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.
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.
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.
Political Architecture: Contextual Development and Opposition to Housing
Over the past few years, the architecture of new apartment buildings has received significant attention. In particular, a style of new building sometimes called “fast-casual” or “gentrification architecture.” Many readers may recognize these buildings: blocky, generally black-and-white (although some come with neon pops of color), and unornamented. They’ve inspired countless debates, with critics calling them ugly and bland, or more creatively “Lego structures” and “oversized tin cans.”
Cultured Sites of Contestation
Across Europe and beyond, cities are reimagining abandoned military sites as vibrant cultural spaces. But what happens when the very institutions that support these transformations begin to commodify them? Our paper explores this tension by comparing two distinct governance models for culture-led regeneration of former military barracks, Metelkova in Ljubljana and Kasárna Karlín in Prague, which have both significantly enriched their neighborhoods through creative placemaking, demonstrating how culture can transform abandoned urban spaces into vibrant spaces.
State Preemption in Theory and Practice
Minimum parking requirements—zoning regulations that require a certain number of parking spaces to be built with new developments—come with a long list of downsides. The requirements increase the costs of development, reduce housing densities, subsidize car ownership, and reduce walkability. They also make it difficult to adapt and reuse historic buildings. In response, cities as diverse as Anchorage, Buffalo, and San Diego have reduced or eliminated parking requirements in recent years.
When do Local Governments Discriminate?
There is a long history of municipal governments worldwide passing resolutions, laws, and regulations governing discrimination and anti-discrimination. These cities are increasingly stylized as “human rights cities,” where municipal governments seek to protect civil rights of their residents: examples include sanctuary city movements, passing municipal versions of international law, and instituting laws to protect LGBTIQ citizens. In short, cities have emerged as a critical space for civil society to protect human rights, which is especially important given the increasing prevalence of repressive laws targeting minority groups in many authoritarian and backsliding countries.
Fundamentals of Solidarity
Coalitions amongst people of color are essential for building political power—particularly as resources and influence fall along lines of race and ethnicity. In “Fundamentals of Solidarity: Race Based Caucus Organizing in Houston,” I consider how Black organizers-built solidarity with each other and with the staff of Houston in Action (HiA).
Can Community Coalitions Unlock Equitable Benefits from Transit Investments?
Transit-oriented development (TOD) represents a promising form of development in urban transit corridors offering walkable communities, reduced car dependence, and enhanced access to opportunities. But all too often, the benefits of new transit investments are overshadowed by rising housing costs and the displacement of long-time residents and small businesses.
Reimagining Public Participation in Urban Development
Public participation is widely regarded as a cornerstone of democratic urban governance. Around the world, governments and planners have embraced participatory practices to involve residents in decisions that shape their cities. Yet much of the academic and policy discourse continues to frame participation as a state-led process, where the public is invited by government actors to engage in predetermined formats designed to improve plans, policies, and projects.
Wetland and stream compensatory mitigation as a funding vehicle for US public housing authorities
What if restoring polluted streams behind public housing complexes could directly fund new affordable housing? This innovative approach, explored in our recent Urban Affairs Review article, introduces public housing authorities (PHAs) to a unique opportunity to generate additional revenue by participating in federal "compensatory mitigation" markets. Through our study of the Durham Housing Authority (DHA) in North Carolina, we demonstrate pathways through which urban stream and wetland restoration can be financially viable, environmentally beneficial, and socially impactful.
Social and Political Pillars of Police Diversity
Police officers serve a public service role, as highlighted by scholarly literature on street-level bureaucracy. Thus, it matters whether police departments represent the social characteristics of communities. In socially diverse cities, police diversity promises to facilitate police–community interactions. However, to what extent are US police departments diversifying their personnel?
Do Canadian Municipalities Have a Hidden Ideological Pulse?
Are Canadian municipal politics simply about fixing potholes and managing traffic, or does ideology shape municipal behavior more deeply? In contrast to the U.S. and several other federations, Canadian municipal elections are overwhelmingly non-partisan. Fewer than one in five municipal officials run on party slates. This fact leads many to infer that Canadian city halls are free from the left-right ideological divide that exists at higher levels of government.
Which Local Governments Adopt New Technology First?
Emerging technologies, including real-time digital tracking systems, AI, and satellite imagery, can enhance public service delivery by enabling real-time performance monitoring, automating routine tasks, and improving the targeting of services. These tools also have the potential to support more responsive and personalized interactions with citizens, increasing both efficiency and trust in government institutions. Under what conditions are new and emerging technologies adopted by local governments?
Succession Planning for the Future of Intergovernmental Organizations in the U.S.
Intergovernmental organizations play a pivotal role in America’s regions in important areas like transportation planning, Area Agencies on Aging services, and economic development, to name a few. These organizations serve as conveners and coordinators among local governments in their regions and represent their members to state and federal agencies. Given their importance, how can they ensure continuity and sustainability during leadership changes or staff turnover?
Policing Now, Gentrification Later?
Aggressive policing has hidden costs. This study provides some of the first empirical evidence that intensified policing can lead to gentrification. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom about the causes of neighborhood change and offer a crucial lens to understand how law enforcement policies shape the places we live—sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.
As cities confront issues of inequality, racial justice, and housing displacement, studies like this reveal why rethinking public safety is not just about crime—it's about who has the right to belong in a neighborhood.