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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)