In the past several decades, a growing body of academic and policy research has documented the deteriorating living conditions in our nation's public housing projects. Residents of these housing projects often live in areas of highly concentrated poverty that are associated with a host of negative outcomes, including high levels of unemployment, welfare receipt, teenage childbearing, and drug use (Crane, 1991; Jargowsky and Bane, 1991). Dissatisfaction with the physical and social state of public housing was the motivation behind the 1992 HOPE-VI Urban Revitalization Demonstration, which has provided $4.5 billion over 10 years to a) physically revitalize the most distressed public housing into mixed-income communities and b) to foster the self-sufficiency and empowerment of its residents (Senate Committee on Appropriations, 1992).(More)

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Policymakers are struggling to respond to the subprime mortgage foreclosure crisis in real time (Rosengren 2008). As the foreclosure rate continues to increase across the nation, the entire financial system, leveraged on top of subprime mortgage backed securities, is in crisis. While newspaper articles have focused on the losses that both investors and homeowners face, the majority of the academic, mostly economic, literature to date has posited two key reasons for the development of the foreclosure crisis: risky borrowers and falling real estate prices (Gerardi, Shapiro, and Willen 2007). While this analysis offers some value, it is an overly simplistic statement of the current problem. Conversely, another body of literature rooted in the perspective of community development practitioners and consumer advocates point to the critical role of bad lending and predatory lending practices disproportionately targeting minority groups in the current failure of the subprime mortgage market (Ernst et al. 2006; Holloway 1998; Holloway and Wyly 1999; Ross 1996; Schill and Wachter 1993). While there are valid points made in both of these literatures, there is a real gap in bridging these two arguments with the economists taking a "blame the victim" perspective, and the community development practitioners "blaming the industry." The result is that valuable information regarding the actual experience of the borrower is lost, and consequentially statistical modeling of borrower behavior and decisionmaking remains limited. (More)

Property tax is an important issue for local governments as well as property owners and renters. The hypothesis of this research is that rents in urban areas are higher because agricultural property is valued at a lower rate than residential property.(More)