The Involvement of Business Elites in the Management of Homelessness: Towards a Privatization of Service Provision for Homeless People?

Although the influence of local urban elites on urban planning is well established in urban studies and geography, the ways in which business and property owners take part in the management of homelessness has received far less attention. This article focuses on Portland (OR) in the United States as a means of understanding the motivations that underlie the role of the private sector and its impact on public policies. To this end, I focus on the support by Portland's downtown Business Improvement District of homeless outreach programs, and on the funding of two homeless shelters by business elites / philanthropists. I argue that although public authorities have different views on the actions to be taken to end homelessness, business elites often manage to bring initially-reluctant public authorities to support their projects in what might be termed a forced-march cooperation. I also highlight the versatility of the private sector and business elites’ participation in homelessness management, given that the outreach programs they support and the homeless facilities they fund provide services for the homeless while simultaneously removing them from visible public space. In this sense, the involvement of business and property owners is also a way for them to protect their own interests.

The Business of Improving Neighborhoods. A Critical Overview of Neighborhood-Based Business Improvement Districts (NBIDs) in Sweden

This article offers an overview of neighbourhood-based BIDs (NBIDs) in Sweden. Swedish NBIDs tend to appear in stigmatized residential areas engaging with pressing sets of urban issues that have been longstanding concern of social policy. Their overarching goal is raising property values in neighborhoods on the edge between urban decline and (re)development potential. Emerging in a neoliberalizing institutional context, NBIDs present themselves as correctives to public-policy failures by promoting property-oriented solutions. The adaptation of the BID model in the Swedish ‘post-welfare’ landscape, however, exhibits, and arguably exacerbates, the shortcomings found in BID elsewhere. Their opaque institutional structure and lack of accountability contribute to curbing democratic influence over local development, thus reinforcing spatial inequalities. We argue that the growing political advocacy for the institutionalization of the BID model in Sweden presents a new milestone in the neoliberalization of urban governance, as private actors are promoted to legitimate co-creators of urban policy.

Does an Increased Share of Black Police Officers Decrease Racial Discrimination in Law Enforcement?

Based on representative bureaucracy theory, the current study investigates whether increasing Black representation in police forces is negatively associated with racial discrimination in law enforcement. This study additionally investigates how associations may differ according to the organizational or environmental contexts of the forces. Results show that an increased share of Black officers is associated with decreased police-involved deaths of Black residents, but is not significantly associated with a change in order maintenance arrests of Black suspects. In addition, the negative association between Black representation and police-involved deaths of Black residents disappears when the percent of Black officers surpasses about 15 percent, especially in organizations where White officers comprise a larger share. These findings support the potential negative role of organizational socialization on the effectiveness of increasing the share of Black officers in policing, implying that additional long-term efforts to change organizational culture are needed to realize the benefits of enhancing Black representation.

Neighborhood Distribution of Unsheltered Homelessness and its Temporal Changes: Evidence from Los Angeles

Using the 2016–2020 point-in-time homeless count data, this study investigates neighborhood characteristics associated with the levels of and changes in unsheltered homeless population density in Los Angeles. The results show that unsheltered homeless people in the study area are heavily concentrated in and around the city center, and in neighborhoods with greater access to shelters and lower socioeconomic status. Notably, neighborhoods closer to the city center experienced a relatively large increase in unsheltered homelessness during the study period, implying a persistent spatial concentration of unsheltered homelessness. The results consistently indicate that residential land share, Hispanic resident share, and the number of bridges in the baseline year are significant predictors of relative changes in unsheltered homelessness in subsequent years, whereas access to shelters and poverty rates are not. This study’s findings provide several important policy implications that could potentially help prevent and mitigate unsheltered homelessness.

When Cities Borrow State Power: New York State's Empire State Development Corporation in New York City

Since the late 1960's New York State's Urban Development Corporation (UDC), now operating as the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), has been leveraged by New York City government to pursue large-scale projects. This paper examines two cases from New York City in which the city borrowed a state-controlled public authority's power to accomplish projects initiated at the local level: the case of Queens West, a development in western Queens, proposed in the early 1980s, and the case of Columbia - Manhattanville, an expansion of the Columbia University campus into Harlem, announced in 2003. These cases highlight how cities might, at times, embrace state involvement rather than lament its restrictions or rue its indifference. The study concludes by suggesting a theoretical path for incorporating such a city-state dynamic.

Local Government's Resource Commitment to Environmental Sustainability: Capacity, Conservatism, and Contractual Dynamics

Local governments are leading sustainability efforts through a range of initiatives, often voluntarily. While a spate of research exists to explain what drives these voluntary decisions, we are still limited in understanding how localities follow through with the resources to implement their adopted plans. This is particularly the case for environment and climate protection programs that are transboundary in nature and thus require more innovative and longer-term approaches than those that are relatively low-cost and easier to implement with future savings. This research examines local investment in promoting three of these program areas: air quality, biodiversity preservation, and ecological restoration. It investigates how local governments vary according to resource commitment and what factors explain those variations. We find several factors significant, including community capacity, political ideology, and institutional arrangements for service production and delivery. Variations are, however, found across different types of resource commitment, suggesting a more complex picture of local resource availability for advancing sustainability efforts.

Using Emerging hot Spot Analysis to Explore Spatiotemporal Patterns of Housing Vacancy in Ohio Metropolitan Statistical Areas

We highlight the use of a newer method—emerging hot spot analysis of space-time cubes from defined locations—for examining the spread of housing vacancy in large, Ohio MSAs. Using this method, we discovered that many Ohio MSAs concurrently experienced spread, contraction, and vacancy stabilization in census tracts located adjacent to, or within close proximity of, one another. These results indicate that vacancy proliferation is not solely a matter of geographic determinism, whereby high vacancy in one tract predicts high vacancy in neighboring tracts in future years. We also found that vacancy spread at the tract level is associated with population dynamics at the neighborhood, city, and MSA levels. Our findings suggest that vacancy reduction initiatives should account for population trends at various geographic scales, not just physical conditions within a particular neighborhood or tract.

School Segregation in the Era of Color-Blind Jurisprudence and School Choice

The decades-long resistance to federally imposed school desegregation entered a new phase at the turn of the new century. At that time, federal courts stopped pushing racial balance as a remedy for past segregation and adopted in its place a color-blind approach to evaluating school district assignment plans. Using data that span 1998 to 2016 from North Carolina, one of the first states to come under this color-blind dictum, we examine the ways in which households and policymakers took actions that had the effect of reducing the amount of interracial contact in K-12 schools within counties. We divide these reductions in interracial contact into portions due to the private school and charter school sectors, the existence of multiple school districts, and racial disparities between schools within districts and sectors. For most counties, the last of these proves to be the biggest, though in some counties private schools, charter schools, or multiple districts played a deciding role. In addition, we decompose segregation in the state's 13 metropolitan areas, finding that more than half can be attributed to racial disparities inside school districts. We also measure segregation by economic status, finding that it, like racial segregation, increased in the largest urban counties, but elsewhere changed little over the period.

You Won't be My Neighbor: Opposition to High Density Development

Virtually every city in the United States bans multifamily homes in at least some neighborhoods, and in many cities most residential land is restricted to single family homes. This is the case even though many metropolitan areas are facing skyrocketing housing costs and increased environmental degradation that could be alleviated by denser housing supply. Some scholars have argued that an unrepresentative set of vocal development opponents are the culprits behind this collective action failure. Yet, recent work suggests that opposition to density may be widespread. In this research note, I use a conjoint survey experiment to provide evidence that preferences for single-family development are ubiquitous. Across every demographic subgroup analyzed, respondents preferred single-family home developments by a wide margin. Relative to single family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic, and decreasing desirability.