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)

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)

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 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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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)

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

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)

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 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 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)

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)

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

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)

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 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)

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)

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

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)