New on the Urban Affairs Forum

Gendered Gentrification in Hong Kong: The Role of Women in Shaping One of the Most Unaffordable Urban Housing Markets
Minting Ye and Igor Vojnovic | In a recent Urban Affairs Review article we explore how women have been impacting the social and physical upgrading of neighborhoods in one of the most competitive property markets in the world. In 2016, the most expensive apartment in Asia sold in Hong Kong for US$117 million, breaking the old record that was set in that city a year earlier. At the other end of the market spectrum, purchasing an entry-level apartment is also costly, with units as small as 163 square feet selling for $500,000. Being one of the most expensive global real estate markets ensures that space is at a premium. Micro-apartments ranging between 28 square feet to 40 square feet—a fraction of the size of a parking spot—are available across the city. Read More

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  • Order out of Chaos: The Case for a New Conceptualization of the Cross-Boundary Instruments of American Regionalism

    July 25, 2018 // 0 Comments

    David Miller and Jen Nelles | American regions are made up of interdependent local governments. Their interdependencies stem from the fact that many problems, opportunities, and issues routinely ignore and transcend the clear jurisdictional boundaries between neighboring cities, counties, and towns. Figuring out how to work across those boundaries has proved both elusive and a challenging.  That said, state and local governments have, over time, awkwardly, and with much experimenting, developed mechanisms of regional governance.   Read More

  • Sanctuary Cities: Attitudes Towards Collaboration Between Local Law Enforcement and Federal Immigration Authorities

    July 16, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Jason P. Casellas and Sophia J. Wallace | Due to the stall in immigration reform at the federal level, there has been a rapid increase in state-level immigration policies over the last 15 years. Some states pursued restrictionist policies aimed at limiting immigrants’ rights and increasing immigration enforcement, such as Arizona through SB 1070, while others have sought to expand and protect immigrant rights, such as California in declaring the entire state a sanctuary. During the 2016 campaign and in his presidency, Donald Trump repeatedly promised increasing restrictive immigration policies aimed at reducing the number of undocumented immigrants, massive deportations, building a wall on the U.S-Mexico border, and imposing harsh penalties on immigrants. Read More

  • Fiscal Secession (or How Local Special Assessments are Exacerbating Service Inequality)

    July 3, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Mathew D. McCubbins and Ellen C. Seljan | Local governments across the United States often find themselves needing to seek out new revenue sources, particularly in the face of state limitations on taxation.  Our research examines the usage of special assessments, a particularly popular, but understudied source of local revenues, in the state of California. Today, special assessments are commonly used to back local infrastructure projects and provide growing number of public services, from local fire and police protection to street maintenance and repair. Read More

  • Shifting Agendas: Private Consultants and Public Planning Policy

    June 27, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Orly Linovski | Urban planning is often thought of as a public sector activity, despite the increasing role and influence of private-sector consultants. Consultants are involved in many stages of the planning process, including undertaking policy reviews; creating long-range plans and strategies; and, designing and implementing public engagement strategies. Planning consultants often straddle the private and public spheres, working for both government and private clients. This raises questions about how private-sector planners balance competing goals, as well as the democratic legitimacy and accountability of the planning processes they undertake. While consultants have been involved in planning since the early days of the profession, the reduced capacity that many municipalities currently face makes it critical to examine the impacts that outsourcing and privatization may have on planning processes. For local governments that have traditionally seen planning as a public-sector activity, these changes can undermine both the public interest and the relationship between citizens and decision-makers. Read More

  • Running Local: Gender Stereotyping & Female Candidates in Local Elections

    June 19, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Nichole Bauer | The 2018 mid-term elections will be a banner year for women in politics. In fact, as many as 421 women could launch a campaign for a seat in the U.S. House. Even more women will run for office at the local level. In research recently published in Urban Affairs Review, I examined whether female candidates running in local elections will face a gender bias or a gender advantage among voters. Using two original survey experiments, I find that female candidates do not necessarily have an automatic advantage in a local election. Female candidates, however, will have an advantage when they emphasize positive masculine traits that voters value in political leaders. Read More

  • Public Housing Participation in Superstorm Sandy Recovery

    June 5, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Leigh Graham | In February in New York City, the Citywide Council of Presidents, an elected body representing over 400,000 tenants of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), took the unprecedented step of suing the agency. Resident leaders sought an independent monitor for the Authority, pointing to high-profile health and safety failures including a lapse in lead paint inspections with fraudulent reports to the contrary from the Chairwoman, Shola Olatoye, and sporadic heat and hot water during a frigid winter.   Read More

  • Urban Gathering Addresses Bottom-Up Politics

    May 21, 2018 // 0 Comments

    By Hilary Silver, Gregory Squires, and Clarence Stone | Partisan polarization and gridlock at the federal level have effectively obstructed the path to positive solutions to the everyday problems of ordinary people.  One consequence of this has been a proliferation of local initiatives, many percolating upwards from the very community residents experiencing these problems.  To collect, analyze, and advance such "bottom-up" innovations, the Woodrow Wilson Center's Urban Sustainability Laboratory, with the University Seminar on Bottom-Up Politics at the George Washington  University and the Metropolitan Policy Center of the School of Public Affairs at American University, held a a symposium on April 12, 2018, in Washington D.C.  The symposium grew out of a grant from George Washington University.   Under it a team of D.C. area scholars including Clarence Stone, Gregory Squires, Hilary Silver (all from GWU’s faculty), Blair Ruble and Allison Garland of the Wilson Center, and Derek Hyra of American University provided the planning and made the arrangements.  Before his failing health forced him to withdraw, the late Thomas Kingsley of the Urban Institute was an integral part of the early planning. Read More

  • Economy or Justice? How Urban Actors Respond to Diversity

    May 17, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Michalis Moutselos, Christian Jacobs, Julia Martínez-Ariño, Maria Schiller, Karen Schönwälder, Alexandre Tandé | In many European countries, "diversity" has become a common term in political and public life. In Germany, for instance, thousands of companies, administrations, and other civil society actors have signed a diversity charter. Recent governments have run campaigns announcing the diversity is good for German society (Schönwälder and Triadafilopoulos 2016). But what exactly is meant by "diversity"? Is this just a slogan that suits economic interests and obscures inequalities, as some critics fear? Or is "diversity" associated with more equality? And how widely do important actors in German society actually share the positive appreciation of diversity? The arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees has also been accompanied by more vocal anti-immigration mobilization. Read More

  • Racial/Ethnic Transition and Hierarchy Among Ascending Neighborhoods

    May 1, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Ann Owens and Jennifer Candipan | When neighborhoods’ socioeconomic status (SES) improves, does their racial/ethnic composition change? Is socioeconomic change also a process of racial/ethnic transition from minority to white? Often when minority neighborhoods are experiencing socioeconomic increases, residents and anti-gentrification activists perceive such a threat—that higher-income, mainly white newcomers will “invade” the neighborhood, potentially displacing residents and altering the neighborhood’s racial/ethnic makeup. Read More

  • Race and Legislative Responsiveness in City Council Meetings

    April 19, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Bai Linh Hoang | The local council is one important institution that provides opportunities for constituents to directly interact with their legislators.  In holding public hearings on specific policy proposals and reserving time for the public to comment on more general matters, city council meetings enable constituents to voice their concerns about community and municipal-related matters to elected officials.  However, we know little of the potential disparities in how legislators treat different racial and ethnic groups in these meetings.  Are there racial differences in the propensity of legislators to respond to and acknowledge a constituent’s concern?   Read More

  • Opening Universities as Global Urban Actors

    April 10, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Jean-Paul D. Addie | The relationship between the university and the city is evolving in an era of global urbanization. It is now a well-worn adage that we have entered an ‘urban age’ with more than half the world’s population living in cities. This epochal transition raises unprecedented opportunities for universities to mobilize their expertise, influence policy agendas, and assume critical roles as urban leaders on the global stage. Yet it also presents profound challenges for academic institutions, both in terms of changing expectations and functions of higher education and where in the world – and the city – university adaptions need to unfold.  Read More

  • Putting Culture On The Map: Media Discourse and the Urban Growth Machine in Koreatown, Los Angeles

    March 29, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Brady Collins | Over the last decades, culture has become an essential ingredient in the economic development strategies of cities around the world. In this context, the development and promotion of ethnic neighborhoods—e.g. Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Harlem—is a strategy for revitalizing diverse urban areas. The local newspaper is a key actor in this process: it represents and promotes a city’s cultural assets, and in doing so shapes the way readers perceive of different communities. Given the tastes and preferences of today’s young urban professionals, “hipsters”, and tourists--urban environments characterized by ethnic diversity, authentic cuisine, and unique cultural experiences--these representations have the power to attract new capital and residents to immigrant communities.  Read More

  • Taking a Risk: Explaining the Use of Complex Debt Finance by the Chicago Public Schools

    March 21, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Amanda Kass, Martin J. Luby, and Rachel Weber | For most of the 20th century, the municipal securities market was a sleepy backwater where governments went to raise money for roads, bridges, and wastewater systems. Most cities financed their infrastructure with debt that relied on conservative or well-seasoned market structures.  At the end of the century, however, local governments entered a period of “entrepreneurial” finance as federal support for urban development declined. In the years leading up to the global financial crisis, many US governments began utilizing new bond structures and riskier financial instruments to, potentially, lower borrowing costs. Read More

  • Nonprofit Organizations and the Local Politics of Immigrant Rights

    March 2, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Els de Graauw's new book Making Immigrant Rights Real: Nonprofits and the Politics of Integration in San Francisco unpacks the puzzle of how immigrant-serving nonprofits successfully navigate the many constraints on their advocacy to influence the local governance of immigrant integration. It focuses on nonprofit advocacy for immigrant rights in San Francisco, a traditional immigrant-receiving city with over 200 active immigrant-serving nonprofits, along with similar nonprofits in Houston, New Haven, New York City, Oakland, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. Read More

  • Forum Dialogue: Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era (Part 2)

    February 23, 2018 // 1 Comment

    Earlier this month we brought you the first part of a two-round dialogue between the authors of Clarence Stone and Robert Stoker’s (editors of Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City, 2015, University of Chicago Press) and Tim Weaver (University at Albany).  Their dialogue deals with important questions related to what it means for urban neighborhoods to be making economic, social, and political progress. Today, we have the second round Read More

  • Forum Dialogue: Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era

    February 6, 2018 // 1 Comment

    Clarence Stone and Robert Stoker’s edited volume Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City (2015, University of Chicago Press) featured research from an array prominent scholars of urban politics, policy, and planning.  Focusing on neighborhoods in Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Toronto, the authors collectively make a case that post-industrial cities are starting to change in productive ways, ways that see economic Read More

  • The Equity/Economic Development Tradeoff in Cross-sector Collaborations

    February 5, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Melissa Arnold Lyon and Jeffrey R. Henig | On a chilly October morning in Buffalo, New York, the Executive Director of Say Yes Buffalo sits at a table in a high school library with a group of about 20 community leaders. The group includes two local foundation leaders, the president of the local teachers union, a top school official, the vice president of a parent advocacy group, a few local higher education representatives, and a representative from the County Department of Social Services, among others. They gather for these meetings once every three weeks. On the agenda today is a discussion about inviting a representative from the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority to join this group, known as the Operating Committee of Say Yes Buffalo, as well as an update on programmatic data for initiatives such as school-based legal clinics, mental health clinics, mobile health units, and summer camps. During these updates, implementation challenges are discussed and the participants volunteer or call upon each other to figure out solutions. Not every issue is resolved, but the Operating Committee works together, argues a little, and eventually determines what it can accomplish.  Read More

  • New UAR Disasters Issue

    January 23, 2018 // 0 Comments

    In response to recent natural disasters around the globe, urban scholars have looked to the pages of Urban Affairs Review to understand the causes and consequences of these events. In a new Urban Affairs Review virtual issue, we highlight several previously published articles that explain the conditions under which voters have held local officials accountable for natural disasters and when they have not. Articles in Urban Affairs Review have shown how natural disasters expose the Read More

  • Why scholars should avoid throwing out a 28-year-old baby with the bathwater: Applying urban regime analysis to Switzerland

    January 16, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Sébastien Lambelet | Governing a city has always required some cooperation between public and private actors since both actors lack resources owned by their counterpart to govern effectively. This interdependence has been theorized in the late 1980s by Clarence Stone with the concept of “urban regime”. Simply defined, an urban regime is a longstanding coalition between the city government and some private actors that has defined a specific policy agenda and that has the capacity to mobilize the necessary resources to implement it. However, in recent time, the concept of urban regime has been heavily criticized by several American scholars who considered it unable to explain the increasing complexity of contemporary governance. By contrast, European scholars have increasingly referred to urban regimes since the concept allows them to take into consideration the declining role of nation states and the rise of neoliberalism that they observe in Europe. Read More

  • Testing the Importance of Geographic Distance for Social Capital Resources

    January 3, 2018 // 0 Comments

    Kirk Foster | Each one of us occupies a particular space in the course of our daily lives. We live in a domicile on a block that is situated within a specific neighborhood within a specific town or city. We move about that city as we go to work or someplace to volunteer – each occupy their own space into which we are incorporated. We have particular places that we stop for coffee to chat with familiar faces or shop for groceries. We may drop off children at daycare and discuss common issues with other parents. We may worship with a group of people who share similar values and experiences. My point is that our lives exist within both a social and geographic context. We cannot divorce the two. Our social interactions happen, in part, because of the geography we occupy each day.   Read More

  • Light-rail Investment in Seattle: Gentrification Pressures and Trends in Neighborhood Ethnoracial Composition

    July 31, 2018

    Chris Hess | Public infrastructure has always shaped patterns of metropolitan growth and residential segregation. Street-car lines, followed by highways, created important corridors from cities out into the so-called “Crabgrass Frontier” (Jackson 1985). New access to undeveloped suburban areas combined with government-insured mortgages with low down-payments generated vast opportunities for housing construction. However, through much of the 20th century “redlining”, discriminatory housing covenants, and exclusionary zoning maintained a system of residential stratification preventing racial and ethnic minorities from moving outward to burgeoning suburbs. Consequently, many urban neighborhoods became racially-segregated, faced disinvestment due to housing policy favoring lending to suburban contexts, and experienced increasing “mismatch” from suburban employment growth. Read More

What the Trump Administration Should Know About Cities

  • Enterprise Zones: The Zombie Idea That Just Won’t Die

    July 18, 2017

    By Timothy Weaver | The election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency has left many observers in profound shock and has caused great alarm in city halls across the nation. Not surprisingly, many analysts have emphasized the degree to which Trump’s approach to cities will involve a sharp break with the past. By contrast, I want to suggest here that, though change is indeed in the offing in some domains, in the final analysis the forthcoming urban policies introduced by Trump’s secretary of HUD, Ben Carson, will prove all too familiar. Rather than a brave new world, cities are likely to find themselves back in the 1980s, where cuts, privatization, deregulation, and pro-business strategies will be given a major fillip. It is important to note that such a state of affairs, while having most in common with the Reagan years, would prove less of a sea change from the Obama administration than many liberals would like to admit.

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  • No Sanctuary? The Consequences of Police Involvement in Immigration

    April 14, 2017

    By Nik Theodore | Immigration policy was a focal point of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which included a pledge to mass-deport millions of unauthorized immigrants currently residing in the United States. Cloaked in the rhetoric of law-and-order policing, the proposed deportations have been presented as a necessary first step towards reforming the nation’s immigration system.

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  • It’s Time for a Change: Rethinking Urban Policy in the Age of Trump

    March 22, 2017

    By David Imbroscio | Recent political developments in both the United States and Europe have been, to say the least, jarring. They should give us cause to begin a process of systematically re-evaluating many of our accepted orthodoxies in political strategy and policy development. Regarding the latter, the urban sphere is a critical, if not essential, place to start. For embodied in what we call urban policy lies a host of core values and assumptions regarding what has been the central political question since at least the time of Aristotle: Namely, what constitutes the nature of “the good society,” and how it might be achieved? Urban policy – properly understood – thus is best thought of as representational of all matters concerning the public interest, at least in the sphere of domestic affairs.

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  • Cities as Nodes of Resistance to the Trump Agenda

    February 22, 2017

    By Peter Eisinger | During the Obama years cities around the nation articulated or actively pursued policy initiatives at the vanguard of progressivism. Sometimes these policy commitments were entirely consistent with Obama’s agenda (green cities, gun control) and sometimes they went beyond (the $15 minimum wage, sanctuary cities), but in general the cities were partners with Washington in the progressive project. Many cities also embraced global trade, an Obama priority, seeing both foreign direct investment and export as crucial to local economic fortunes. As the Trump era begins, however, these various progressive and globalist initiatives and commitments will clearly put cities in stark opposition to the national government. Cities across the country—not simply on the coasts but also in the heartland—are already emerging as active or de facto nodes of resistance to the Trump agenda.

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  • Trump and Urbanism: Defending the Unwalled City

    February 14, 2017

    By Todd Swanstrom | Donald Trump ran against cities. During the campaign, he called inner cities “disasters,” implying that this was caused by flawed liberal policies. Trump’s negative portrayal of cities continued after the election. In his Inaugural Address he painted a bleak picture of “[m]others and children trapped in our inner cities, rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape,” and he decried “the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.”

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  • Infrastructure, Taxes, and Sanctuary Cities

    February 7, 2017

    By Michael Pagano | The 2016 presidential campaign rhetoric was laced with mischaracterizations of cities, even as we have come to understand the importance of cities and metro regions as the nation’s key economic drivers in the 21st Century. Yet, campaign rhetoric and the candidates’ statements do speak to an understanding of each candidate’s perspectives on cities and their connections to the federal government. Let’s take a look at three broad federal policy areas that will certainly be (or already have been) addressed by the Trump Administration and that clearly have a place-based dimension: infrastructure, tax reform, and sanctuary cities. Read More

  • The Promise and Perils of Education Reform

    January 30, 2017

    By Vladimir Kogan | Many early indicators suggest that big cities are unlikely to get much love from the incoming Trump administration. At an early January press conference, for example, the president suggested his administration would focus on rewarding “places that I won” — and most big cities backed his Democratic opponent by large margins, as they have done for many decades. In addition, President Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, not only lacks government experience but is also openly hostile to some of the agency’s programs and efforts. Read More

  • Our Metro Areas Have Become Engines of Inequality

    January 24, 2017

    By George Galster | America prides itself as the land of equal opportunity. Sadly, it is clear that equal opportunity is a cruel sham in a nation whose metropolitan areas’ neighborhoods and schools are increasingly segregated by race and class. Our metropolitan areas are rapidly becoming engines of inequality. Here is what the Trump Administration should know: Read More

  • What the Trump Administration Should Know About Cities

    January 23, 2017

    By Scott Minkoff | When we started the Urban Affairs Forum last year one of our goals was to become an outlet for scholars to offer thoughts about current events based on their years of expertise. Today we are launching our first (of what we expect to be many) Urban Affairs Forum Scholars Series. The topic: What the Trump administration should know about cities. Read More

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About the Forum

Urban Affairs Review is a peer-reviewed, bi-monthly journal focused on questions of politics, governance, and public policy specifically as they relate to cities and/or their regions. The Urban Affairs Forum is a space for leading thinkers about urban issues to share their research, ideas, and experiences. Visit us for insights on local and regional politics, urban governance, and public policy that are based in the research findings of our diverse community of scholars and practitioners. You can learn more about the Forum here.

 

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