Whose Voice Counts? Uncovering Municipal Issue Publics
I recently interviewed a man I’ll call Henry. Henry cares deeply about road safety after his son died in a car accident. He sits on three local committees dedicated to improving road safety in his community, and road safety informs how Henry participates in politics and who he votes for. But is Henry unique? Are other citizens highly informed and engaged on one (or more) specific policy issues?
Want to Pay for Climate Policy Right Now? Look to Cities
Over the last year, the Federal government has waged a war on climate policy: from repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, to paying companies to kill offshore wind leases. At the same time, over the last few years, political scientists have pointed to local politics as a potential venue for progress on a number of policy issues, climate among them. The goal of my paper “Voters Support and are Willing to Pay for Local Climate Adaptation Policies” is to measure the degree to which Americans are willing to pay for climate policy at the local level, with a particular distinction between mitigation policy (reducing emissions) and adaptation policy (reducing the effects of climate change). Voters have reasons why they might wish to make progress on climate change, including implementing their green values, and lessening the impacts of flooding and heat. However, they also may have reasons why they might not wish to do so, including already high tax burdens, and the geographically diffuse benefits of climate mitigation policies in particular. The question of the extent to which individuals are willing to pay for local climate policies is an open one, and one with important policy stakes.
Housing First or Treatment First Interventions for Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorders among the Chronically Homeless?
After a decade of steady declines, since 2016 the number of chronically homeless individuals—both sheltered and unsheltered—has been inexorably and dramatically increasing. Perhaps most worrisome is the fact that unsheltered chronic homelessness is rising most rapidly, now registering almost 100 thousand individuals, almost twice the number as those in shelters. A nontrivial number of our chronically homeless population manifest substance use disorders and/or unresolved mental illnesses. This population is likely most disruptive of the civic spaces and neighborhoods that they frequent, challenging to house stably over the long term, and costly to the nation through high use of publicly funded health and criminal justice systems resources.
Goodbye to All That: The Rise, Dominance, and Decline of Machine Politics in Chicago
Dominic Pacyga is a distinguished urban historian whose books include American Warsaw: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Polish Chicago and Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made. The publication of Clout City: The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Political Machine, even had the book represented a synthesis of existing Chicago scholarship, would have been an important addition to the literature on Chicago politics. In fact, with Clout City Pacyga offers a distinctive, culturally grounded explanation of how the Cook County Democratic Party came to dominate Chicago politics. In a nutshell, Pacyga’s argument is that Catholic, working-class neighborhood culture was the magic sauce producing the sequence of Cermak, Kelly/Nash, and Daley machines that ruled Chicago from the 1930s into the 1970s. In Pacyga’s view, that Catholic, working-class neighborhood culture persisted in Chicago for a long century running from the post-Civil War era into the 1970s or 1980s, but it no longer represents a crucial shaper of the city’s political elites and governmental institutions. And as Catholic, working-class neighborhoodism waned (not least due to suburbanization), so too did the dominant Democratic Party organization.
Who Should Social Housing Be For? Towards a Redistributive Majoritarianism
When designing social policy, a central question is: who is this for? In figuring out who should benefit from social welfare policy, there are broadly two schools of thought. First, you have a targeted perspective, which argues that we social programs should only be for the neediest. There are many good reasons for targeted policy. It could be because you want to prioritize scarce public money, or you want to redistribute to the have-nots. The second perspective is the universalist one, which instead tries to make policy for everyone – or at least an extremely broad constituency. The rationale for universalism is that it reduces the stigma that often gets attached to policies for low-income beneficiaries, and it also broadens the coalition, making it harder to cut when political winds change. In our paper, we argue for a hybrid—redistributive majoritarianism—which attempts to create a majoritarian constituency while also creating explicit targets for the neediest.
Crisis, Violence, and Crime
By Tim Weaver, UAR Co-Editor
The “urban crisis” concept has been deployed by scholars, commentators, and politicians alike to interpret all manner of urban problems and, critically, to establish warrants for action (Weaver 2017). Though early academic work on the topic dealt principally with mundane issues, such as traffic problems (Vigman 1955), the upheavals of the 1960s soon gave rise to analyses of crises that focused on economic change, racial conflict, disorder, and crime. All these themes enjoy close attention in the four essays highlighted here that span the past half century.
Compelled to Coordinate: Understanding local inter- and intra-governmental coordination on environmental sustainability issues
Environmental challenges have never been more pressing for local governments to address. Intensifying climate change, resource disputes, and ecosystem disruption are increasingly being scrutinized and through a patchwork of local policy action. The environmental problems facing us demand immediate attention. However, the current policy landscape is, in many ways, poorly organized to accomplish this task. Local governments will need to engage in coordination if we want to tackle these issues more effectively moving forward.
Cities Say They’re Planning for Climate Equity. Are They Actually Doing It?
Climate change doesn’t hit everyone equally. Socioeconomically disadvantaged groups—particularly low-income communities and communities of color, often termed “frontline communities”—face the greatest climate risks while possessing the fewest resources to adapt or recover (Schlosberg and Collins 2014). As local governments have become key players in U.S. climate action over the past decade, many cities have explicitly integrated equity into their Climate Action Plans (CAPs) as a stated priority alongside emissions reductions and resilience building.
Bring the Middle Back In? Election Timing and Political Polarization
With political polarization threatening American democracy at almost every level, scholars, policymakers, and pro-democracy advocates have invested considerable time and resources in efforts to mitigate polarization, prevent democratic decline, and avert violent conflict. Despite these efforts, polarization continues to deepen, extending beyond Congress and national politics to state and local governments.
Anti-Black Urban Politics in America’s Wakanda
In 2020, it seemed that the United States (and the world) might be on the verge of significant structural change regarding racial justice. And Atlanta, a city with a Black mayor and Black majorities on the City County, School Board, and among the Police Department appeared poised to make substantial change in its urban policies. Then-Mayor Keshia Lance-Bottoms supported a movement to “defund the police,” diverting $73 million from the APD budget to social services and then-City Council member Andre Dickens authored legislation to close and repurpose the City Jail as a community resource center. But quickly, the political tides turned and instead, Mayor Bottoms announced the construction of the $90 million dollar Atlanta Police training facility, colloquially known as “Cop City.” The resulting theatre of events included domestic terrorism charges, protests, and the trampling of democratic norms. Intrigued (and appalled), I decided to investigate why Atlanta’s Black-led municipal leadership would suppress sustained activism against police brutality, preferring instead to embrace an escalation in militarization.
Multiple Dimensions of Urban Inequality
By Yue Zhang, UAR Co-Editor
Inequality has been a central concern in urban politics, with multiple dimensions ranging from institutional and territorial to economic and social. The four articles selected here collectively show that urban inequality is not produced by a single mechanism, but emerges through the interaction of institutional design, economic restructuring, labor market transformation, and differentiated citizenship across global contexts.
Meta-governing the Co-creation of a Green and Just Transition in Urban Areas
The accelerating climate and nature crisis and the political ambition to ensure distributed socio-economic prosperity call for swift action to create a sustainable future while leaving nobody behind. While global and national efforts to promote green and just transitions in contemporary societies are indeed crucial, they rarely consider the challenges that such transitions entail for local communities—and not least for those living in poor and devastated urban areas.
Invisible Debt and the New Urban Crisis
By Ang Liu (Rutgers University–Newark)
While urban crises are often understood through visible symptoms such as housing unaffordability, segregation, and infrastructure decline, the financial arrangements that sustain these conditions are easier to overlook. This paper explores the concept of invisible debt—debt displaced into separate entities, off-balance-sheet arrangements, and future revenue claims outside the core municipal budget. Drawing on comparative cases from Chicago, São Paulo, Dubai, and Chengdu, it shows that these arrangements differ across institutional settings but share a broader logic of fiscal displacement. Cities reorganize debt through quasi-public authorities, public-private partnerships, state-linked developers, and local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Ultimately, the contemporary urban crisis is characterized by the extent to which fiscal strain is deferred and fragmented, keeping immediate financial pressure out of sight while allowing deeper, long-term vulnerabilities to accumulate. The true vulnerability of the city remains off the books until the moment of reckoning.
How do Americans perceive cities, and why does it matter?
Americans tend to have strong feelings about cities. For many Americans, cities are almost not even real places at all, but mystical, foreign realms that represent and confirm their fears about crime, poverty, race, immigration, terrorism, and dozens of other social ills. Cities are not where decent, upstanding citizens live; they are simply a concentration of problems. Social scientists have recently begun to focus on the resentment of urban spaces and populations, especially among white Americans, and how this resentment affects political behavior and state decision-making.
Community Centered Research During Times of Crisis
Good research on cities hinges on collecting accurate information from diverse groups of people. For instance, the use of focus groups, interviews, and ethnographies can teach us a great deal about the nuances of urban communities. This can help researchers and policymakers think through important issues such as trust, cooperation, and the needs of a community that may not be reflected through survey research alone. My own research began with a single question: How do Black Chicagoans in Bronzeville, Greater Englewood, and Calumet Heights interact with institutions and neighbors they distrust to find solutions to police violence and community violence? This type of question requires deliberation, follow-up, and elaboration. In short, a qualitative research approach. Yet, what happens when a crisis shakes the ability to meet and build relationships with community members?
Revisiting the transportation crisis across America
By Christina Greer (UAR Co-Editor)
Over the past several decades, local municipalities have worked with (and against) state governments to increase funding for public transport. Issues of transportation reform- just exactly who pays for existing and future infrastructure, how technology is incorporated into updating systems, and how revenues should be redistributed- have served as roadblocks for local, state, and federal elected officials as they think critically about expansion, equity, and redistributive policies pertaining to transportation policy.
“The City Has Completely Turned Its Back On Us”
By Michele McLaughlin-Zamora (UCSB)
Los Angeles mutual aid networks (LAMAs) stepped up to provide critical aid and resources to the most vulnerable communities during and after the January 2025 wildfire crises and in the wake of extreme institutional failure. As this catastrophic climate crisis unfolded, cross-community direct action mobilized at an unprecedented scale to meet a wide array of everyday needs. Despite strong, vibrant, ethnoculturally focused political communities, regional power building has struggled to find wide roots. However, as the crises escalated, typically siloed communities united while institutions and elected officials made fundamentally flawed decisions, further endangering Angelenos in dire times of need. These governing failures are not a one-off case of crisis fumbling but indicative of L.A.’s intentionally diffuse governing landscape and historically racialized structure of policy and practice, roots of the ongoing urban crises. One year following the wildfires, LAMAs are in the process of building regional socio-political capacity in light of ongoing institutional insufficiencies and escalating polycrises, engaging in a grassroots “politics of refusal” and often on the front defensive line against the active rise in national authoritarianism. Within a critical environmental justice framework, critical political ethnography and digital ethnography help to explore the evolving regional community organizing power and political influence of LAMA hubs and their potential to move the region, and the nation, towards stronger urban sustainability and resilience.
Formulation and Evaluation of Two Citywide Gentrification Measures
One national concern is the lack of affordable housing. Among other challenges (such as homelessness), this deficiency encourages gentrification, a process entailing affluent newcomers flowing into lower-income, disinvested neighborhoods. These districts are often initially dominated by minority populations, while gentrifiers are usually White. Encroaching residents raise rents through their demand for homes, and increased rents financially encumber the incumbent, more resource-limited denizens. Additionally, many scholars, journalists, and activists assert that rising rents displace economically disadvantaged occupants. Gentrification also inhibits the entrance of lower-income households, a less visible but more pervasive concern.
Delivering the New Urban Crisis
By Isaac Oates (CUNY Graduate Center)
New York City’s 2021 legislation establishing minimum pay for app-based food delivery workers represents a significant recent effort to protect gig workers. This essay argues that the legislation is counterproductive: by raising pay without reclassifying workers as employees, it gave delivery platforms an incentive to extract more output per worker hour, shifting the cost of higher wages back onto workers in the form of greater strain and risk. Drawing on data reported by delivery platforms to the city under the 2021 legislation, the essay shows that between the second half of 2023 and the second half of 2024, deliveries per worker hour rose 75% while consumer spending per delivery stayed flat and platform gross profit per delivery fell only modestly, suggesting that workers absorbed the bulk of the mandate’s cost. The essay situates these findings within Richard Florida’s framework of the new urban crisis, arguing that Florida’s prescription of converting low-wage service jobs into family-supporting work cannot be achieved through wage protection alone when the underlying power asymmetry between platforms and workers remains intact. The New York case is not exceptional: platform companies have pursued analogous arrangements in California and other states, and a proposed 2026 federal rule would make independent contractor classification easier nationally. For this class of worker, the new urban crisis is not a failure of policy ambition, but a predictable feature of how platform labor markets distribute power.
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.