poor work habits, lack of work experience, race/ethnicity, child-rearing obligations, and length of time spent on welfare. (More)

This dissertation examines the processes by which homeless people leave the streets for conventional housing. (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine how the major federal housing block grant, HOME Investment Partnerships Program, has lead to changes in various elements of governance at the state and local level and the extent to which these elements affect housing policy development and housing policy outcomes. This project will assess the performance of HOME program participating jurisdictions and seeks to gain understanding of the relationship between performance and governance (statutes, policy mandates, organizational, financial, and programmatic structures, administrative rules and guidelines, and institutionalized rules and norms). (More)

This research investigated the link between neighborhood satisfaction and characteristics of the built environment. Adopting multivariate statistical methods and on the basis of individual-level data from the 2002 American Housing Survey, this research used ratings of neighborhood as a place to live to assess the relative importance of various factors involved in neighborhood satisfaction. Particularly, it examined the degree to which characteristics of the built environment relevant to traditional physical form (that is, higher density, mixed land uses, and mixed housing types) associate with neighborhood satisfaction for different kinds of people.

This study reveals that neighborhoods with traditional characteristics generally received lower neighborhood ratings than low-density, homogenous neighborhoods. After other neighborhood characteristics and household sociodemographic characteristics are controlled for, the research indicates that the higher density and mixed tenure features in the built environment area were associated with lower satisfaction levels, but diversity in terms of land use mix and housing structure mix associated with higher satisfaction levels to some degree. Further analysis shows that the single-mother headed households derived more satisfaction from living in a more mixed environment than other household types when other factors are controlled for. However, compared to such factors of housing quality and neighborhood maintenance and safety, the effects of physical form characteristics are fairly weak. (More)

This dissertation examines the relative impact of place and person effects on the earnings and employment opportunities of less educated prime age black males. (More)

The study analyzes the following research questions: a) What factors affected the quantity and distribution of manufactured home parks? b) Why did parks close? c) How did the state legislature respond and why? d) What are the likely impacts of the state response? A wide variety of sources (for example, key informant interviews, observations of meetings and public hearings, focus groups of park residents, archival materials, and secondary data about manufactured home parks) are employed to investigate a phenomenon embedded in its context. (More)

This dissertation examines the implementation of the HOPE VI federal housing program at a specific site located in Washington, D.C. I utilized participant observation techniques recognized in the field of cultural anthropology, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, library, and archival research, daily walks, and attending community meetings to guide this research. The site was 1 of the first 14 developments in the nation to receive a grant to demolish existing public housing structures and rebuild new mixed-income sites that resemble other neighboring homes to create seamless communities. (More)

Individuals who live in poor urban neighborhoods are often characterized in monolithic ways that understate diverse responses to poverty. Using the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago and bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis techniques, this study examines the degree to which neighborhood poverty constraints, household economics, and demographic variables influence positive homeownership attitudes, homeownership behavior, and neighborhood ties. (More)

Since the 1970s, waves of deindustrialization have dramatically transformed the urban Rust Belt. The plight of cities in this region is well documented by scholars. The story they present upholds central assumptions in theories of urban growth, mainly new cities grow in new economic regions at the expense of others. This dissertation challenges this notion by addressing the following question: What are the different economic trajectories Rust Belt cities have taken over the course of global economic restructuring from 1970 to 2000? (More)

This study examines how community development and mainstream environmental groups form coalitions in state-level urban environmental legislation, and the effect these coalitions have upon larger processes of institutional change. I argue that the alignment of community development and environmental interests is essential in the efforts to flatten the existing power hierarchy around land use decisionmaking and open up new possibilities for urban form. It helps to form a “counter-institutional” response, which combines “pragmatic” and “purist” interests to resolve the social and environmental dilemmas of land use. (More)

This dissertation will examine the interdependence of cities and suburbs and the unique agglomeration economies central cities are purported to have through an analysis of the intra-metropolitan location of producer services and the spatial linkages between producer service establishments, their clients and suppliers, and specialized institutions. (More)

There are nearly 40,000 local general purpose governments and approximately 50,000 special districts in the United States. Throughout the past two decades the number of local governments has increased by only 9 percent and special districts by 14 percent. During this same period of time, however, we have witnessed the emergence and rapid proliferation of another type of local governance and service provider. Scholars have often described these entities as "private governments" (see Helsley and Strange 1998, 200a, 2000b) or micro-institutions" (Liebmann 1993, 1995; Ellickson 1998; Nelson 2006); they are exclusive in membership and possess the authority to tax their members and supplement public goods. The numbers are less definitive (as these is no Census that keeps track of their formation and existence), but estimates suggest that there were upwards of 300,000 of these organizations in the United States as of 2008, a number that has nearly doubled in the past two decades. Herein referred to as private governments, the current analysis will take a much-needed in-depth look at these organizations and how they shape outcomes for individuals, neighborhoods, and cities. (More)

The focus of this study is Concentrated Urban Poverty (CUP) neighborhoods and the emerging responses to this phenomenon. CUP neighborhoods are frequently described as a social problem in that they are seen as undesirable and yet have potential for change. Residents of these neighborhoods require public subsidies to provide housing and food, as well as public problem solving and resource investment within the housing, educational, criminal and health systems in order to meet the basic social needs and overcome barriers to self-sufficiency. There are a range of interventions to address urban neighborhoods with a concentration of poverty; the two that are the focus of this study are Transit-Oriented Mixed Income Redevelopments and Community Organizing, both of which have been found to improve neighborhood and individual outcomes (Berube, 2006; Foster-Fishrnan, Cantillon, Pierce, & Van Egeren, 2007; Joseph, 2006; Joseph, 2008; Ohmer & Beck, 2006; Popkin et al, 2004). (More)

This dissertation concerns the decision making process for brownfields redevelopment residential neighborhoods. Using a three-part methodology, I investigate the current status of public participation by affected residents and other stakeholders in the redevelopment of brownfields sites located in residential neighborhoods. (More)

This study examines three public policy questions related to the FHA's mortgage insurance programs. (More)

Breaking with the present research on the use and effectiveness of urban black church-affiliated CDCs in altering the conditions in urban black neighborhoods, my research attends to the political effects and consequences of CDCs, both for black citizens and city government. (More)

Long-term observers of urban communities know that the distribution of housing quality and the changes of this distribution over time encompass not one but a variety of neighborhood housing patterns. Results from the housing market literature, most notably the filtering literature, explain one pattern of change. (More)

This dissertation focuses on the effectiveness of the Empowerment Zones (EZ) initiative in the original six urban areas: Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia/Camden. Using a quantitative analysis, this study measures the impact of EZ designation on poverty, employment, and educational attainment of the residents in the six zones. (More)

The main purpose of the project is to examine the role that local politics has played in contributing to the creation of an underclass neighborhood. (More)

Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago are two of the most historic and culturally significant urban African-American communities in the country. These areas have been critical spaces for the study of neighborhood change theory, Black urban life, and concentrated poverty. After a middle-class flight and almost 40 years of economic abandonment, these urban communities are currently experiencing massive influxes of commercial and residential investments, rapidly changing them from low- to more mixed-income environments. (More)

This dissertation attempts to answer the questions: Will the nation become more pluralistic, sharing different cultures, religions, and philosophies in a beautiful mosaic of human exchange and interaction?; or will the nation become even more divided, breaking down into warring factions struggling to get their piece of the economic and cultural pie? (More)

In my dissertation, I problematize the current framing and understanding of U.S. racial and ethnic neighborhood integration in an increasingly heterogeneous society. Research questions and analyses are shaped by contemporary race theories, which emphasize how societal systems, structures, and racial ideologies condition institutions, outcomes, and a shifting U.S. racial order (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Omi and Winant 1994). I examine the often implied, yet rarely empirically validated, proposal that long-term racial and ethnic neighborhood integration is a primary remedy for the inequities and deleterious consequences associated with racial residential segregation. I construct a descriptive and analytical national portrait of the patterns and socioeconomic consequences of metropolitan neighborhood integration between 1980 and 2000. I extend existing research by illuminating national patterns that account for Latinos as well as Black and Whites, and by directly comparing neighborhood and group-level socioeconomic advantage/disadvantage for a range of integrated and homogeneous neighborhood types. Most importantly, I explicitly examine whether Black and Latinos residing in durable integrated contexts appear to be significantly more advantaged than those situated in long-term, predominantly minority communities. (More)

This study addresses the issue of racial differences in owner-occupied housing. (More)

In the wake of Emancipation, African Americans viewed land and homeownership as an essential element of their "citizenship rights." However, efforts to achieve such ownership in the postbellum era were often stymied by credit discrimination as many Black were ensnared in a system of debt peonage. Despite such obstacles, African American achieved land ownership in surprising numbers in rural and urban areas in the South.

At the beginning of the 20th century, millions of African Americans began leaving the South for the North with continued aspirations of homeownership. As Blacks sought to fulfill the American Dream, many financial institutions refused to provide loans to them or provided loans with onerous terms and conditions. In response, a small group of African-American leaders, working in conjunction with a number of the Black churches in Philadelphia, built the largest network of race financial institutions in the United States to provide credit to Black homebuyers. The leaders recognized economic development through homeownership as an integral piece of the larger civil rights movement dedicated to challenging White supremacy. The race financial institutions successfully provided hundreds of mortgage loans to African Americans and were a key reason for the tripling of the Black homeownership rate in Philadelphia from 1910 to 1930. (More)

This dissertation examines the political economy of the redevelopment process to ascertain why some projects are successful while others are not. The dissertation consists of case studies of four former Naval facilities. (More)

This dissertation examines one new strategy designed to help alleviate poverty and promote other economic development goals—microenterprise programs. (More)

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, created in 1933 to help urban homeowners avoid foreclosure, developed a series of residential security maps for cities across the country. (More)

This study investigates spatial dependence and neighborhood effects in mortgage lending disparities in the Southern California five-county region. In doing so, it assesses indicators of primary mortgage market activity and their determinants for the region as a whole. The study compiles data from the 2002 HMDA and the 2000 U.S. Census to undertake a variety of analyses, including computation, assessment, and mapping of social-economic characteristics, as well as home mortgage origination, denial rates, and secondary market purchase rates by census tracts among sampled areas and population cohorts. Cluster analyses of social-economic and mortgage parameters show distinctive patterns of spatial clustering among tracts across the region. In observing these blueprints of spatial dependence, the study further undertakes a geographically weighted regression (GWR) to analyze spatial non-stationarity in the determinants of variability in neighborhood primary market loan denial rates for the year 2002. (More)

Three studies were conducted to analyze the relationship between public infrastructure investment and regional economic performance. The first study examines the literature on economic development and productivity growth. (More)

This research proposes to examine this and other ways in which the capacity of neighborhood organizations is impacted relative to community reinvestment activities. (More)

Although this study is based on correlational data, and no casual inferences can be drawn, this work takes an important step of providing empirical evidence to suggest a systematic link between certain aspects of resident appropriation and positive neighborhood outcomes. This work thus contributes to research on environment-behavior relations by providing some support for an important relationship posited by DS theory. Implications for DS theory and for public housing policy are discussed. (More)

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program was initiated through the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 with policy goals of promoting mixed-income neighborhoods and residential mobility. Prior evaluations of the HCV program find that HCV program recipients are residing in lower-poverty neighborhoods when compared to other low-income renters, yet yield mixed results in regard to desegregation and quality of neighborhoods. This study builds on prior evaluations of HCV program policy goals using a mixed-methods approach by examining the factors that predict residential mobility of the HCV program recipients and their residential outcomes in terms of change in poverty and change in racial composition in neighborhoods. (More)

This research explored how protection of health is being addressed at brownfields that are being redeveloped for residential uses. An inter-disciplinary literature review informed the research approaches that included: a context analysis of U.S. newspaper stories; a survey of brownfields practitioners on assessing and managing risks; and case studies in the cities of Elizabeth, New Jersey; Emeryville, California; and Trenton, New Jersey. (More)

The dissertation research that I propose will attempt to generate knowledge within social work and related disciplines that will help identify local institutions that can serve as facilitators of community collective efficacy. The purpose of my dissertation research is to examine whether church and civic participation among urban, predominantly poor African Americans is related to strong perceptions of neighborhood mutual trust and a shared willingness to engage in efforts to resolve the problems affecting their communities. (More)

The current economic expansion improved the economic conditions of many Americans. While there is evidence that minorities are sharing more equitably in the benefits of this expansion, many of America's inner cities, where minorities are concentrated, still suffer economically and socially from the deindustrialization of the previous decades. (More)

Existing research has shown that households consider differences in public school quality when choosing where to live (Jud and Bennett, 1986). A recent article in the New York Times entitled "Parent's Real Estate Strategy: Schools Come First" (July 12, 2010) finds that in New York City homeowners often hire an education consultant before deciding in which neighborhood they would be willing to purchase a home. However, current literature does not explain exactly how and to what extent a household's decision to move into a neighborhood is affected by school quality. Nor does existing research detail how changes in school quality influence that household's strategy for investing in renovating their home. Due to difficulties in the identification of the relationship between schools and homeowners, as well as the difficulties involved in obtaining the necessary data, these questions have remained unanswered. (More)

The process of globalization is fundamentally reorienting not only urban economies, but also urban political projects and the ways in which people think of cities as being connected to one another through trade, migration, communication and representation. (More)

My dissertation aims to take a broader and more contemporary look at this phenomenon, which will hopefully reveal a more nuanced, policy-relevant account. (More)

This dissertation analyzes nonprofit organizations that assist the homeless in 26 U.S. metropolitan areas from 1989 to 2002. The primary objective of this project is to explore how social and political context affect the interorganizational dynamics and distribution of homeless services. To achieve this end, I utilize a multi-method approach consisting of 60 interviews with executive directors, observations of city-wide task forces, and multiple sources of original time-series data on financial, operational, spatial, and network aspects of 4,765 organizations. These data provide analytical leverage to examine previously overlooked processes and the multilevel context of the sample offers methodological improvements over previous studies. (More)

This dissertation is about the making of American urban political culture and urban space in three decades after World War II. (More)

This study show that a city's adjustment to external shocks is significantly affected by the export prices of cities with similar industrial complexes and cities in close proximity. (More)

This study will examine two types of policies to limit in-home secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among subsidized housing tenants. First, voluntary home smoking restrictions (VHSRs), which households voluntarily impose on themselves will be assessed. Second, tenant support for mandatory smoke-free policies imposed by housing owners or managers will be assessed. Individual, interpersonal, social, and environmental factors associated with VHSRs and support for mandatory policies will also be identified. The study population is tenants in 1,000 private, project-based Section 8 housing units in Columbus, Ohio. Methods include a face-to-face survey with a probability sample of tenants, surface nicotine sampling, and focus group interviews. Results will be used to inform the design and implementation of smoke-free policies in subsidized housing. (More)

This research makes an important contribution to urban development policy by informing and refining and refining the criteria for assessing what constitutes successful community development. (More)

This dissertation explore why some battered women "stay put" (that is, evict their batterers rather than flee to confidential locations), and the process and means by which they establish home in the site-of-battering. (More)

"Suburban gentrification" of older, inner-ring suburbs is an emerging phenomenon that has the potential to transform American metropolitan regions. It may foreshadow shifts in household location patterns and changes in the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods, similar to the examples of classical gentrification observed in central cities. Gentrification is most visible through capital reinvestment in the built environment. This dissertation examines one particular type of reinvestment--the incremental, private sector, residential redevelopment process, in which older single-family housing is demolished and replaced with larger single-family housing. (More)

A significant proportion of people age 60 or older are living, and aging in place, in age-integrated multifamily housing developments. Multifamily housing is a major but largely unacknowledged and unexplored retirement housing choice of older people. (More)

This study seeks to identify the conditions and political activities that enable impoverished urban communities to become re-integrated into the urban economic system. (More)

This dissertation studies the relationship between a coalition member's financial or service commitment before and after the designations were announced. (More)

This research suggested that the co-location of Section 8 housing and brownfields in Cleveland, Ohio potentially compounds the blighted nature of distressed neighborhoods in a mutually reinforcing way. The concentrations of Section 8 households depress an already limited urban real estate market providing yet one more reason why the brownfields in central city neighborhoods remain unaddressed; and the brownfields further depress the real estate market in these same neighborhoods, thereby attracting residents who have the least amount of choice in their housing decisions. (More)

For my dissertation, I am exploring the various conceptions of and conflicts over a broad range of urban policies and practices that involved not only politicians, business leaders, and planners in the 1940s and early 1950s, but also engaged union leaders, working men and women, members of women's civic organizations, civil rights activist, and others who formed a series of grass-roots coalitions (however fragile and changing) in this time period. (More)

The proposed research is a sustainability-based assessment of the impacts of a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based program that uses greening as an interim management strategy for vacant land. I will use quantitative spatial analysis techniques to measure economic, environmental, and social justice impacts of the Vacant Land Stabilization program, which treats vacant land by removing debris, bringing in topsoil, planting grass and trees, putting up a split-rail fence and providing maintenance during the growing season. The analysis is shaped by the concept of sustainability, which posits that to be sustainable, development must incorporate and balance economic development, environmental preservation, and social justice. The research will measure impacts on surrounding property values and success of commercial corridors, air pollution mitigation and carbon sequestration, and access to greenspace for underserved populations and communities. It will assess the extent to which these impacts vary based on location and whether or not there are significant tradeoffs between potential benefits. (More)

From case studies and even casual observation, the characteristics of gentrified neighborhoods—and, by extension, the probably determinants of urban housing renovation—are easily identifiable. However, nearly all existing empirical studies in the literature have found that these characteristics (with the exception of building age) are insignificant as predictors of residential renovation. (More)

This study investigates the relationships between minority-owned and non-minority owned financial institutions in their lending patterns to lower-income and minority home mortgage loan applicants. (More)

This dissertation investigates the relationships between housing demand, mortgage demand, and demand for non-housing assets. (More)

In the past 15 years, we have seen an important transformation in concentrated poverty. The dissolution of large-scale public housing in Baltimore has resulted in great social turmoil and the displacement of the city's poorest and most vulnerable population, many of whom are youth. The vertical ghetto-the high-rise public housing development-has remade itself into the horizontal ghetto-the concentration of Housing Choice Voucher users in moderately poor neighborhoods. Federally assisted housing comprises 20 percent of the rental market in Baltimore, and Section 8 vouchers make up 5.4 percent, one of the highest rates of any city more than 500,000 in the United States. These "Section 8" neighborhoods are also characterized by extremely high residential churning, and by high rates of crime and violence. Will the social ills that plagued America's public housing over the past 30 years follow the poor as they relocate to new neighborhoods? It is imperative that we learn more about the neighborhoods families are moving to, the forms of social organization that exist there, and the consequences these contexts have for the young adults who grow up in these areas. (More)

The 1996 welfare-to-work altered social policy for poor families. My dissertation was designed to study the decline of state aggregate caseloads and individual work and welfare outcomes. By studying state aggregate data and looking at individual welfare-to-work transitions, I evaluate the incremental effects of the 1996 welfare-to-work law on reduced welfare dependency. (More)

This is a study of the effect of spatial mismatch, that is a lack of geographically accessible employment opportunities, on the employment status of blacks compared to whites and Hispanics in the Detroit, Atlanta, Boston, and Los Angeles Metropolitan Areas. (More)

The purpose of the research is to determine the potential impact of global climate change on the upper Rio Grande basin. Geographically, the study encompasses the Rio Grande basin upstream of its confluence with the Rio Conchos. (More)

This research studies inclusionary development statutes adopted in three New England states. The laws are intended to reduce suburban exclusion and increase the supply of affordable housing by inducing developers to build affordable housing as an integral part of residential projects. The research examines whether the laws have resulted in the creation of more affordable housing in exclusionary suburbs. (More)

The goal of this dissertation is to conduct the first comprehensive study of two major homebuyer tax credit programs recently implemented at local level and their replicability in other distressed central cities in the United States. The first program provides a federal income tax credit of up to $5,000 to first-time homebuyers in Washington, D.C., which went into effect on August 6, 1997, and will expire on January 2, 2002. The second program is a local innovation of Baltimore City that uses property tax credits to attract homebuyers into a targeted inner city neighborhood. (More)

Proximity to major urban institutions presumably generates positive and negative externalities that can contribute to, or detract from, a neighborhood's residential appeal. (More)

While the ongoing mortgage crisis has brought heightened awareness to housing problems nationwide - including foreclosed, abandoned, and vacant properties - the problem of housing abandonment is not new. Long before the current mortgage crisis, many large metropolitan areas were already grappling with the problems of housing abandonment and neighborhood decline. This problem, however, is no longer confined to older cities but spreading to small towns and suburbs across the country due to the recent foreclosure crisis. (More)

This study attempts to analyze decentralization, deconcentration, and metropolitan expansion processes over the period 1980-1990 by focusing on the transformation that is occurring at the metropolitan fringe. (More)

In the mid 1990s, Chicago embarked on the most ambitious urban planning experiment of its kind: The demolition of troubled Chicago Housing Authority (public housing) projects, and their transformation into smaller-scaled, mixed-income, private neighborhood developments called "new communities." Launched as a model for national public housing reform, Chicago’s controversial experiment has more recently drawn criticism for its considerable residential displacements and shortsighted expectations about the salutary effects of mixed-income neighborhood life. (More)

This dissertation analyzes Philadelphia’s Landlord-Tenant Court (L-T Court) within organizational and policy contexts. It identifies the factors that influence the outcome of private landlord-tenant trials, describes people’s experience of the courtroom from multiple perspectives, and analyzes the Municipal Court’s intraorganizational and interorganizational dynamics that inform L-T Court’s behavior. (More)

The purpose of my dissertation is to (a) establish the direct theoretical link between sustainability and the profession of planning and (b) determine the extent to which planners at the community level have integrated sustainability into their thought and practice. (More)

The original intent of inclusionary zoning (IZ) policies was to produce affordable housing with little direct public subsidy, while encouraging neighborhood integration and overcoming community opposition to low-income housing projects (Calavita el al. 1997; Calavita and Grimes 1998). Many of the justifications for a mixed-income affordable housing strategy stem from the belief that neighborhood racial and, more specifically, income integration provide positive social, economic, and political externalities (Cutler, Glaeser, and Vigdor 1999; Schwartz and Tajbakhsh 1997; Wilson 1987). Since the adoption of the first IZ programs in the early 1970s, the outcomes of these policies in relation to their initial objectives has been mixed (Schuetz, Meltzer, and Been 2009). While affordable housing has been produced in some areas, there has been little scholarly investigation on why and how the effects of IZ vary across jurisdictions. (More)

Audit studies of housing discrimination have focused nearly entirely on the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities. Much less attention, on the other hand, has centered on differential treatment by gender. Given what we know about gender broadly, gender inequalities in other institutional domains specifically (e.g., employment), and the gendered perceptions, meanings, and experiences associated with the home, gender discrimination within the housing context should be viewed as an important topic of research for both social scientists and public policymakers. (More)

The two central questions which guided this research are: Does the spatial mismatch between jobs in which youth are traditionally employed and youth's residence explain young black and Latino males' worse labor market outcomes in relation to those of their white counterparts in metropolitan areas? And, what is the relative importance, and their possible interactions, of the spatial mismatch and race in determining young blacks' and Latinos' worse labor market outcomes? (More)

This study shows how kin networks, parental monitoring, and housing mobility structure low-income adolescents’ engagement in risky and delinquent behavior. I use ethnographic data from a mixed-method study of a randomized housing experiment: The Three-City Study of Moving to Opportunity. The ethnography was conducted over 8 months in 2004-05 with 39 families, including 52 male and female adolescents (ages 11-23) in greater Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. (More)

A major community development challenge of the new millennium is to build and strengthen career paths for low-income workers in growing occupations, especially the technology-intensive jobs that increasingly predominate in cities. In the past, skill training, career ladders, and advancement opportunities for entry-level workers often existed within large, vertically integrated firms. (More)

This disseration builds on theories of policy innovation and diffusion by analyzing social networks as a contributing explanation for the diffusion of "targeted-investment zones" (such as enterprise zones, empowerment zones, and enterprise communities). (More)

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of race as a factor in the perpetuation of inadequate housing in the United States. (More)

This dissertation examines the potential of industry clusters as an economic development strategy for metropolitan regions and their central cities. The ultimate research question is whether or not industry clusters matter for economic development and, if so, how and why they do. (More)

This dissertation uses multilevel analysis to 1) investigate the prevalence and stability of racially/ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the United States and 2) examine how individuals evaluate residence in these neighborhoods. (More)

My research includes two case studies of divergent homeless populations, both conducted in the urban and suburban surrounding of the New York metropolitan area. (More)

During the 1990s, poverty increased significantly in U.S. suburbs; as of the year 2000 the suburbs became home to the greatest share of the poor. For the most part, what we know about suburban poverty is limited to demographic trends. This research seeks to move beyond these descriptive snapshots. Using Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb, as a case-study, three primary questions guide this research:

1. How is poverty socially organized and what is everyday life like for the suburban poor?
2. How is the social and economic life of the wider community organized around poverty in the suburbs?
3. To what extent are these neighborhoods economically, politically, and socially isolated from the broader metropolitan community?

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This dissertation examines the design of Hope SF, an innovative program in San Francisco that addresses both the physical decay of public housing properties and the social exclusion of public housing residents. Hope SF builds on the model of HOPE VI. Like HOPE VI, it attempts to remedy concentrated poverty and poor design by replacing class homogenous, dilapidated public housing sites with economically integrated, mixed-income communities. Projects achieve income diversity through increased density, phased development, and the one-for-one replacement of public housing units rather than the dispersal of residents. Because the program emphasizes integration, not relocation, every public housing family remains onsite. Service plans move public housing residents from their current condition of alienation and exclusion to their future as residents of new economically mixed neighborhoods. (More)

This doctoral dissertation analyzes the discursive constructions of community and place in Elm Valley, a multiethnic and multi-class urban neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Data include e-mails, conversation, meeting talk, ethnographic interviews, a grant proposal for public toilets, and a play about neighborhood life. (More)

Recent research has uncovered a new phenomenon in some distressed areas, Black gentrification. Black gentrification follows the same pattern as mainstream gentrification with one exception: In Black gentrifying neighborhoods, both the poor and working class residents who resided in the neighborhood prior to its "gentrification" and the new residents of greater economic means are Black. An additional hallmark of Black gentrification that distinguishes it from traditional gentrification is that Black gentrifiers in Black gentrifying neighborhoods often feel a responsibility or obligation to the their lower income Black neighbors. Prior to the economic downturn in the United States, some in-town Atlanta neighborhoods were undergoing Black gentrification. (More)

This dissertation examines New York City's efforts to establish a racially integrated public housing program from 1945 to 1975. It focuses on the struggle against the city's 1966 plan to construct a low-income project (housing mostly poor African-American and Puerto Rican families) in Forest Hills, Queens (a Jewish, middle-income neighborhood). I argue that the protests and political compromises that punctuated the Forest Hills controversy symbolized the failure of the city's integration policies and contributed to the decline and fall of its public housing program. (More)

For most households in the United States, the majority of their wealth or assets exist within the equity of their home. In the past decade, predatory lending has arisen as a danger to homeowners by increasing the threat of foreclosure and bankruptcy. Predatory lending is usually understood to have excessive terms or rates that are inappropriate, and so disadvantageous to borrowers that it is considered abusive. (More)

This study examines the California Redevelopment Housing Set-Aside program, which requires that all redevelopment agencies set aside and use 20 percent of their revenues to build or improve the supply of affordable housing in the city in which the agency is located. While some cities have used their funds appropriately, others have not. This research asks the question: "What explains the variation in city use of housing set-aside funds in Southern California?" (More)

This project hopes to address problems for a small neighborhood area, by developing a method of observation and recording of the experience of relative well-being as felt by people who reside in the area or visit it (More)

This research moves beyond preoccupations with deindustrialization, joblessness, and the urban “underclass” to examine the role that cities and urbanization in general have played in the reorganization of production and local labor markets. (More)

This dissertation will focus on social capital as a feature of neighborhoods. In general terms, social capital refers to features of social structure that facilitate the achievement of individual or collective goals (Coleman 1988). (More)

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This dissertation examines the shift currently taking place among community development corporations (CDCs) from a focus on the economic and physical revitalization of low income urban communities to more comprehensive approaches to community development. (More)

This dissertation investigates migration selectivity by socioeconomic status and its implications for community development and cumulative disadvantage for economically marginal places. In this thesis, I will examine incidence of "poverty migration" (Fitchen 1995) of poor families into areas experiencing economic hardship and decline, documenting the effect on the economic status and social service capacity of receiving communities. (More)

Land-use dispersion at the metropolitan fringe combined with deepening poverty at the urban core is intensifying the division between two discrete constituencies of mass transit. Public officials may not be capable of simultaneously luring suburban commuters out of their cards while maintaining good access to dispersing metropolitan jobs and other opportunities for transit-dependent people. (More)

Globalization is described as driving growing inequality and social polarization in the world's leading cities. However, rates and characteristics of income inequality, poverty, and homelessness show wide local variation. I use a combination of qualitative research strategies to examine how an understudied form of social mobility, the process of exiting homelessness, is shaped by conditions at various social levels. I find that conditions at the global, national, local, institutional, micro-social, and individual levels in Los Angeles and Tokyo combine and interact to shape the process of exiting homelessness. (More)

This study examines the culture of twelve sanctioned welfare recipients who reside in federally assisted housing across the State of Maryland. It also explores the self-sufficiency linkages between the Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) and federally assisted housing programs. (More)

Social capital is defined as features of social structure such as networks, norms, and trust that facilitate individual and collective action. Participation in associations and other groups are though to foster social capital, and social capital may facilitate the exchange of resources among organizations in the pursuit of affordable housing development.

Two overarching questions are addressed in this research. The first concerns the extent to which associations and collaboratives serve as sources of social capital and facilitate access to resources and production activity. The second question concerns understanding and identifying the role of social capital in accessing and mobilizing resources to produce housing. (More)

In this dissertation I explore the idea of "design" as a mechanism of aesthetic classification and control - what I call aesthetic expertise. This is to understand design not solely in terms of specialized knowledge, skill, or procedures, but as constituting relationships of power through claims to aesthetic or subjective authority. For this analysis I draw upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted among urban design faculty engaged in university-community partnerships. (More)

The objective of this dissertation is to answer these questions through the use of a theoretical model: Are enterprise zones efficient if adopted by high-unemployment areas? What are the effects of the EZ or tax incentives on the unemployment rates of areas? The research applies these questions to Ohio's enterprise zone program because of the policy debate in the various state enterprise zone programs regarding the zero-sum nature of such policies. (More)

Racial segregation in housing is a familiar feature of the urban landscape and continues to play a key role in race relations, urban politics, and economic and educational inequality. Past investigations of residential segregation have typically focused on Black-White dichotomies that exclude rapidly growing Latino and Asian metropolitan populations. Moreover, most urban segregation research examines broader metropolitan areas but fails to look at how community (that is, city and suburb) differences within these areas also contribute to overall neighborhood segregation. (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct research on how major urban revitalization initiatives affect cohesion in inner-city neighborhoods. It is undertaken with the anticipation that the results of the study will inform the community practice of social work as well as enlighten city governments, urban planners, community organizers, members of community development corporations and architects. (More)

This dissertation is a study of how "the public" has functioned in different periods of urban development. It traces the transformation from modernist liberal publicity to neoliberal publicity, charting the types of neighborhood spaces produced by these different modes of urban development. Both of these forms of development are found to be contested and ambivalent, combining elements of participation with elements of control. But they represent very different social, spatial, and political projects. Whereas the industrial, modernist public did seek to ameliorate some of the ravages of the urban capitalism, neoliberal publicity is increasingly aligned with the market-led development of neighborhoods as exclusive, unequal spaces. (More)

This study introduces, tests and demonstrates the efficiency of a methodology for improving post-census population and housing units estimates for Census Block Groups—neighborhood-sized geographical units of roughly 1,000 persons. (More)

This analysis uses intermetropolitan differences in quality of life to estimate the value that residents place on metropolitan amenities and disamenities in land and labor markets. Using individual-level data from the 1980 and 1990 Census of Population and Housing merged with metropolitan-level economic, social, and environmental factors, it estimates hedonic wage and rent equations to derive the value of amenities and disamenities for 257 metropolitan areas in the United States. (More)

The U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo versus City of New London (2005) dramatized conflict between growth-oriented government and individual property security. In this project, flexibility in the concept of private property helps political communities confront this tension and judge government power. A comprehensive study of Philadelphia's recent use of eminent domain for economic growth draws on observations, archives, and interviews. A quantitative overview of citywide practice combines originally collected data on eminent domain with the city of Philadelphia and U.S. Census data on properties and neighborhoods, showing that eminent domain has been largely uncontroversial though fairly common (approximately 7,000 properties and 400 development projects pursued from 1992 to 2007). (More)

According to recent estimates, there are more than 75,000 homeless elders in the United States today (Cunningham and Henry, 2007). Such numbers represent the failures of the aging and homeless service systems to meet the needs of the most vulnerable older adults in our communities. Further, the housing and aging literatures have paid little attention to elder homelessness (Gonyea et al., 2010). This study addresses a critical gap by bringing forth the voices of those on the frontlines to explore how older adults experiencing homelessness and their outreach workers define and mitigate problems associated with urban elder homelessness. (More)

This thesis explores community organizing by Community Development Corporations (CDCs), the different outcomes achieved by organizing campaigns, and the factors that contribute to their successes and failures. Among organizing outcomes, I focus not only on policy victories and physical or economic improvements to communities, but also on the ways that collective action produces changes in local political institutions. (More)

This exploratory study examined the application of the Transtheoretical model of behavior change to the welfare to work transition with public housing residents. (More)

My dissertation research will address conditions and experiences of white poverty in an urban setting and the precarious position of white working-class residents amidst economic, social, and political transformations. (More)

This dissertation research complements and expands the work of MCPI by looking at live/work situations in four neighborhoods of varying income groups in Milwaukee. This research is an in-depth study of the socio-spatial and temporal dimensions of women's based work in these neighborhoods. (More)

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires federally funded homeless service providers to participate in a homeless management information system (HMIS). While federally mandated, no one has examined how these technologies are being used. Theory and research suggest that the technology dissemination is contingent upon the organizational culture in which it is used. This study represents the first empirical analysis of HMIS use and explores the cross-level relationship between staff members' HMIS use and organizational culture. (More)