Once the primary leader in shaping a national response to housing concerns, the federal government has narrowed its housing agenda and reduced funding over the past several decades. In its place, the private and nonprofit sectors, as well as lower levels of government, have gained new responsibilities and provide a range of incentives for filling the widening gap between the housing needs people have and what the free market will provide to address them. Among these rising actors are state governments, who have created new programs and sources of funds to target specific state housing objectives.

This research seeks to fill several gaps in the existing knowledge of how states are responding to the diminished federal role in the housing arena. First, it links state approaches to housing with theories of policy innovation. Second, it does so through an analysis of the one specific type of housing agency common to all states - state housing finance agencies (HFAs). (More)

This dissertation explores the causes and effects of government intervention in two critical elements of housing markets: land use and finance. (More)

The 1980s and 1990s have seen the growth of new forms of housing, both public and private, that have been portrayed by their promoters as having the ability to build communities and increase social capital. The movement that has attracted the most attention is New Urbanism, which makes explicit claims that physical design can improve or build community. In recent years New Urbanist developments have proliferated in the United States and Canada, in both the private and the public housing sectors. In my dissertation, I study what effect New Urbanist developments have upon community building, both in the private housing market and in public housing's HOPE VI projects.(More)

The majority of Americans experience housing careers that are ascending in nature (Clark et al., 2003). This upward progression is achieved through tenure change, from renter to homeowner or through improvements in housing quality. For a smaller portion of Americans, the housing careers consists of housing sequences that do not lead to improvements in housing tenure status and quality over time.(More)

This study will describe immigration dynamics in HUD’s Renewal Community, Empowerment Zone, and Enterprise Community (RC/EZ/EC) programs and identify places where immigrant firms and targeted services contributed to revitalization. Is there a policy treatment effect of the EZECs compared to the rest of the county on entrepreneurship controlling for the jobs housing imbalance and longitudinal immigration trends? This study uses Heckman’s Differences in Differences approach to answer these questions with data from the National Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB), Integrated Public User Microdata (IPUMS) and other census products. Execs experienced a 4-percent increase in the foreign born holding other variables constant. The rate of native-born entrepreneurs in wage credit EZs increased 14 to 24 percent from 1990 to 2000 holding other variables constant (N=134). There is no significant change in the rates of foreign born entrepreneurship in any EZ from 1990 to 2000 after controlling for other variables. (More)

As one of the new planning approaches, the New Urbanism aims to address many of the ills of the current sprawl development pattern by returning to a compact and close-knit community development pattern. However, there are many debates about consumers' preferences toward New Urbanist neighborhoods. This dissertation develops a methodological framework for assessing the value of New Urbanist features for single-family properties in a neighborhood, and to apply the framework to evaluate the value of New Urbanist features on single-family housing prices in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. (More)

For many reasons, affordable housing remains at best only a small part of most New Urbanist developments. However, there exists a repertoire of methods, such as tax credits, zoning bonuses, and subsidies, to increase the amount of affordable housing created by developers. Further, there are excellent examples of public-private partnerships that have successfully produced affordable housing. How can New Urbanist communities be developed to include a larger affordable housing component?(More)

Recent congressional initiatives requiring the devolution of the operation of many social services from the federal to the local level, combined with the passage of Charitable Choice legislation that allows churches and other religiously affiliated organizations to compete for government contracts, has led to an increased need for research on faith-based social service providers. However, very little is known about the distinctive characteristics of faith-based social service providers or the extent to which these organizations will be useful in filling the gap left by the exit of the federal government from the direct delivery of many services. (More)

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is an important policy that is responsible for the creation of more than 1.5 million units of affordable rental housing throughout the United States (Abt Associates, 2002). Despite the magnitude of this program, research focused on the impacts of the tax credit in communities across the country is sparse. This study will add to the limited literature by examining one LIHTC product type: single-family, scattered-site detached housing in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, and its effect on the neighborhoods in which it is located.(More)