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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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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)

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)

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)

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)