School board elections have a reputation for being sleepy affairs—low voter turnout, minimal campaigning, and little media attention. But recent news coverage of school board elections in cities like Denver, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New Orleans seems to indicate heightened interest in these races: out-of-state donors are writing very large checks to support candidates and PACs in local elections. Many of the outside donors are very wealthy and some are billionaires, such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.

Like other post-industrial or legacy cities in the United States, such as Detroit and Cleveland, New Orleans has garnered attention for its boom in urban agriculture over the past few years. While the city has historically boasted a backyard gardening culture, along with a surge of community gardening movement in the 1990s, commercial and non-profit gardens became more prevalent in the years following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There were over 100 urban gardening and farming projects in the city as of 2014, with growers engaging in a wide range of agricultural activities from growing vegetables and flowers, planting fruit orchards, keeping bees to raising chickens and goats.

In 2013, El Paso, Texas took the sacrifices cities make in building sports facilities to new symbolic heights when it demolished its 34-year-old city hall in order to clear the land for a new minor league baseball stadium. El Paso committed to the project, not for the love of the game, but in order to anchor their downtown redevelopment, which included 85 projects receiving nearly $500 million in total from municipal bonds.

Globalizing cities in the emerging Asian economies are increasingly facing tough competition from cities within their countries to attract global investments. In this competitive national scenario, some cities are more successful than others in attracting global capital, even though they operate under similar macroeconomic and regulatory environment. This spurred me to examine the roles played by the local political actors in steering the economic policy directions of their cities. And also to find out, whether we can measure the political-economic characteristics of these newly globalizing Asian cities, through the same yardstick of the well established global cities of the Western world or do we require a new framework?

The relationship between the legislative and executive branches of local government is the key aspect of power in the Russian local communities. Formally the branches are equal and independent of each other. However local actors have natural aspirations for leadership and power since it can increase their capacity to govern and implement social and/or corporate interests.

Metropolitan sprawl is a well-studied, multidimensional phenomenon. Sprawling development patterns play a substantial role in taxing the resources and infrastructure of local governments, as well as contributing to global environmental externalities like climate change. Counties have become increasingly tasked with municipal-style public service delivery, including land-use planning.

Mergers of general-purpose local governments are a recurring topic on the agenda of national or regional governments in the OECD countries. From time to time, national or sub-national governments decide to reform the territorial structure of their local government landscape. These reforms usually consist of, or are accompanied by, territorial restructuring and municipal mergers.

In the United States, the differences in what a neighborhood can offer is stark. Some neighborhoods are full of amenities: safe and clean streets, high-performing schools, and abundant employment opportunities and services; other neighborhoods have high crime rates, failing schools, and are physically isolated form services and employment centers. Living in a good neighborhood can positively impact life trajectories.

Most people are familiar with endorsements in Presidential Primaries and other elections.  During election season, it seems we cannot go one day without an announcement about an endorsement for one candidate or another.  But what is an endorsement? An endorsement is a cue or a heuristic—a signal—and it conveys a lot of information. 

Investors played a large role in driving both the housing boom and bust. Investor related foreclosures were responsible for a non-trivial number of foreclosures, resulting in nearly 20% of foreclosures nationwide. Our recent study finds that neighborhoods with more foreclosed properties that were previously owned by an investor leads to short-term property crime bursts in communities.

It is no longer fruitful to treat cities and other urban places as special interests with special problems in order to successfully address many of America’s urban inequalities. Critical forces now shaping urban America overwhelmingly are found beyond it. Future policies should become more holistic in scope and purpose than in the past, treating urban populations and places as they are connected to America’s system of power and governance.

When I first read about the problems with Flint’s water system, I was shocked and angry, but I can’t say I was completely surprised. The Flint water case illustrates the dangers of treating declining and fiscally burdened cities as local problems to be solved at the local level. The Flint water crisis is just the most severe example of the impossibility of providing adequate city services in a policy atmosphere of austerity.