Nonprofit Organizations and the Local Politics of Immigrant Rights
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.
Forum Dialogue: Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era
Clarence Stone and Robert Stoker's edited volume Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City 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 growth and neighborhood improvement as complimentary. Recently, Timothy Weaver wrote a strong critique of Urban Neighborhoods in Perspective on Politics. Focusing primarily on Stone and Stoker’s contribution, the gist of Weaver’s review is that he does not see the same seeds of equity and prosperity in American cities that the book’s authors do.
The Equity/Economic Development Tradeoff in Cross-sector Collaborations
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.
Why scholars should avoid throwing out a 28-year-old baby with the bathwater
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.
Testing the Importance of Geographic Distance for Social Capital Resources
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.
Artists, Temporality, and the Governance of Collaborative Place-making
Work space for artists is becoming increasingly scarce in the city of Berlin. After the fall of the Berlin wall, artists were often welcomed in formerly run-down neighborhoods in order to creatively upgrade them, but their spatial presence in inner-city areas has undergone a transformation. Even though artists continue to play a crucial role in shaping the image and character of Berlin as a creative and open-minded place that attracts tourists, investors and new businesses, in times where both residential and commercial rent prices are rising and gentrification leaves visible marks all over the city, artists increasingly face the difficulty of finding affordable work and living space to pursue their creative projects.
Picking Winners: How Political Organizations Influence Local Elections
Endorsements are a part of most elections. In the urban and local context, they can come from other elected officials (National, State, and Local), Political Action Committees (PACs), and newspapers. Regardless of the source of the endorsements, the conventional wisdom is that candidates seek out endorsements because they believe they help voters make informed decisions. Despite their popularity during campaigns, we know very little about how local elected officials, PACs, and community leaders decide which candidates to endorse.
Speculative Charter School Growth in the Case of UNO Charter School Network in Chicago
The Obama administration emphasized charter schools as a reform strategy; early indications from the Trump administration signal a wholesale drive toward expanded “choice” options. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is now the highest-profile advocate for school choice, arguing alongside other proponents for liberalized regulation and financing for the expansion of charter schools. In their estimation, when parents are empowered to choose the school that best meets their children’s needs, schools are compelled to compete for students, and this marketplace delivers education efficiently and effectively to the public.
Can British Columbia be a Model for US Regional Governance?
Local government fragmentation in US metropolitan regions has been widely recognized as a critical problem with seriously adverse consequences impeding the ability of the region to engage in actions that would be beneficial to the region as a whole. Despite this recognition, the problem has proven nearly impervious to effective solutions, although partial remedies such as single-purpose regional special districts, inter-local agreements, and planning and discussion forums such as Councils of Government (COGs) and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) abound.
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.