Public Service Provision and Urban Stratification in Shanghai
The interaction between public service provision of local governments and housing market can reinforce each other and polarize the socioeconomic space in this global city, Shanghai, even though the governance system is centralized instead of fragmented as in the US. Therefore, how to balance between different types of public expenditure within local governments has significant social and economic implications.
Coffee Shops and Street Stops
Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the concept of gentrification and how it has radically transformed neighborhoods and communities throughout America. Generally speaking, gentrification describes the transformation of areas of a city: from areas previously characterized by inadequate public services, low levels of private investment, and occupancy by poor or working class residents, to zones characterized by expanded public services, more private investment, and occupancy by well-educated, middle and upper class residents.
Hurricanes, Climate Change, and Urban Growth Machines
During this latest and most brutal of hurricane seasons, the real estate website Zillow.com offered that hurricanes typically had no impact on property values in the coastal areas most often impacted by such storms. Yet the website also cautioned that “Whether or not this holds true in the wake of Harvey and Irma remains to be seen.” Indeed, what ostensibly might affect coastal property values is not hurricanes per se, but rather the fact that increasingly severe storms are just one of the more obvious facets of the multiple impacts climate change will have on coastal communities.
The Local Autonomy of Canada’s Largest Cities
Canada has become increasingly urbanized through its history, and yet its system of urban governance have changed very little since Confederation in 1867; provincial controls on local governments in Canada remain among the strongest in the world. It is not inevitable that this situation will change, but it is indeed likely. Big city mayors are powerfully arguing for reforms to the structures of urban governance, and at various points in Canadian history there has been an appetite, or at least openness, to this agenda at the provincial and federal levels.
Why Urban Politics Should Pay Attention to Sheriffs (and Local Law Enforcement)
Sheriff Clarke has resigned his position as sheriff of Milwaukee. Clarke is famous for his wild comments and for his association and support of Trump. Clarke is not the only Trump-supporting sheriff to draw national attention. Joe Arpaio, who is a former sheriff, was pardoned by President Trump. Mixed reactions to this pardon have cast the spotlight on the power that sheriffs and law enforcement leaders have at the local level.
Cashing In On Distress
The finance industry plays an important role in shaping inequality. Private financial institutions determine, often in partnership with government, where to invest in housing, economic development, and infrastructure. These investments are often drastically uneven, fostering job growth and housing value appreciation in some areas and economic decline in others. One manifestation of this disparity is dramatic differences in access to services. While the affluent are able to build home equity and retirement accounts via access to “mainstream” financial services, the poor are disproportionately reliant on “alternative” or “fringe” services, such as check cashing outlets (CCOs), payday lending, and subprime mortgages.
What is “Neoliberalism”?
In the early 1980s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, urban policy and politics in the U.K. and the U.S. took a sharp turn towards markets, competition, and privatization. But while both the Thatcher government and the Reagan administration shared similar ideas about the causes of urban problems and about how best to tackle them, the differing institutional settings in which they operated shaped the timing, extent, and character of the changes they were able to introduce.
Is ‘Gaytrification’ a Real Phenomena?
City leaders have often suggested attracting gays to neighborhoods within their cities as a remedy for urban blight. A 2013 Slate column discusses the CEO and president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp who explicitly suggested that city leaders try to attract gays to Detroit to spur gentrification of decaying areas. The research literature suggests a few reasons why gays may act as “urban pioneers” who revitalize run-down areas close to downtowns. One proposed reason is that gays and lesbians may be willing to invest and reside in run-down areas to create welcoming communities in the presence of perceived discrimination elsewhere. In creating these enclaves, gays and lesbians renovate the aging housing stock and provide additional amenities to the region.
Welcoming Cities: Immigration Policy at the Local Government Level
Against the backdrop of increasing immigration dispersion and ongoing stalemate over federal immigration reform, many local governments have taken immigration matters into their own hands. While opposing approaches to undocumented immigrants (anti-immigrant policies versus sanctuary ordinances) are observed in many municipalities, a new type of local immigration policy has emerged recently, which shifts from a focus on the basic rights of undocumented immigrants to a recognition of immigrant contributions to community development: welcoming cities
Donald Trump is from America’s Most Diverse Neighborhood, How Did That Happen?
Queens, New York City’s second largest borough with nearly 2.3 inhabitants, is known as the beating heart of the city’s many immigrant communities. Once a collection of splintered garden districts, public housing estates, and industrial areas, the borough has grown enormously in the last fifty years. It is arguably the most diverse place on earth and the American torchbearer for tolerance and multiculturalism. It is also the place that brought the world Donald Trump.
Explaining Differential Treatment of Renters Based on Ethnicity
In Sydney’s highly competitive rental market, we were hearing anecdotal reports of rent seekers being treated differently according to their ethnic background. We designed an experiment to test whether these anecdotal reports reflected systematic differences in treatment. Using a method widely used in the US and elsewhere, in late 2013 we conducted a ‘paired testing’ experiment, which involved sending renters of Anglo, Indian and Muslim Middle Eastern backgrounds to rental properties advertised on a large real estate website.
Grocery Co-Ops as Governing Institutions
Grocery cooperatives dot the retail food landscape in cities across the United States. Most of these community-owned stores participate in an alternative food network that supports local farming, organic products and fair-trade goods. Many cooperatives are part of neighborhood commercial corridors. Those with a long tenure may be the most established, and largest, retailers on these corridors. These grocery cooperatives may play a crucial role in corridor governance, helping to convene other merchants to market the corridor, increasing visibility, sales, and corridor stability.
What Do Host City Residents Think about the Olympics?
Among the most common questions asked about the Olympics by scholars and the public alike is: “Why do cities want to host the Olympics anyway?” Our recent research shifts the question from the rationales proposed by elites to how local residents encounter the Games through its various stages from bidding to post-Games perceptions. Such a perspective is particularly important given the pressure that has emerged from local residents in recent years in bid cities that has frequently scuttled Olympic aspirations.
What 311 Calls (Cannot) Tell Us about Political Engagement
Let’s say that the last heavy rain left a pothole on your street significantly deeper, or that a streetlight went out right in front of your house.What do you do? Some of us stick to airing a few choice curse words when the car bottoms out or when we can’t see where we dropped those keys… but some call “311”, the non-emergency service request line that now operates in many cities across the US.
Can CBO's Alleviate Political Inequality?
The results of political inequality and disenfranchisement are becoming increasingly difficult for Americans to ignore. It is not just the horrific scenes of black people, almost always from poor urban communities, being shot by police officers on video. It is also the voices of despair and anger as well as calls for justice and reform that are heard after such horrendous events occur. Street protests, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and everyday people on social media platforms have shed light on the palpable sense of political and civic isolation that exists in many urban communities.
Why Do Some Foreclosed Properties Re-sell More Quickly Than Others?
The record number of foreclosures that occurred during the 2007-2009 financial recession was a cause of significant concern for low-income neighborhoods. Foreclosures were often found to be concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods, and foreclosures themselves have been associated with declines in neighborhood home prices.
Mayors, Partisanship, and Redistribution
In the face of federal and state intransigence, progressive policy advocates have increasingly looked to cities for innovative and aggressive redistributive policy. Recently promulgated local policies tackling issues like minimum wage and sick leave policies offer some preliminary evidence that urban governments are important players in this policy arena. Given their direct and indirect powers at the local level, mayors naturally play a salient role in pursuing these policies through agenda setting and other means. Despite mayors’ centrality in these issues, prior studies of local redistribution have not focused on their prioritization of redistributive policy and efforts to put it on the agenda.
How Cities Are Promoting Clean Energy and Dealing with Problems Along the Way
Cities are taking the initiative to promote environmental sustainability. They provide incentives for buildings and homes to go green. They adhere to smart growth. They design urban space in a way that facilitates the interactions of human, nature, and built environment. And their latest efforts are directed toward clean energy. Many cities are not only encouraging residents to use but also produce their own electricity through renewable sources. But the road to clean energy is not a straight path. It has twists and turns and many obstacles along the way.
Will New Light Tech Produce Safe Entertainment Districts?
How can we make our cities safe? Entertainment areas in big cities are places of fun but also of trouble. Thefts and fights frequently occur on these areas when people gather in masses and drink large amounts of alcohol. Police presence may help to enhance safety but is costly and may even have adverse effects. A large police presence may give people the impression that there are problems! For these reasons, cities are looking for innovative ways to enhance the safety of entertainment areas.
It’s Time for a Change: Rethinking Urban Policy in the Age of Trump
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.