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)

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 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)

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)

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

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)

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)