LOCAL LAND POLICY OVERRIDES: WHEN ARE THEY APPROPRIATE?

The state has the power both to enable local communities to regulate land usage, as well as to override local jurisdictions' zoning policies. In Massachusetts, two pieces of legislation have empowered the state to override local land use control for the purpose of constructing two types of facilities: low and moderte income housing and hazardous waste treatment facilities. Both initiatives have stimulated considerable debate and controversy. This paper provides a framework or “test” for understanding the relative appropriateness of state overrides in general. In addition, the two Massachusetts case are discussed and analyzed according to these criteria.     

Immigrants and homelessness—at risk in Canada's outer suburbs

Homelessness is a risk for growing numbers of immigrants. Largely as a result of low incomes, newcomers are more likely than the Canadian-born to spend over 50 percent of total household income on housing costs. Many newcomers suffer 'hidden homelessness'. They do not use shelters and other services, but share accommodation, couch-surf and rely on their social contacts for temporary and precarious housing. The adverse impact of low incomes on the housing experiences of Canadian newcomers is exacerbated in the outer suburbs of metropolitan areas where the supply of affordable housing is limited. This study explores the social backgrounds and housing experiences of immigrant households that are vulnerable to homelessness in outer suburbs through analysis of special tabulations from the 2001 census for York Region and interviews with representatives from local community organisations serving immigrant and low-income populations. The initial findings confirm that a high proportion of newcomers in York Region are at-risk of homelessness during the first 10 years of residence in Canada. Although renters are more vulnerable than homeowners, a substantial percentage of newcomers who are homeowners pay more than 30 percent of their total income on housing costs. The shortage of affordable rental housing in the outer suburbs exacerbates the impacts of low incomes, immigration status, household size and ethnoracial identities on immigrants' housing.     

Locational Disadvantage and Household Locational Decisions: Changing Contexts and Responses in the Cessnock District of New South Wales,Australia. 1964–1999

Following the rapid demise of local coalmining in the 1950s and early 1960s, the former coal towns of the Cessnock area have survived in their newfound dormitory role, with cheap serviced housing acting as a major constraint on out–migration and an incentive for in–migration for low–income householders, mainly engaged in external commuting or outside the workforce. Behavioural responses to widening local job deficits in the early 1960s were reported in this journal (Holmes, 1965). From household surveys and other sources, Holmes examined the interplay between individual, household and locality variables and presented a spectrum of projected future outcomes for localities, according to accessibility, size and service provision, either attached to the Newcastle–Maitland labour market as low–income outer suburbs or experiencing varying rates of decline while providing low–cost welfare housing. While these broad trends have continued over the last 35 years, significant variants, not predictable in 1965 have emerged, notably: the increased residential attractiveness of some small localities; the strengthening of welfare migration, notably from Sydney; the increase in non–workforce households; and, some evidence of emerging socio–economic polarisation in larger towns. In these respects, Cessnock localities can be viewed as a microcosm of wider trends in Australian society, trends which are most fully revealed in disadvantaged metropolitan peripheral localities.     

Developing,designing and managing mixed tenure estates: implementing planning gain legislation in the Republic of Ireland1

This article reports the results of research on the implementation of recent legislation which enables Irish local authorities to require that up to 20% of new residential developments must be employed for social housing and for “affordable housing” for sale at below market value to low income households. The legislation will mean that most new residential developments will include several housing tenures. A survey of the number of mixed tenure estates constructed prior to its enactment indicates that, that without this legislation, few estates of this type would have been constructed in urban areas. Furthermore case studies of existing mixed tenure estates indicate that the prospects that this legislation can be successfully implemented are good. Opposition to tenure mixing among home buyers is less than some interest groups have claimed; there is little conflict between the residents of the different tenures in these estates and social housing managers and property developers hold similar views on the most appropriate design of these estates. However successful implementation of the legislation will require some reforms to arrangements for the planning and management of the developments subject to its provisions.     

COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION AND URBAN SEGREGATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: THE CASE OF TWO COLORED SUBURBS IN THE JOHANNESBURG REGION

In South Africa, the provision of collective consumption and urban racial segregation have always been closely connected. This article examines changes in apartheid urban policy with specific reference to two predominantly working-class colored suburbs on the periphery of Johannesburg: Eldorado Park, begun in the mid-1960s during a period of relative growth and stability, is largely an expression of socialized housing produced by an interventionist state and construction of this suburb, despite its racially exclusive character, appears to fit all too well within the theory which sees collective consumption in terms of the reproduction of labor power. However the apartheid regime, confronted by a deepening economic and political crisis, later withdrew from the provision of collective consumption, and appears to be abandoning its racist urban policies and ideology. Thus construction of Ennerdale, beginning in the mid-1970s occurred within a context of privatization and austerity. Analysis of the apparent “deracialized” and market-oriented provision of urban goods and services in Ennerdale reveals, at a local level, contradictions of South African crisis policies.     

THE EFFECT OF LAND USE AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON HOUSING COSTS

This paper examines the effects of various land use and environmental regulations on land and housing markets. Seven widely used techniques for controlling residential development appear to generate four “direct” and two “indirect” inflationary impacts. Land use and environmental controls directly affect the supply and cost of residential land, shift the cost of public services forward to developers, and increase delay and compliance costs associated with project evaluation. Development controls may also inadvertently facilitate monopolistic behavior in the development industry and predispose developers to orient their projects to high income groups onto which they can more easily pass along higher costs. The paper concludes by offering several policies for reducing the inflationary effects of environmental regulations.     

Gentrification Interrupted in Salford,UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.     

Determinants of Residential Location Choice: How Important Are Local Public Goods in Attracting Homeowners to Central City Locations?*

Abstract. A hybrid conditional logit choice model is estimated using data on the characteristics and destination of homeowners who engaged in intrametropolitan moves among 17 school districts within the Columbus, Ohio area in 1995. The model is used to test the relative influence of local fiscal and public goods versus household‐level characteristics in determining household location choices across central city and suburban school districts. Results provide evidence of both a “natural evolution” of households to the suburbs, due to job location, residential filtering, and household income and lifecycle effects, and “flight from blight,” due to lower school quality, higher crime levels, and lower average income levels in the city. In comparing the magnitudes of these variables, we find that school quality exerts the strongest influence: a 1‐percent increase in the school quality of the city district increases the probability of choosing a city residence by 3.7 percent. In contrast, the effects of household income and other individual characteristics are relatively modest. The findings provide support for a “flight from blight” suburbanization process that is dominated by differences in neighborhood quality between the city and suburbs. An implication is that investments that promote central city development and reduce suburbanization are justified on efficiency grounds if negative externalities are generated by increased concentration of poverty, crime, and low school quality.     

The Space of Local Control in the Devolution of us Public Housing Policy

Sweeping changes in national policy aim to radically transform public housing in the United States. The goal is to reduce social isolation and increase opportunities for low income tenants by demolishing ‘worst case’ housing, most of which is modern, high‐rise buildings with high vacancy and crime rates, and replacing it with ‘mixed‐income’ developments and tenant based assistance to disperse current public housing families. Transformation relies on the national government devolving more decision‐making power to local government and public housing authorities. The assumption here is that decentralizing the responsibility for public housing will yield more effective results and be more efficient. This paper explores the problematic nature of decentralization as it has been conceptualized in policy discourse, focusing on the underlying assumptions about the benefits of increasing local control in the implementation of national policy. As this paper describes, this conceived space of local control does not take into account the spatial features that have historically shaped where and how low income families live in the US, including racism and classism and a general aversion by the market to produce affordable rental units and mixed‐income developments. As a result, this conceived space of local control places the burden on low income residents to make transformation a success. To make this case, Wittgenstein's (1958) post‐structural view of language is combined with Lefebvre's view of space to provide a framework in which to examine US housing policy discourse as a ‘space producing’ activity. The Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation is used to illustrate how local efforts to transform public housing reproduce a functional space for local control that is incapable of generating many of the proposed benefits of decentralization for public housing tenants.     

PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN THE OLD AND NEW EUROPE: THE ROLE OF AGGLOMERATION EXTERNALITIES

As Europe is currently characterized by huge disparities in the economic performance of “old” and “new” states, we investigate whether this is the result of local agglomeration—specialization and diversity—externalities. Our spatial econometric analysis focuses on total factor productivity dynamics over the period 1996–2007 for 13 industries located in 276 European regions. Consistently with the “nursery cities” theory, we find that diversity exerts a positive effect in the knowledge‐intensive services of the “old” Europe urban areas, while specialization is still effective in the “new” Europe low‐tech manufacturing. Human and technological capital has also a positive impact.     

Welfare Reform and Economic and Housing Capacity for Low-Income Households, 1997–1999

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) marked the continued devolution of social policy to state and local government in addition to restructuring an ailing welfare system. Despite concerns that welfare recipients would find greater obstacles to economic stability as a result, declining welfare rolls have been accompanied by declining poverty rates over the past seven years. An important question is whether low‐income families have gained greater employment and housing capacity following welfare reform. Moreover, does capacity vary across states with different welfare policies? In addition, do families face greater economic vulnerability with respect to food scarcity and health care? This article uses the data from the 1997 and 1999 waves of the National Survey of America's Families to systematically assess differences in capacity and vulnerability among lower income families across different policy regimes. Using two measures of capacity for housing and employment, and quality of life, findings suggest that more stringent welfare rules are related to greater job and housing attainment but a reduced quality of life.     

PERSPECTIVES ON THE SAGEBRUSH REBELLION

The Sagebrush Rebellion began in the late 1970s with the objective of transferring various categories of federally owned lands to the states. The movement was centered in western “public lands” states, where nearly half the total land area is in federal ownership. Within a relatively short period of time this objective was changed to one of “privatizing” federal lands, of selling these land into private ownership. While the Sagebrush Rebellion has been highly political in its activities, the movement can be viewed in the perspective of historical land disposition policies in the U.S. These policies were changed near the turn of the century from alienating public lands into private ownership to their retention and management by the federal government. Confusion over the economics of building a free enterprise system based on private property rights, and the costs associated with building such as system, appear to have been major factors in changing land policies. Two important aras in which this occurred were the Homestead Act of 1862 and timber. The provisions of the Homestead Act imposed heavy costs on settlers, and these costs caused a reaction against the economic system that was being built.     

THE HAPPINESS‐REDUCING COSTS OF NOISE POLLUTION*

ABSTRACT This analysis examines the costs of everyday residential noise pollution using a series of “happiness regressions.” We control for both the possibility that an unobservable characteristic may cause omitted variable bias, as well as for the possibility of endogeneity bias if “effort” is not adequately taken into account. We find perceived noise pollution to exert a negative and highly significant effect on happiness. We then calculate the required income transfer to compensate for the noise and find the costs of noise pollution to be on the order of €172 per month per household.     

IF YOU CANNOT TAKE THE HEAT,GET OUT OF THE CERRADO … RECOVERING THE EQUILIBRIUM AMENITY COST OF NONMARGINAL CLIMATE CHANGE IN BRAZIL*

ABSTRACT This paper presents an empirical technique for valuing large changes in nonmarketed local attributes (e.g., climate amenities) without data describing prices of locally traded commodities like housing. A model of endogenous sorting is used to identify individuals' indirect utility functions, from which the value of the change in the local attribute is recovered while accounting for equilibrium impacts on markets for labor and locally traded commodities. Annual amenity costs of Brazilian climate change are estimated to be between $1.6 and $8.1 billion for a moderate climate change scenario, depending upon the role of migration costs.     

"LOCAL" DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHERN EUROPE: TOWARDS A NEW MYTHOLOGY

From the mid-1970s onwards, many southern European regions experienced a pattern of decentralized development and growth. This pattern has been largely explained by theories of “local” or “endogenous” development which became the new catch-phrases during a period of great financial difficulties. Despite logical improvements and the use of some radical rhetoric, local development approaches based on rationalization of existing cases (especially in Third Italian regions) suffer both in their theory and practice from the same inherent limitations of two decades ago. The paper argues for an alternative interpretation of local development characteristics in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, discussing the political implications of proposed policies.     

“Compassionate” Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post‐Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco

Abstract: After almost 30 years of Federal retraction from anti‐poverty initiatives, many American cities have been left with the dual burden of intensified poverty and far fewer resources to combat the problem. At the same time, such devolution has afforded cities the authority to forge poverty policy at the local level, such that the familiar neoliberal imperatives of state retraction and the mobilization of territory for capitalist expansion are frequently tempered by more progressive political imperatives at the local scale. What has thus emerged is a deeply ambivalent policy landscape, of which “kinder and gentler” poverty management strategies are a central feature. Using the example of a recent homeless program in San Francisco, “Care Not Cash”, this paper argues that such poverty management strategies, while less punitive than their revanchist predecessors, nonetheless introduce a new set of exclusions to the service delivery system, many of which are obscured by the language of compassion. In order to illustrate those new exclusions, I describe the city's homeless geographies—the public spaces, shelters, service sites, and housing models—that have been produced and reconfigured according to a logic of managing homelessness through the provision of care.     

Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing,Community Control,and Citizenship at the Margins

This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.     

Explaining "Auschwitz" after the End of History: The Case of Italy

Everywhere the 1990s have been characterized by an odd mixture of ideological triumphalism—Fukuyama's “end of history” being only the crassest example—and of ideological uncertainty—can there be, should there be, a “third way”? For all its pretensions to universality, the “New World Order” has never lost a fragility in appearance. Students of historiography can scarcely be surprised to learn that an uneasiness over the present and future has in turn frequently entailed uncertainty about the past and particularly about those parts of the past which had seemed most able to give clear and significant “lessons.” One evident example is the history of what in my Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima (1993) I called the “long” Second World War, that is, that crisis in confidence in the relationship between political and economic liberalism and the nation-state which, by the end of 1938, had left only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia as in any sense preserving those “liberal” freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789. In this article, I briefly review the most recent difficulties World War II combatant societies have had in locating a usable past in the history of those times. However, my major focus is on the specific case of Italy, very much a border state in the Cold War system, and today the political home of an “Olive Tree” and a “Liberty Pole” whose historical antecedents and whose philosophical base for the future are less than limpid. 1990s Italian historians thus give very mixed messages about the Fascist past; these are the messages I describe and decode.