Homelessness as America’s “New Urban Crisis”
By Yetimoni Kpeebi (UNC Charlotte)
Homelessness in the United States has reached its highest recorded level in decades, yet governance responses remain overwhelmingly punitive. Drawing on critical urban theory, this essay frames homelessness as America's “new urban crisis.” By exploring the unprecedented scale of homelessness and the intensification of punitive governance, this essay shows that homelessness has shifted from a temporary social emergency to a normalized mode of urban governance in contemporary American cities. I conclude by arguing for a decisive shift away from punitive governance and toward housing-centered solutions grounded in the rights and dignity of the unhoused.
Decarceration and…?
Public Safety Realignment significantly changed spending behavior in California’s city governments. Taking changes in spending behavior as an indication of policy prioritization, I provide statistical and descriptive evidence that the design of the Realignment policies led city officials to de-prioritize enforcement when dealing with the policies’ effects. I use a policy feedback framework to explain why this happened. The provisions within Realignment that led to large reductions in the state’s incarcerated population also made local policy makers feel that increased law enforcement would lead to redundancy, thus exacerbating the “revolving door” problem in their local jails.
Do Sanctuary Cities Reduce Fear?
Fear changes behavior. Based on an original survey of Mexican undocumented immigrants in the United States, our research reveals that those afraid of deportation pull back from the most routine interactions of modern life — talking to police, enrolling children in school, visiting a hospital, even leaving a phone number at a restaurant. These are the small acts through which people participate in society. When fear suppresses them, the consequences ripple outward.
When Fewer People Looks Like Better Finances
In many small towns, public finances seem to improve at exactly the moment things are getting worse.
Fewer residents… but higher spending per person.
Fewer people… but more revenue per inhabitant.
At first glance, this sounds like good news. But our research shows the opposite: in many shrinking municipalities, these “improvements” are largely an illusion. Across Spain—and in many other countries—rural areas are steadily losing population. This trend is often discussed as a social or demographic problem. But it also has a less visible consequence: it changes how we measure and interpret the financial health of local governments.
Why Some Cities Go Further Than National Government Demands–and Others Don’t
When national governments make new policies, they often rely on cities to carry them out. But cities are not passive delivery machines. They have elected councils, local priorities, and their own understanding of what is needed locally. So, what happens when what the national government wants conflicts with what the city council has already decided to do?
Gentrification and Rising Rents May Worsen Black Residents’ Views of Whites as a Group
America's housing crisis has reshaped cities in profound ways. As rents have skyrocketed and affordable neighborhoods have become harder to find, higher-income residents have increasingly begun moving into historically lower-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods. This process, gentrification, has generated enormous debate about displacement, neighborhood change, and racial dynamics. But one question has received surprisingly little attention: how does gentrification affect the way Black residents feel about the racial groups moving into their neighborhoods?
When Cities Take Back Their Water, Who Really Gets a Say?
Cities that reclaim their water services from private operators tend to invite citizens into governance during the dramatic transition, then quietly push them out once serious decisions begin. This is the central finding of our comparative study of Paris and Naples, published in Urban Affairs Review: public ownership is not sufficient for public accountability, and participatory governance structures created to legitimize reform are routinely dismantled or emptied of meaning the moment civic actors start pressing on questions of budgets, hiring, and investment priorities. In other words, participation is welcomed at the margins, but becomes contested once it reaches decisions about how resources are actually allocated.
Size, Rurality, Peripherality and Mergers
Contrary to other countries such as Denmark, in the Netherlands local party systems shows signs of reverse nationalisation. Using data from seven municipal elections between 1998 and 2022, we observe that the Dutch local party system nationalisation index decreases considerably over time, meaning more independent local parties in the local council. We find that size, rurality, peripherality and mergers all have an influence on the index.
Why Mayors Matter
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, over 1.5 million people fled to Poland in a matter of weeks. Poland had no national integration strategy, no refugee camps, and very little experience managing large-scale displacement. Cities, rather than the central government, became the frontline responders and improvised solutions for housing, healthcare, education, and social support with minimal guidance from above.
Influence of State Planning Environments on Urban Sprawl
Urban sprawl has been a dominant feature of U.S. urban expansion over the past five decades. Sprawl has many well-documented negative consequences, such as the degradation of prime agricultural land, higher per-unit costs of land development and urbanized land and housing, higher municipal costs to maintain services and amenities, longer and more frequent travel distances in single-occupancy vehicles, and even poor health. Unsurprisingly then, many U.S. cities, regions, and states have tried to combat urban sprawl since the 1960s using four main approaches: state growth management laws, urban service area boundaries, local government regulations, and smart growth strategies.
San Francisco Residents’ Experiences in the Latest– and Largest– Public Housing Redevelopment Program in the US
Since its introduction in the 1990s, researchers across disciplines painstakingly analyzed HOPE VI, a public-private redevelopment initiative that transformed over 100 thousand units public housing across the United States while also displacing an estimated 250,000 residents. Despite it being adopted for the last fifteen years and being poised to convert four times as much public housing as HOPE VI, much less attention has been given to outcomes of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD program.
Inherited Homes and Urban Inequality
Homeownership has long been one of the primary ways families build wealth in the United States. But when families become homeowners through inheritance, the legal rules governing inherited property can introduce new challenges that threaten housing stability and wealth preservation.
Changing Notions of Urban Crisis
By Richardson Dilworth (UAR Managing Editor)
In this brief introductory essay I focus on articles on urban crisis published in the first two decades of UAR, leading up to the 1985 symposium, “Whatever Happened to the Urban Crisis?”, which included an introductory essay by Mark Gottdiener (1985) and three articles, by Eric Monkkonen (1985), Alexander Ganz (1985), and Irene Rubin (1985). I then provide a quick and admittedly incomplete overview of changing notions of urban crisis since that symposium to suggest that, despite healthy usage of the term in the decades that followed and the invention of new terms such as “permacrisis” and “crisis cities” that suggest some evolution in this particular framework, the framework itself has always been so malleable and potentially inclusive that its subject is not crises per se but rather how and why we might define things as crises.
Are Direct Mayoral Elections Holding Women Back?
Across Europe, women are steadily increasing their presence in local councils, yet they are still far less likely to become mayors. Our research suggests that the way mayors are elected plays an important role in shaping this legislative-executive gender gap. We conducted the cross-sectional time-series analysis using the original dataset describing women’s descriptive representation among local councils and local executives in 33 European countries. We found that countries where mayors are directly elected by citizens tend to have fewer women mayors compared to countries where councillors elect the mayor or the executive committee.
Can a voter-approved crime prevention district reduce crime?
Local officials face a stubborn challenge: public-safety gains can be fragile when budgets and political attention shift from year to year. Our new Urban Affairs Review study examines a practical governance tool that Texas communities have used to stabilize crime-control funding: Crime Control and Prevention Districts (CCPDs). The central takeaway is simple: cities that adopt CCPDs tend to see meaningful reductions in crime for several years.
Are Opportunity Zones Working?
When Congress created Opportunity Zones in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the promise was compelling: use tax incentives to redirect private capital into distressed communities that had been overlooked by investors. Seven years later, with the program recently made permanent by Congress in 2025, a crucial question remains: is it actually working? New research analyzing over 70,000 property transactions across the United States reveals that Opportunity Zones are delivering measurable impacts on real estate markets—with important nuances about where and how the policy succeeds.
When Cues Collide
In many city elections across the United States, voters face a similar challenge: they are asked to choose among candidates they know very little about. Ballots often list only names, not party labels, and local races receive little media attention. In these low-information settings, voters look for clues that can serve as “shortcuts,” or anything that will help them quickly decide which candidate to vote for.
New Books: The Menace of Prosperity
In this episode, we’re speaking with Daniel Wortel-London, author of The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981. In this book, Dr. Wortel-London chronicles how periodic economic crises have shaped New York City’s modern history — and how alternative strategies for sustainable, democratic growth are possible.
Reviving Living Wage Policies
As local leaders grapple with soaring housing costs, persistent inflation, and a tight labor market, living wage ordinances offer a targeted way to support low-income workers without waiting for federal action. With the federal minimum wage remaining at $7.25 since 2009, cities and towns have stepped up, but adoption remains spotty. A recent research note highlights that only 14% of the largest U.S. municipalities have enacted such policies, yet they could play a bigger role in reducing poverty and boosting local economies.
Which Neighborhoods Have Farmers’ Markets?
Farmers’ markets offer valuable resources not only to the people who shop at them, but also to the broader communities in which they are situated. They are an important source of fresh and sustainable produce, often surpassing the quality of food available at traditional grocery stores, and they frequently operate as gathering places that facilitate social interaction and cohesion.
This raises a basic and surprisingly underexplored question: Which neighborhoods actually have farmers’ markets, and why?