In 2015 the state of California ended more than 150 years of off-cycle local elections with the passage of SB 415, the California Voter Participation Rights Act (Anzia 2012; SB415). Aiming to increase turnout in local elections, the bill forced all California jurisdictions (like cities and school districts) to begin holding elections concurrently with statewide elections. SB 415 allows local governments to align their elections with either general or primary elections in even numbered years, resulting in variation across cities in the kind of concurrent election that they hold. This state level change in election law offers a unique opportunity to measure the effect of forced changes to election timing on voter turnout and voter priorities.

This research aims to examine how congregations form development partnerships and what successful planning strategies they utilize to gain city approval and accomplish affordable housing construction. Secondly, this research compares faith-based development planning activities to urban planning standards for project design and social integration. Thirdly, this article explores whether congregation members social networks were utilized to obtain support for the affordable housing project. I adapted survey items measuring forms of social capital mediated by organizations for civic engagement and political participation.

Integration, arguably one of the primary goals of the Civil Rights Movement, has become a topic of renewed interest among scholars as a means of promoting racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic equity in the United States. Dr. Elizabeth Anderson in particular argues that integration “consists in comprehensive intergroup association on terms of equality.” Conceptions of integration like this represent a more expansive understanding of integration than how most researchers measure it and likely how most of us understand it.

Housing choice vouchers — formerly known as "Section 8" — are the primary way that the federal government provides rental assistance to low-income Americans. Vouchers work through a three-way contract: low-income tenants pay a fixed portion of their income to a private landlord, and a local Public Housing Authority (PHA) pays the difference between what the tenant can pay and the fair market rent. An administrative challenge of this program is that some landlords may not want to participate, whether because of the red tape that comes with contracting with a PHA or because of stereotypes that voucher-holders are bad tenants. There is no federal prohibition against landlords simply refusing to rent to any tenant who wishes to pay their rent using a housing choice voucher.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation of people experiencing homelessness and what communities could do to protect this vulnerable subpopulation emerged as an area of particular concern. People experiencing homelessness are both less likely to be able to self-isolate or quarantine and more likely to suffer a severe case of COVID-19 due to underlying health conditions. In addition, local mitigation efforts in response to the pandemic may have negative, unintended consequences for the population experiencing homelessness.

Judging by rates of turnout and contestation in mayoral races across the roughly 2,500 municipalities examined in this study, it seems safe to conclude that there is room for improvement when it comes to the health of local elections in the United States. While turnout varies considerably, across the more than 10,000 mayoral races we investigated, it averaged only 43 percent, and almost half of all races (48%) were unopposed. Though these statistics seem rather pessimistic, our study confirms prior research, which finds that the most powerful predictor of turnout in mayoral elections is when the election is held . We find that irrespective of size or location, municipalities with off-cycle elections have turnout rates about 25 percentage-points lower than municipalities whose mayoral elections are concurrent with presidential elections. The good news then, is that a very promising means by which to significantly increase turnout in local elections is not only quite simple, but also clearly within the province of policymakers: changing the election date.

Commercial places are important amenities for any community. Communities and their residents need access to commercial places that provide core goods and services (e.g., retail stores, banks, grocery stores, restaurants). These place types, however, are often associated with higher levels of crime, though there is within-place type variability. In “Do Investment and Code Enforcement Mitigate the Criminogenic Effects of Commercial Places on City Streets?” we examine whether investment and code enforcement actions moderate the criminogenic impact of commercial places.

Do voters know what their municipal councillors actually do on council? And if they do know what their councillors are up to, does this knowledge help them keep councillors accountable? Issue accountability – the extent to which elected representatives are rewarded or punished by voters for their legislative actions in office – is fundamental to how we often think about democratic representation, but this form of accountability requires that constituents are aware of their representatives’ actions in office. To what extent do voters have this kind of awareness?

Our research focuses on the role of social ties in the development of civic norms within urban communities. Previous political science research finds that socioeconomic resources and “strong” social connections to friends and family members increase political participation. However, most interactions in urban settings occur between “weak” social ties who include neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers. Despite their potential importance, little is known about the political consequences of informal social interactions with neighborhood-based ties in shared urban spaces. How do these casual interactions with weak social ties shape political participation?

What do we know about horizontal governance relations at the local level? In general, local experiences exhibit two contrasting trends. On the one hand, there is a certain degree of local pragmatism by local governments in developing such relations, as non-public and private actors are key partners in the implementation of integration programs and the delivery of local social services. On the other hand, refugee integration has transformed small localities into battlegrounds with conflicts between pro-migrant non-public actors and local governments.

This paper contributes to the debates on housing supply efforts and the “missing middle” argument by examining the relationships between the share of metropolitan housing units in three types of compact transit-rich built environments and TOD housing rent. The census block groups of twenty-six U.S. metropolitan areas with intra-urban light, heavy, or commuter rail service were classified into six categories based on proximity to rail, housing density, and walkability: three rail-proximate built-environment types (high, moderate, and low density and walkability) and their three non-rail equivalents. Additionally, the studied metropolitan areas were grouped into three clusters based on housing and transit characteristics.

In our empirical study on “Radicalizing Spaces,” we examine whether disadvantaged neighborhood effects – operationalized in our case as susceptibility to radicalization – can be mitigated or even prevented by LSSOs. We focus our analysis on susceptibility to Islamist ideologies. The study was conducted in three German cities: Dortmund, Bonn, and Berlin. The survey was designed so that conclusions could be drawn about almost every district in each city. The topics of the survey focused on susceptibility to radicalization, participation in LSO services, and in-dividual attitudes and behaviors.

In this article, “Spotlighting the Economy: Media Coverage and Mayoral Evaluations,” Burke shows that local newspapers are opinion leaders in the cities that they serve. I demonstrate that local newspapers help citizens hold their local governments accountable for economic performance. While a great deal of political science research has found that Americans hold their national government accountable for economic performance, only recently have scholars begun to examine the relationship between economic performance and citizens’ support for their city governments.

This article contributes urban politics literature on local democratic practices by studying mayors in one region of the world – Latin America – who in the last couple of decades have gained more prominence as political actors. This is primarily because decentralization as a popular trend has given local governments much more power, authority, and responsibility. In many cities across the region, we can point to mayors who have used their authority to do important things, including opening the budget to new forms of participation and providing services that are tailored to local priorities. In this article, however, we emphasize the opposite problem: mayors who govern using informal political practices that might be characterized as undemocratic.

In this case study of university-driven gentrification in Philadelphia, I try to understand the extent to which gentrification driven by universities, or studentification, is related to the victories of progressive candidates and displacement of the Black electorate. Scholars of studentification have understudied its electoral impact. The analysis draws on census and voting data to examine the extent to which political wards that were once a stronghold of Black political power in Philadelphia have studentified, and whether studentified neighborhoods played a role in two elections that saw the unseating of long-time incumbents by progressive newcomers. In other words, this study is trying to get at whether studentification is correlated with political displacement of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the Black Worker”.

The redevelopment of Woodberry Down, one of the largest council estates in London, has been the subject of intense debate: touted in regeneration circles as a success story, critics have labeled it as yet another example of the pervasive state-led gentrification of London council housing. As we delved into the multifaceted story of Woodberry Down, we have uncovered a nuanced tapestry of victories and losses, forcing us to grapple with the question: is Woodberry Down an example of successful regeneration or is it yet just another casualty of “state-led gentrification”?

The “compact city” is one of the key responses of urban policy for tackling the pressing challenges that cities are facing, such as environmental sustainability, economic viability, and social cohesion. Nonetheless, understanding Japan's compact city policies requires considering the historical trajectories of past events and decisions made by policymakers.

This study analyzes the transformation of Kotobuki in Yokohama, Japan, from a day laborers’ quarter to a service hub using public choice and neo-Hegelian theories. It aims to address gaps in understanding the role of city government in welfare provision, which has often been overshadowed by the focus on civil society’s contributions. By conducting in-depth interviews with city government officials and civil society personnel, the study explores Kotobuki’s unique evolution into a welfare center through the lenses of these analytical frameworks.

The substantial influence of partisanship on voting behavior at the national level is widely studied and agreed upon. But to what extent does partisanship influence voting behavior at the local level? While some research indicates local elections may be similar to national elections in terms of partisan influence, there are reasons to be skeptical. Local elections typically are nonpartisan; even if they are not, issues may not fall neatly along party lines.

Recent hurricanes, floods, and wildfires across the United States highlight the devastating effect of climate change on individuals and households. Renters and households with low incomes are disproportionately exposed to and harmed by these disasters in many ways – but there are still open questions about the effects of these disasters, specifically on rents. On the one hand, disasters often lead people to leave affected areas, which may lessen demand for housing and lead to lower rents. On the other hand, disasters generally damage housing units, rendering some unusable, which may lower supply and lead to higher rents.

In the early 1990s, along the once-industrialized Mahoning River in Northeast Ohio, a small-town mayor faced a challenging set of forces when trying to solve local problems. With the steel industry long gone, the town’s future had been hindered by a series of low-level dams and industrial contamination in and along the river. These and other serious problems extended across the region – through other small, river-adjacent towns and nearby Youngstown.

While the COVID-19 pandemic was, first and foremost, a health crisis, it presented a profound challenge to local economies around the world. Day-to-day business was suspended, and employers were forced to adapt to rapidly evolving working conditions. An external, global pressure issued an abrupt shock to the economic system of communities. While certainly profound and currently the first-to-mind example of economic shock, it is just one of many global pressures that local economies have had to contend with. In the face of global forces, how do local economic practitioners react and empower their communities to shape their own economic destiny?

Eleven years after the official over turn of Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) in New York City there is still a debate about the appropriate ways for officers to interact with citizens on the street – and what information they have a right or obligation to record. How police stops impact citizens and their wider communities is of critical importance, but difficult to fully understand until long after policies have unfolded. However, within the bounds of privacy, detailed data on police actions and where they occur can provide the needed information to trace back how effective policy changes are and what consequences they have.

Amalgamations have gained popularity worldwide as important strategies for enhancing administrative efficiency and addressing a variety of governance challenges, including fiscal constraints, demographic shrinkage, and fragmented urban governance. This trend has also spurred a surge in empirical research to assess the actual impacts of such territorial reforms across diverse political and social contexts. One noticeable pattern that emerges from the literature is that small and politically marginalized units are often underserved after amalgamations, as a result of their diminished political importance in the post-amalgamated jurisdictions.

Economic disparities within cities and across regions have long posed challenges for policymakers aiming to revitalize struggling communities. For decades, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program has been a cornerstone of place-based investment strategies in the United States, offering local governments flexible funds to improve economic and social conditions in low-and-moderate income communities.

The struggle to revitalize America’s Rust Belt has been going on for so long that it’s hard to find anyone alive who lived during its heyday when it was the epicenter of American industrial capitalism. Today’s Rust Belt inhabitants work through a spiral of competing narratives, symbols, and collective memories of the past as they try to rehab and reimagine the present Rust Belt city. We call these cultural meanings place reputations, and the construction of new place reputations play a vital role in the Rust Belt’s urban regeneration.

After four decades of stalemated debates about privatization there is a newer and more refreshing conversation on the block: remunicipalization. Also known as “reverse privatization” and “insourcing,” remunicipalization refers to a process of returning services back to state ownership and management after a period of private sector control.

There is a distinct lack of good quality public toilets in public spaces in cities across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. With increasing numbers of unhoused people without access to private facilities, this is a growing concern. It is also an issue for anyone who wants to use public spaces, as everyone eventually needs a dignified place to go. Furthermore, the scarcity of quality public toilets disproportionately affects women, trans, and gender-nonconforming individuals, which impacts their mobility, safety, and health.

The share of women in Canadian municipal politics is just thirty-one percent—far from parity. Yet it varies widely across municipalities. What explains why sixteen percent of councils have no women on them while another sixteen percent have achieved gender parity? Such differences matter because research shows that elected women tend to prioritize issues that are distinct from men, contributing to better representation of many social issues. And young women who see themselves reflected on their councils are more likely to consider running for office themselves someday.