Download or read book Climbing Mount Laurel written by Douglas S. Massey and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-21 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close look at the aftereffects of the Mount Laurel affordable housing decision Under the New Jersey State Constitution as interpreted by the State Supreme Court in 1975 and 1983, municipalities are required to use their zoning authority to create realistic opportunities for a fair share of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income households. Mount Laurel was the town at the center of the court decisions. As a result, Mount Laurel has become synonymous with the debate over affordable housing policy designed to create economically integrated communities. What was the impact of the Mount Laurel decision on those most affected by it? What does the case tell us about economic inequality? Climbing Mount Laurel undertakes a systematic evaluation of the Ethel Lawrence Homes—a housing development produced as a result of the Mount Laurel decision. Douglas Massey and his colleagues assess the consequences for the surrounding neighborhoods and their inhabitants, the township of Mount Laurel, and the residents of the Ethel Lawrence Homes. Their analysis reveals what social scientists call neighborhood effects—the notion that neighborhoods can shape the life trajectories of their inhabitants. Climbing Mount Laurel proves that the building of affordable housing projects is an efficacious, cost-effective approach to integration and improving the lives of the poor, with reasonable cost and no drawbacks for the community at large.

Download or read book The University Next Door written by Mark Schneider and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges public comprehensive universities face today are expanding, they have been challenged to enroll and graduate more students, adopt new technologies that lower cost without sacraficing quality, and align program and curricular offerings with the skills that employers require. While these universities have a long history of adapting to change, today's environment will likely test the capabilties of even the most adaptive institutions. This volume assembles a team of experts from a variety of disciplines to examine both the history of the comprehensive university and what lies ahead. Overall, the book grapples with such questions as: How do these institutions adapt to serve the growing population of non-traditional students? How well do they prepare graduates for the labour market? Can partnerships between community colleges and comprehensive universities bolster student success? The University Next Door draws a much-needed attention to a set of institutions that has historiacally received little notice, yet play an important role in meeting our new attainment goals and helping the economy grow. This book: examines the role of comprehensive universities from start to finish, their history and future; uses empirical analysis to explore complex questions about which students choose these universities and why; explores how these institiutions might struggle under a federal ratings system such as the one proposed by President Obama; discusses how these institutions can better monitor the needs of the economy and better educate students to fill those needs; and provides recommendations to inform future decisions about higher education policy.

Download or read book Homelessness Is a Housing Problem written by Gregg Colburn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using rich and detailed data, this groundbreaking book explains why homelessness has become a crisis in America and reveals the structural conditions that underlie it. In Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern seek to explain the substantial regional variation in rates of homelessness in cities across the United States. In a departure from many analytical approaches, Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible statistical analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city—including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, generosity of public assistance, and low-income mobility—and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, housing market conditions, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, offer a far more convincing account. With rigor and clarity, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem explores U.S. cities' diverse experiences with housing precarity and offers policy solutions for unique regional contexts.

Download or read book Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation written by Margery Austin Turner and published by The Urban Insitute. This book was released on 2009 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past two decades the United States has been transforming distressed public housing communities, with three ambitious goals: replace distressed developments with healthy mixed-income communities; help residents relocate to affordable housing, often in the private market; and empower former public housing families toward economic self-sufficiency. The transformation has focused on deconcentrating poverty, but not on the underlying role of racial segregation in creating these distressed communities. In Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation, scholars and public housing officials assess whether--and how--public housing policies can simultaneously address the problems of poverty and race.

Download or read book Divergent Paths written by Annette Bernhardt and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2001-06-21 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The promise of upward mobility—the notion that everyone has the chance to get ahead—is one of this country's most cherished ideals, a hallmark of the American Dream. But in today's volatile labor market, the tradition of upward mobility for all may be a thing of the past. In a competitive world of deregulated markets and demanding shareholders, many firms that once offered the opportunity for advancement to workers have remade themselves as leaner enterprises with more flexible work forces. Divergent Paths examines the prospects for upward mobility of workers in this changed economic landscape. Based on an innovative comparison of the fortunes of two generations of young, white men over the course of their careers, Divergent Paths documents the divide between the upwardly mobile and the growing numbers of workers caught in the low-wage trap. The first generation entered the labor market in the late 1960s, a time of prosperity and stability in the U.S. labor market, while the second generation started work in the early 1980s, just as the new labor market was being born amid recession, deregulation, and the weakening of organized labor. Tracking both sets of workers over time, the authors show that the new labor market is more volatile and less forgiving than the labor market of the 1960s and 1970s. Jobs are less stable, and the penalties for failing to find a steady employer are more severe for most workers. At the top of the job pyramid, the new nomads—highly credentialed, well-connected workers—regard each short-term project as a springboard to a better-paying position, while at the bottom, a growing number of retail workers, data entry clerks, and telemarketers, are consigned to a succession of low-paying, dead-end jobs. While many commentators dismiss public anxieties about job insecurity as overblown, Divergent Paths carefully documents hidden trends in today's job market which confirm many of the public's fears. Despite the celebrated job market of recent years, the authors show that the old labor market of the 1960s and 1970s propelled more workers up the earnings ladder than does today's labor market. Divergent Paths concludes with a discussion of policy strategies, such as regional partnerships linking corporate, union, government, and community resources, which may help repair the career paths that once made upward mobility a realistic ambition for all American workers.

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book Generation Unbound written by Isabel V. Sawhill and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over half of all births to young adults in the United States now occur outside of marriage, and many are unplanned. The result is increased poverty and inequality for children. The left argues for more social support for unmarried parents; the right argues for a return to traditional marriage. In Generation Unbound, Isabel V. Sawhill offers a third approach: change "drifters" into "planners." In a well-written and accessible survey of the impact of family structure on child well-being, Sawhill contrasts "planners," who are delaying parenthood until after they marry, with "drifters," who are having unplanned children early and outside of marriage. These two distinct patterns are contributing to an emerging class divide and threatening social mobility in the United States. Sawhill draws on insights from the new field of behavioral economics, showing that it is possible, by changing the default, to move from a culture that accepts a high number of unplanned pregnancies to a culture in which adults only have children when they are ready to be a parent.

Download or read book Do Neighborhoods Matter written by Margery Austin Turner and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where we choose to live matters-not only for our own families but for the future of the metropolitan region as a whole. The neighborhoods in which we live not only affect our day-to-day quality of life, but may also determine our risk of being victimized by crime and violence, the quality of our children's public education, and our access to jobs, income, and wealth accumulation. At the same time, our individual location choices shape the social and economic geography of the urban region. One by one, families' individual decisions about where to live add up, determing the racial and ethnic composition of neighborhoods, the relative affluence of communities across the region, homeownership rates, house values, and the tax base of local governments. -- Introduction.

Download or read book Generation Priced Out written by Randy Shaw and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Generation Priced Out is a call for action on one of the most talked about issues of our time: how skyrocketing rents and home values are pricing out the working and middle-class from urban America. Telling the stories of tenants, developers, politicians, homeowner groups, and housing activists from over a dozen cities impacted by the national housing crisis, Generation Priced Out criticizes cities for advancing policies that increase economic and racial inequality. Shaw also exposes how boomer homeowners restrict millennials' access to housing in big cities, a generational divide that increasingly dominates city politics. Defying conventional wisdom, Shaw demonstrates that rising urban unaffordability and neighborhood gentrification are not inevitable. He offers proven measures for cities to preserve and expand their working- and middle-class populations and achieve more equitable and inclusive outcomes. Generation Priced Out is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of urban America"--Provided by publisher

Download or read book The Dream Revisited written by Ingrid Ellen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated? The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.

Download or read book The Voucher Promise written by Eva Rosen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines the Housing Voucher Choice Program, colloquially known as "Section 8," and the effect of the program on low-income families living in Park Heights in Baltimore. In a new era of housing policy that hopes to solve poverty with opportunity in the form of jobs, social networks, education, and safety, the program offers the poor access to a new world: safe streets, good schools, and well-paying jobs through housing vouchers. The system should, in theory, give recipients access to housing in a wide range of neighborhoods, but in The Voucher Promise, Rosen examines how the housing policy, while showing great promise, faces critical limitations. Rosen spent over a year living in a Park Heights neighborhood, getting to know families, accompanying them on housing searches, spending time on front stoops, and learning about the history of the neighborhood and the homeowners who had settled there decades ago. She examines why, when low-income renters are given the opportunity to afford a home in a more resource-rich neighborhood, they do not relocate to one, observing where they instead end up and other opportunities housing vouchers may offer them"--

Download or read book Social Mobility written by Lee Elliot Major and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-09-27 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the effects of decreasing social mobility? How does education help - and hinder - us in improving our life chances? Why are so many of us stuck on the same social rung as our parents? Apart from the USA, Britain has the lowest social mobility in the Western world. The lack of movement in who gets where in society - particularly when people are stuck at the bottom and the top - costs the nation dear, both in terms of the unfulfilled talents of those left behind and an increasingly detached elite, disinterested in improvements that benefit the rest of society. This book analyses cutting-edge research into how social mobility has changed in Britain over the years, the shifting role of schools and universities in creating a fairer future, and the key to what makes some countries and regions so much richer in opportunities, bringing a clearer understanding of what works and how we can better shape our future.

Download or read book Creating the Urban Dream written by Clay Grubb and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For generations, homeownership has been an avenue to a better life. But discriminatory policies left many people out, and today's trend of rising home prices continues to put housing beyond the reach of significant sectors of the workforce. This is particularly true in America's urban centers, where a shortage of affordable housing is stifling social and economic mobility. We must face this problem with a balance of compassion and competence. The solution will require the efforts of many--including the public sector, private developers, financial institutions, and community leaders--all working together to find creative solutions rather than relying on the policies of the past. In Creating the Urban Dream, Clay Grubb shares the strategic focus of his decades-long career: how to provide good homes for the many people who need them and create dynamic neighborhoods where they can better their lives. Investing in the future through secure, affordable housing will be our country's challenge for many years to come--and a huge opportunity for those who will join in helping to solve it.

Download or read book Consequences of Growing Up Poor written by Greg J. Duncan and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1997-06-19 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One in five American children now live in families with incomes below the povertyline, and their prospects are not bright. Low income is statistically linked with a variety of poor outcomes for children, from low birth weight and poor nutrition in infancy to increased chances of academic failure, emotional distress, and unwed childbirth in adolescence. To address these problems it is not enough to know that money makes a difference; we need to understand how. Consequences of Growing Up Poor is an extensive and illuminating examination of the paths through which economic deprivation damages children at all stages of their development. In Consequences of Growing Up Poor, developmental psychologists, economists, and sociologists revisit a large body of studies to answer specific questions about how low income puts children at risk intellectually, emotionally, and physically. Many of their investigations demonstrate that although income clearly creates disadvantages, it does so selectively and in a wide variety of ways. Low-income preschoolers exhibit poorer cognitive and verbal skills because they are generally exposed to fewer toys, books, and other stimulating experiences in the home. Poor parents also tend to rely on home-based child care, where the quality and amount of attention children receive is inferior to that of professional facilities. In later years, conflict between economically stressed parents increases anxiety and weakens self-esteem in their teenaged children. Although they share economic hardships, the home lives of poor children are not homogenous. Consequences of Growing Up Poor investigates whether such family conditions as the marital status, education, and involvement of parents mitigate the ill effects of poverty. Consequences of Growing Up Poor also looks at the importance of timing: Does being poor have a different impact on preschoolers, children, and adolescents? When are children most vulnerable to poverty? Some contributors find that poverty in the prenatal or early childhood years appears to be particularly detrimental to cognitive development and physical health. Others offer evidence that lower income has a stronger negative effect during adolescence than in childhood or adulthood. Based on their findings, the editors and contributors to Consequences of Growing Up Poor recommend more sharply focused child welfare policies targeted to specific eras and conditions of poor children's lives. They also weigh the relative need for income supplements, child care subsidies, and home interventions. Consequences of Growing Up Poor describes the extent and causes of hardships for poor children, defines the interaction between income and family, and offers solutions to improve young lives. JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN is Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also director of the Center for Young Children and Families, and co-directs the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College.

Download or read book Modern Housing written by Catherine Bauer and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The original guide on modern housing from the premier expert and activist in the public housing movement Originally published in 1934, Modern Housing is widely acknowledged as one of the most important books on housing of the twentieth century, introducing the latest developments in European modernist housing to an American audience. It is also a manifesto: America needs to draw on Europe’s example to solve its housing crisis. Only when housing is transformed into a planned, public amenity will it truly be modern. Modern Housing’s sharp message catalyzed an intense period of housing activism in the United States, resulting in the Housing Act of 1937, which Catherine Bauer coauthored. But these reforms never went far enough: so long as housing remained the subject of capitalist speculation, Bauer knew the housing problem would remain. In light of today’s affordable housing emergency, her prescriptions for how to achieve humane and dignified modern housing remain as instructive and urgent as ever.

Download or read book Getting to Scale written by Laurence Chandy and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2013-04-10 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global development community is teeming with different ideas and interventions to improve the lives of the world's poorest people. Whether these succeed in having a transformative impact depends not just on their individual brilliance but on whether they can be brought to a scale where they reach millions of poor people. Getting to Scale explores what it takes to expand the reach of development solutions beyond an individual village or pilot program so they serve poor people everywhere. Each chapter documents one or more contemporary case studies, which together provide a body of evidence on how scale can be pursued. The book suggests that the challenge of scaling up can be divided into two solutions: financing interventions at scale, and managing delivery to large numbers of beneficiaries. Neither governments, donors, charities, nor corporations are usually capable of overcoming these twin challenges alone, indicating that partnerships are key to success. Scaling up is mission critical if extreme poverty is to be vanquished in our lifetime. Getting to Scale provides an invaluable resource for development practitioners, analysts, and students on a topic that remains largely unexplored and poorly understood. Contributors: Tessa Bold (Goethe University, Frankfurt), Wolfgang Fengler (World Bank, Nairobi), David Gartner (Arizona State University), Shunichiro Honda (JICA Research Institute), Michael Joseph (Vodafone), Hiroshi Kato (JICA), Mwangi Kimenyi (Brookings), Michael Kubzansky (Monitor Inclusive Markets), Germano Mwabu (University of Nairobi), Jane Nelson (Harvard Kennedy School), Alice Ng'ang'a (Strathmore University, Nairobi), Justin Sandefur (Center for Global Development), Pauline Vaughan (consultant), Chris West (Shell Foundation)

Download or read book Cities and the Wealth of Nations written by Jane Jacobs and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this eye-opening work of economic theory, Jane Jacobs argues that it is cities—not nations—that are the drivers of wealth. Challenging centuries of economic orthodoxy, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations the beloved author contends that healthy cities are constantly evolving to replace imported goods with locally-produced alternatives, spurring a cycle of vibrant economic growth. Intelligently argued and drawing on examples from around the world and across the ages, here Jacobs radically changes the way we view our cities—and our entire economy.