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 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)

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)

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)

"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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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 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)

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

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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)

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 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)

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)

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)