Since 2013, protests opposing police violence against Black people have occurred across a number of American cities under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” We develop a new dataset of Black Lives ...Matter protests that took place in 2014–2015 and explore the contexts in which they emerged. We find that Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to occur in localities where more Black people have previously been killed by police. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of the literature on the development of social movements and recent scholarship on the carceral state’s impact on political engagement.
Who Represents the Renters? Einstein, Katherine Levine; Ornstein, Joseph T.; Palmer, Maxwell
Housing policy debate,
11/2023, Letnik:
33, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Owning a home profoundly shapes Americans' economic and political lives and preferences. A wide body of housing policy research suggests that homeowners receive favorable treatment from public policy ...at all levels of government. We know virtually nothing, however, about the descriptive representation of renters and homeowners. This paper combines a novel data set of over 10,000 local, state, and federal officials with administrative data on property records to assess the descriptive representation of renters and homeowners in the United States. We find that renters are starkly underrepresented by a margin of over 30 percentage points-a gap that persists across a variety of institutional and demographic contexts. Public officials are substantially more likely to own single-family homes that are more valuable than other homes in their neighborhoods. Collectively, these findings suggest deep representation inequalities that disadvantage renters at all levels of government.
St. Aidan's Catholic Church, built in 1911, sat in the middle of a relatively dense and highly desirable residential area in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was, among other things, President John F. ...Kennedy's childhood church and the site of his baptism. In 19999, the Archdiocese of Boston merged the shrinking parish with one across town and sought to redevelop the land to create new housing. About one year after closing the church, the diocese was working on a plan to raze the structure and build a six story, 140-unit residential building with 92 affordable units and 48 market-rate units.
Most studies of policy diffusion attempt to infer the processes through which policies spread by observing outputs (policy adoptions). W e approach these issues from the other direction by directly ...analyzing a key policymaking input—information about others' policies. Moreover, we do so by investigating policy diffusion in cities rather than states. Using a survey of U.S. mayors, more specifically, mayors' own lists of cities they look to for ideas, we find evidence that distance, similarity, and capacity all influence the likelihood of a policy maker looking to a particular jurisdiction for policy information. We also consider whether these traits are complements or substitutes and provide some evidence for the latter. Specifically, we find that, at times, mayors eschew similarity and distance to look to highly respected "high capacity" cities but that there is no tradeoff between distance and similarity.
“Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning” provocatively claims that the movement to eliminate exclusionary zoning is misguided, and will create a worse set of social, economic, and political conditions than ...those currently produced by contemporary land-use regulations. In this response, I present several challenges to this claim. First, I demonstrate that “Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning” misses the well-documented political harms wrought by exclusionary zoning. Second, I illustrate that “Rethinking Exclusionary Zoning” misidentifies the central problems and solutions proposed by scholars and policy makers comprising the so-called Anti-EZ Project. These advocates seek fair and equitable land use—not the elimination of all regulations—as part of a broader housing policy agenda to increase the supply of housing in places that need it. They do not view local land-use reform as a panacea to urban inequality.
Pushing the City Limits Einstein, Katherine Levine; Kogan, Vladimir
Urban affairs review (Thousand Oaks, Calif.),
01/2016, Letnik:
52, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Are city governments capable of responding to the preferences of their constituents? Is the menu of policy options determined by forces beyond their direct control? We answer these questions using a ...comprehensive cross-sectional database linking voter preferences to local policy outcomes in more than 2,000 midsize cities and a new panel covering cities in two states. Overall, our analysis paints an encouraging picture of democracy in the city: we document substantial variation in local fiscal policy outcomes and provide evidence that voter preferences help explain why cities adopt different policies. As they become more Democratic, cities increase their spending across a number of service areas. In addition, voter sentiment shapes the other side of the ledger, determining the level and precise mix of revenues on which cities rely. In short, we show that cities respond both to competitive pressures and the needs and wants of their constituents.
While experimental studies of local election officials have found evidence of racial discrimination, we know little about whether these biases manifest in bureaucracies that provide access to ...valuable government programs and are less tied to politics. We address these issues in the context of affordable housing programs using a randomized field experiment. We explore responsiveness to putative white, black, and Hispanic requests for aid in the housing application process. In contrast to prior findings, public housing officials respond at equal rates to black and white email requests. We do, however, find limited evidence of responsiveness discrimination toward Hispanics. Moreover, we observe substantial differences in email tone. Hispanic housing applicants were 20 percentage points less likely to be greeted by name than were their black and white counterparts. This disparity in tone is somewhat more muted in more diverse locations, but it does not depend on whether a housing official is Hispanic.
While the willingness of people to believe unfounded and conspiratorial explanations of events is fascinating and troubling, few have addressed the broader impacts of the dissemination of conspiracy ...claims. We use survey experiments to assess whether realistic exposure to a conspiracy claim affects conspiracy beliefs and trust in government. These experiments yield interesting and potentially surprising results. We discover that respondents who are asked whether they believe in a conspiracy claim after reading a specific allegation actually report lower beliefs than those not exposed to the specific claim. Turning to trust in government, we find that exposure to a conspiracy claim has a potent negative effect on trust in government services and institutions including those unconnected to the allegations. Moreover, and consistent with our belief experiment, we find that first asking whether people believe in the conspiracy mitigates the negative trust effects. Combining these findings suggests that conspiracy exposure increases conspiracy beliefs and reduces trust, but that asking about beliefs prompts additional thinking about the claims which softens and/or reverses the exposure's effect on beliefs and trust.
Many American cities are in the midst of a homelessness crisis. Through their control over zoning and land use policy, local governments can reduce homelessness by facilitating housing construction ...and improving housing affordability. Using administrative data and surveys of local public officials, this paper asks whether (and which) cities connect their homelessness and land use policies. We find that cities rarely link homelessness policies with zoning and land use. Cities in California and the Pacific region are generally more likely to make these connections, suggesting an important state role in guiding local homeless and planning policies. Cities with high and low levels of unsheltered homelessness show little difference in their propensity to connect land use and zoning policies with homelessness.
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