The decades-long expansion of law and order prison policies across the United States has led to historically high rates of incarceration and has had repercussions far beyond the prison walls. With more than 600,000 inmates returning back to their home communities each year, prisoner reentry reform has recently become as an important strand of penal policy innovation intended to address the barriers that former offenders face when returning home. Consequently, community organizations and corrections have been unified in an effort to assist former inmates. In the reorganization of the relationship between community and prisons that reentry requires, housing plays a central role. The success of reentry programs hinges on the establishment of workable housing scenarios that meet the needs of former inmates and of the surrounding residents who are asked to incorporate them into their communities. My study examines this process and the challenges and opportunities that are created by new reentry dynamics, specifically the challenges posed for these new rehabilitative programs by the lack of affordable housing. (More)

How did Northwest One become a ghetto? (More)

The purpose of this dissertation is to illustrate the effect that corporate political strategies have on a community's shift from extractive industry (coal mining) to a more sustainable economic base. My hypothesis is that the strategies that extractive labor communities evolve for coping with the decline of extractive industry and its consequences parallel the closed corporate community features elaborated by Eric Wolf (1956, 1957, 1986), including features such as shared power, economic egalitarianism, and a pronounced social integration of the community. (More)

This dissertation examines New York City's efforts to establish a racially integrated public housing program from 1945 to 1975. It focuses on the struggle against the city's 1966 plan to construct a low-income project (housing mostly poor African-American and Puerto Rican families) in Forest Hills, Queens (a Jewish, middle-income neighborhood). I argue that the protests and political compromises that punctuated the Forest Hills controversy symbolized the failure of the city's integration policies and contributed to the decline and fall of its public housing program. (More)

A major community development challenge of the new millennium is to build and strengthen career paths for low-income workers in growing occupations, especially the technology-intensive jobs that increasingly predominate in cities. In the past, skill training, career ladders, and advancement opportunities for entry-level workers often existed within large, vertically integrated firms. (More)

Despite the failures associated with the modern housing movement initiated during the inter-war period of the 20th century, the past 15 years have shown that government involvement in the production of affordable housing can be stimulating and beneficial. This study examines different aspects related to one such beneficial program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) initiated in the United States as a result of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. In particular, this research focuses on lease-purchase, single-family housing projects developed from 1987 to 2000 in Louisville, Kentucky, as part of the LIHTC program. (More)