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
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?
Ingredients for Success
Recently, there has been renewed interest in engaging citizens locally. While political motivations vary, a common goal is to enhance participation and representation by creating formal bodies of community representatives to play an advisory role in policy processes. While these intentions are laudable, the best-intentioned reform can flounder if not designed properly. Yet there has been little attention to design, and in particular, to overcoming the challenges that confront the implementation of most participatory designs. This study contributes to this participation literature by illuminating how to design for more effective implementation.
New Books: We Belong Here
We interview Dr. Shani Evans, author of We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place, published in 2025 by University of Chicago Press. In We Belong Here, Shani Evans explores the dynamics of gentrification from the inside through a case study of Northeast Portland, OR, a historically black neighborhood. Drawing on a rich inventory of ethnographic fieldwork, this book unsettles some of the economistic determinants around gentrification scholarship and foregrounds the significance of race and racism in neighborhood change.
Should we Pursue Municipal Mergers?
Municipal amalgamation, the process of merging smaller administrative units into larger ones, has been a key policy tool globally to address issues like fiscal pressure, governance challenges, and urbanization. But do these mergers deliver the promised benefits? Our recent research provides a comprehensive review of the effects of municipal amalgamations, highlighting key findings that are essential for policymakers and citizens alike.
Housing Vacancy, Structural Decline, and Voter Turnout in South Korea
Vacant homes are often treated as a technical concern for urban planners or housing officials. They are discussed in terms of land use, neighborhood maintenance, or redevelopment strategies. Yet in many places, empty homes are also a visible sign of deeper change. They tend to appear where people are leaving, where local services shrink, and where the future of a community feels uncertain. In South Korea, this pattern has become increasingly pronounced. While much public attention focuses on high housing prices and speculation in major cities, a different housing reality is unfolding elsewhere, marked by rising vacancy in smaller cities and rural districts.
When Encampments Are Cleared, the Harm Spreads Further Than We Think
Across U.S. cities, homeless encampments are being cleared at an accelerating pace. These “sweeps,” “cleanups,” or “abatements” are typically justified in the name of public health, safety, or order. The harm to people living in encampments is increasingly well documented. What is far less visible is another consequence: the emotional toll these displacements take on the people who are tasked with carrying them out.
New Books: Making Sanctuary Cities
Tune in to hear from Dr. Rachel Humphris on her new book, Making Sanctuary Cities: Migration, Citizenship, and Urban Governance, published in 2025 by Stanford University Press. Making Sanctuary Cities investigates the complex policy frameworks that shape urban immigration and the politics of belonging through ethnographic and archival research on three cities: San Francisco, Toronto, and Sheffield, England.
New Books: Marked Men
In this episode, we’re speaking with Nyron Crawford, author of Marked Men: Black Politicians and the Racialization of Scandal, published in 2024 by NYU Press. Marked Men complicates the common perception that Black elected officials are forgiven for their transgressions because of the commitments and benefits made to constituents. Instead, Crawford demonstrates that “racialized suspicion” shapes the way Black voters rally to protect their embattled Black political representatives.
Measuring Gentrification with Mortgage Application Data
Our study presents a new approach to measuring U.S. gentrification at the census tract level. We utilize a popular public data set – the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Loan Application Register – and leverage it in an unconventional way. The premise of our study is that there is valuable information about household income levels contained within this mortgage banking dataset. More specifically, the mortgage application data can provide a window into the income levels of households who are seeking to move into a neighborhood. We develop several new measures that benchmark the income of mortgage applicants against existing homeowners in a neighborhood. In our study we show statistically significant relationships between these measures and more traditional gentrification over the 2010 to 2017 period. Furthermore, instead of using a binary measure of gentrification, our tool allows one to gauge the breadth and intensity of the gentrification forces occurring from homebuyer demand in a given tract.
New Books: The Power of Chinatown
Tune in for our conversation with Laureen Hom, author of The Power of Chinatown: Searching for Spatial Justice in Los Angeles, published in 2024 by University of California Press. In The Power of Chinatown, Hom draws on ethnographic fieldwork to explore how and under what conditions residents and business owners in LA’s Chinatown challenge and mobilize dynamics of gentrification and community change.