Author's Blog: Urban Governance and the American Political Development Approach

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. When this article is available in OnlineFirst, a link will be included.

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Jack Lucas

http://poli.ucalgary.ca/profiles/jack-lucas

Urban political authority is complicated. To explain who governs our cities, we first need to acknowledge that our answers will vary across time: a city that looks like a beacon of pluralism today may have been governed by a closed elite only a few decades ago. We also need to acknowledge that political authority varies across cities: take a snapshot of North American urban governance at any point in history and you will find a range of political institutions, embodying widely varying authority structures, in different cities across the continent. Even within our cities, political authority varies across policy domains; authority structures in education, for instance, might look very different from those in policing or public works.

Authors' Blog: What Happened in Sandtown-Winchester? Understanding the Impacts of a Comprehensive Community Initiative

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. When this article is available in OnlineFirst, a link will be included.

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Peter Rosenblatt
http://www.luc.edu/sociology/faculty/peterrosenblattphd.shtml

Stefanie A. Deluca
http://soc.jhu.edu/directory/stefanie-a-deluca/

The death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 sparked unrest in Baltimore and drew international attention to issues of race, police brutality and urban poverty. Efforts to understand what happened have led some to look at Sandtown-Winchester, the poor and segregated neighborhood where Freddie Gray lived.  Two decades ago, Sandtown was the site of one of the largest community development efforts in U.S. history. Our article examines the long-term impacts of the Sandtown-Winchester Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI), which marshalled more than $130 million in public and private funding, and worked with residents to improve housing, employment, and educational opportunities in the neighborhood.

Author's Blog: The migration-development nexus in local immigration policy: Baltimore City and beyond

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. When this article is available in OnlineFirst, a link will be included.

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Felipe A. Filomeno

http://globalstudies.umbc.edu/core-faculty/#felipe

Challenging the plenary power of national governments over immigration, local governments have increasingly engaged in the control of immigration and in the integration of immigrants in host communities. Because most immigrants live in urban areas, local immigration policies are an important piece of the governance of international migration. They can affect international migration flows, the implementation of national immigration policies, and immigrants’ access to employment, housing and public services. In “The migration-development nexus in local immigration policy: Baltimore City and the Hispanic diaspora”, I offer a theory of local immigration policy that emphasizes the developmental efforts of local governments and immigrant communities.

Author's Blog: Ignorance Is Bliss: Information Sources and Attitudes about School Choices in New Orleans

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is available in OnlineFirst.

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J. Celeste Lay
www.jcelestelay.com.

In the last 20 years, school choice options have proliferated in many cities and states. No city exemplifies this move to school choice more than New Orleans. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, school reformers dismantled the low-performing school district and replaced it primarily with autonomous charter schools. As of 2014, over 90% of its public school students were in a charter school – the highest proportion for a major city in the nation. In New Orleans, there are no default neighborhood schools, meaning that parents must apply for admission and select a school for their children.

In this system, the information needs are high so that parents can understand the range of options and how to effectively express their preferences in a new and ever-changing choice process. This paper examines not only which sources of information parents are most reliant on, but also whether those who rely on more objective sources are more satisfied with their choices and more likely to enroll their children in higher performing schools than those who rely on sources with inherent biases

Author's Blog: A Strategic Framework for Building Civic Capacity

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is available in OnlineFirst. 

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Stephen Page, Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington

Wicked Problems and Civic Capacity

Cities today face various wicked problems that prompt fundamental disagreements and distrust within the body politic (Rittel and Weber 1973).  Land use, transportation, housing, education, and other complex issues confound policy makers’ abilities to agree on the contours of problems, much less devise and implement effective solutions that satisfy citizens.

Authors' Blog: “Us Up Here and Them Down There”: How Design, Management, and Neighborhood Facilities Shape Social Distance in a Mixed-Tenure Housing Development

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is available in OnlineFirst.

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“Us Up Here and Them Down There”: How Design, Management, and Neighborhood Facilities Shape Social Distance in a Mixed-Tenure Housing Development

Anouk Tersteeg

Homepage: http://www.uu.nl/staff/AKTersteeg

Fenne Pinkster

Homepage: http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/p/i/f.m.pinkster/f.m.pinkster

Despite the fact that social mix is an essential component of urban policies in Western Europe, it remains unclear at what spatial scale housing diversification programs may be most effective. When people with different backgrounds, household compositions, and lifestyles live in close proximity to one another, the emergence of close social ties is not always guaranteed. On the one hand, living in socially mixed environments may create bridges between residents of different social positions. On the other hand, it can lead to processes of social distancing and reproduce negative stereotypes. This article  explores how these diverging experiences of social closeness or distance may relate to place-specific factors that mediate everyday encounters and interactions such as housing design, management practices and the nature of local facilities and amenities.

Authors' Blog: Explaining ‘power to’: incubation and agenda building in an urban regime.

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is available in OnlineFirst.


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Explaining ‘power to’: incubation and agenda building in an urban regime.

Stefania Ravazzi is assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy, and Vice-President of the LaPo-Laboratory of Public Policy. Her current research focuses on urban governance and deliberative democracy. Her recent contributions on these topics were published in Métropoles and Journal of Public Deliberation. She may be reached at: stefania.ravazzi@unito.it

Silvano Belligni is professor of Political Science at the University of Turin, Italy. His current research focuses on urban governance and corruption. His scholarly publications have analyzed urban power structure, local élites, water policy, the theory of governance, and corruption mechanisms.

From the urban governance perspective, although not free from structural constraints, local actors can exercise a significant influence on urban policies and affect the life conditions of residents. Within this paradigm, the urban regime theory, developed from the works of Elkin and Stone, has placed the decisional power of urban policy-makers in the foreground. From the urban regime perspective, not only can local actors systematically affect the context through their public decisions but, in particular situations, stable and enduring governing coalitions can even change the whole consolidated policy mix of a city through the implementation of a new policy agenda. Stone has labeled ‘power to’ as being the capacity to promote and sustain new urban agendas and to foster great changes in the social and economic context.

Author Blog: The Formation of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Low-Income Immigrant Neighborhoods of Los Angeles

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is now available in OnlineFirst. 
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The Formation of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in Low-Income Immigrant Neighborhoods of Los Angeles

Wonhyung Lee

Assistant professor, School of Social Welfare, 

University at Albany, SUNY

Business improvement districts, or BIDs, are local organizations that aim to revitalize commercial areas. BIDs are self-help organizations in which property or business owners collect funds to improve and promote their retail corridors (Briffault 1999; Houstoun Jr. 2003; Hoyt 2005; Lewis 2010). The collected funds are used for street cleaning, beautification, or security reinforcement in a designated boundary. BIDs have clearly demonstrated benefits for promoting commercial areas over the last two decades. Large and small, BIDs have multiplied rapidly: from about 400 in 1999 to about 1,000 in 2010 across the United States (Cook and MacDonald 2011). BIDs are sometimes referred to as community improvement districts (CIDs), special improvement districts (SIDs), or special services areas (SSAs) contingent on the state legislature.

Author's Blog: Gender, Political Rhetoric, and Moral Metaphors in State of the City Addresses

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles.  This article is now available in Online First.

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Gender, Political Rhetoric, and Moral Metaphors in State of the City Addresses

Mirya R. Holman

Tulane University

Abstract: Politicians and leaders use metaphors and frames in political communication to provide citizens with meaning, persuade, and promote emotional reactions. At the same time, a large body of scholarship documents the propensity for female leaders to “speak in a different voice” when in political office. Research to date on policy metaphors, however, rarely compares male and female leaders’ use of metaphors or evaluates the use of these metaphors in local politics. Using State of the City addresses from sixteen cities to evaluate the connection between policy agendas, metaphors, and mayoral gender, I find that male and female leaders emphasize similar issues in their speeches, but use different frames to present these issues, with female leaders using more nurturing framing than do male leaders. In addition, while both male and female mayors emphasize economic development as the central issue in their speeches, female mayors use more inclusive framing in these discussions. 

Authors' Blog: Housing Choice Voucher Holders and Neighborhood Crime: A Dynamic Panel Analysis from Chicago

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is now available in OnlineFirst. 

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Housing Choice Voucher Holders and Neighborhood Crime:

A Dynamic Panel Analysis from Chicago

Leah Hendey,* George Galster,** Susan J. Popkin,* Chris Hayes*

* Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center, Urban Institute

** Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Wayne State University

2015

Efforts to “deconcentrate poverty” through the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program could potentially produce unintended adverse consequences for the neighborhoods into which HCV holders move.  The most salient concern expressed has been reputed upsurges in violent and property crime.  To date, there is limited credible evidence on this issue, as scholars must successfully confront two fundamental challenges. First, causation may operate in both directions.  In-migrating HCV holders could increase crime rates as many have speculated, but they may also be more likely to move to neighborhoods where crime is already increasing because rents are cheaper there and landlords may be more actively recruiting them there.  Secondly, any observed positive relationship between crime and HCV holders may be spurious if the growth of both in a neighborhood is caused by other (often hard-to-measure) neighborhood characteristics that are not statistically controlled.

Author's Blog: The Relationship between Population Size and Contracting Out Public Services: Evidence from a Quasi-experiment in Danish Municipalities

This is an author-produced blog post designed to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. This article is now available in OnlineFirst.

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The Relationship between Population Size and Contracting Out Public Services: Evidence from a Quasi-experiment in Danish Municipalities[i]

Søren Kjær Foged, PhD fellow

Department of Political Science

University of Copenhagen

E-mail: skf@ifs.ku.dk

1.      The relationship between local government size and contracting out is negative for capital-intensive services, and is positive for labor-intensive services that are difficult to measure and/or are regulated by a free choice market. 

What is the causal relationship between population size and the contracting out of public service delivery in local governments?  Robust results from this article show that the relationship differs across policy sectors: It is negative for services with high fixed costs, presumably due to scale economies, and is positive for services that are difficult to measure, probably due to more administrative and technical capacity in larger municipalities. Also, the effect of population size is positive for tasks in free-choice markets, presumably because private contractors find large free-choice markets more attractive.

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2.      The results make sense of existing research which have found mixed evidence for the relationship between local government size and contracting out

Results of the population size/contracting out relationship have been mixed. A survey of 21 studies conducted from 1986 to 2006 reported that nine studies found a positive relationship, five studies found a negative relationship, and seven studies reported mixed or insignificant. Since 2006, four newer studies found a positive association, while four other studies reported no or mixed results.

Analysis of the literature identifies two shortcomings in estimating the causal relationship between population size and contracting out. First, all studies measure the relationship by non-experimental cross sectional research designs, which often make the estimates vulnerable to threats to internal validity from unobserved variables and reverse causality. Second, only modest attention has been paid to sectoral explanations where the relationship between size and contracting out depends on the service in question.  This article addresses these two shortcomings by using the unique variation created by Denmark’s 2007 local government structural reform and by examining the relationship between population size and contracting out across nine different policy sectors.

3.      The results can be generalized to local governments outside Denmark  

The results are primarily valid for the Danish context and for a population increase from an average of 21,960 inhabitants before reform to 52,387 inhabitants after reform and with a control group with an average of 46,475 citizens. However, the findings can be generalized to local governments in other countries that produce similar services and operate within a comparable institutional framework. In fact, the reported negative relationship between population size and contracting out for services with high fixed costs supports the finding in a survey of 32 international studies that concluded that “studies that analyze just one service find more evidence that scale economies are a major [negative] source of privatization” (Bel and Fageda 2009)

4.      The findings are important for policy-makers that wish to change local government size since the effect for contracting out depends on the produced services  

The relationship between population size and contracting out in local governments is an important research topic since population size is thought to be a driver behind private contracting which, in turn, can have various implications for the cost and quality of publicly financed services. A main argument in favor of contracting out is that private suppliers expose public organizations to competition that can result in potential cost savings. However, contracting out can also lead to reduced service quality or be viewed as a step towards more fundamental privatization of public services (Blomquist 2004). Moreover, because population size presumably affects the production incentives of both municipalities and private suppliers, public authorities may wish to influence the level of contracting out, for example, by manipulating jurisdiction size.

5.      The findings show the conditional nature of the factors influencing privatization decisions and encourage more research in the politics behind privatization  

Besides local government size, the literature generally identifies three main drivers behind contracting out: fiscal stress, public preferences, and the power of interest groups. With respect to this broader literature, this article contributes to recent advances in the privatization field in determining the causal effects of the drivers behind contracting out. Furthermore, it contributes specifically to a growing academic interest in determining the conditional nature of the factors influencing privatization decisions by accounting for the conditional effect of population size due to different service and market characteristics. In a more general sense, it is likely that other drivers of contracting out also work differently depending on context-specific characteristics.

Such characteristics should probably not be confined to market and service features, but could be broadened to include the strength of interest groups within various policy sectors. For instance, the political clout of public employees and service users has been used to explain variations in the level of contracting out across policy sectors in Danish municipalities. Following this logic, the literature could start to further unpack the conditional effect of interest groups and for instance investigate to what extent market characteristics can be explained by the strength of various interest groups that prefer particular market forms.   

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[i] Acknowledgments: The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful comments received from Yosef Bhatti, Ole H. Petersen and Jacob G. Hariri as well as very constructive guidance received from the editors and five anonymous reviewers.

Authors' Blog: Housing and Household Instability

This is an author-produced blog post to introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. The Online First abstract can be found here. 

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Housing and Household Instability

Authors: Matthew Desmond and Kristin L. Perkins

Harvard University

Research attempting to estimate the effects of residential instability on children and adolescents commonly overlooks other changes within households that may be coincident with—and potentially more consequential than—moving.  Because the research on residential instability focuses primarily on its effects on children and adolescents and long has emphasized how moving may weaken familial bonds, which in turn may be harmful to young people, it is particularly important to observe the frequency at which residential or housing instability is accompanied by family or household instability.  Because instabilities may cluster in time, documenting the extent to which residential instability is accompanied by other forms of instability can inform future efforts to estimate the effects of moving and improve our understanding of how residential instability may or may not drive social and health disparities. 

Authors' Blog: Connecting Across the Divides of Race/Ethnicity: How Does Segregation Matter? - An Overview

This is an author-produced blog posts introduce upcoming Urban Affairs Review articles. The Online First abstract can be found here. 

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Connecting Across the Divides of Race/Ethnicity: How Does Segregation Matter? - An Overview

Authors: Joseph Gibbons and Tse-Chuan Yang

         Joseph Gibbons                                              Tse-Chuan Yang

Community Connection and the problem of diversity?

            The recent wave of urban conflicts, like that seen in Baltimore, makes clear the need for continued discussion on urban racial disadvantage.  To this end, the connections one has with their neighbors and a neighborhood itself, community connection, is a key venue with which to focus.  Research has shown that poor community connection leads to variety of social ills, such as higher crime and poorer health.  There exists an active discussion in city research as the effects racial/ethnic composition of one's neighborhood have onto their community connection. A long enduring belief is that racially diverse communities lack strong community connection due to inability of different community members to establish common ground.  As Robert Putnam once put it, people in these communities 'hunker down', avoiding close connections with those nearby.  However, there are raising doubts as to whether this dour assessment captures the full scope of how race impacts community connection.