A Housing Market on the Rise, Leaving Many Behind: Voices of Binghamton on the Housing Crisis

The city of Binghamton is in the depths of a housing crisis that has been growing for decades. According to the Stakeholders of Broome County, a housing advocacy coalition, there are only 17 affordable housing units available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. This deficit in low-income housing in the city of Binghamton and greater Broome County has been persistent for over 20 years. Despite this, hundreds of luxury housing units have been constructed in recent years that are marketed toward Binghamton University students and are too expensive for low-income households to afford. How does the presence of Binghamton University impact the local housing market, specifically the low-income housing market? Additionally, what policy solutions could be implemented to help alleviate the Binghamton housing crisis? I investigated the Binghamton low-income housing market through a series of interviews with tenants, landlords, non-profit and community leaders, public officials and university administrators. I specifically looked at Binghamton University’s effect on the housing landscape in the City of Binghamton. The impact caused by Binghamton University is partially due to the University’s 20 by 2020 plan announced in 2014, in which they planned to expand the school’s undergraduate and graduate enrollment from around 16,000 to 20,000 by 2020. The University fell 2,000 students shy of this expansion goal, however the planned expansion may have been a large factor in the construction of several student housing projects since the 2014 proposal. The City of Binghamton’s supply of student housing far surpasses the actual demand, although new student housing projects are proposed every year. Meanwhile, there is a severe shortage of low-income housing. Developers know that they can make more money in the over-saturated student housing market rather than the growing low-income housing market. Although policies have been written and proposed, the city and county have failed to enact sufficient policy to encourage developers to build affordable housing, as student housing projects and the university’s growth bring money to the downtown area, outpricing the local residents

The Economics of Fair Trade: For Whose Benefit? An Investigation into the Limits of Fair Trade as a Development Tool and the Risk of Clean-Washing.

This paper considers the system of fair trade coffee. It first gives a short description of the coffee market and some of its major trends. The origin of the fair trade movement is then explained. The structure of FLO is examined and its pricing scheme compared to those of other private labeling initiatives. Benefits generated for participants on the supply and the demand side then come under scrutiny. To gauge its potential as a development tool, revenues to coffee producers are estimated on the basis of available information. Revenues to fair trade organizations in the Western world are also examined. Finally, two hypotheses are tested on data from 13 European countries to get a better picture of what is happening on the demand side. First, an OLS regression is tested to see if consumer awareness does Òmake a differenceÓ. Secondly, a treatment regression is used to correct for a sample self-selection bias and to check if there is some support for the claim that supermarkets that have started to sell fair trade coffee are clean-washing their reputation in the fair trade business.Coffee, Fair Trade, Development, Clean-Washing, Treatment Regression

Chemical Information Bulletin

Created as a supplement for "the regular journals of the American Chemical Society," this publication contains annotated bibliographies of chemical documentation literature as well as information about meetings, conferences, awards, scholarships, and other news from the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Chemical Information (CINF)

Fashioning Change: The Cultural Economy of Clothing in Contemporary China

This dissertation is based on fifteen months of field research in Shanghai and Beijing conducted in 2002 and 2004. The central question with which this dissertation is concerned is how clothing and the clothing industry is constituted by and constitutive of the phenomenal changes that have taken place in contemporary China, especially in the post-1978 reform period. Specifically, this dissertation addresses two major questions: 1) Are the changes in Chinese clothing and the clothing industry merely a part of China's economic development or modernization? And 2) does China's integration with the global economy translate into a Westernization of China? The development of China's textile and apparel industries is a process of liberalization in which the socialist state cultivates and encourages market competition in China's economy. The development of China's textile and clothing industries is thus a part of the state's agenda to modernize China's economy. The economic modernization in China, however, is not intended to be an imitation of the West, but a means to an end. Similarly, the Chinese notion of modernity, which is reflected in the official narratives of the evolution of clothing styles, is not modeled after the West; instead, it is a story the Chinese tell themselves about themselves in relation to their own past. Therefore, modernization and modernity as reflected by the changes in Chinese clothing and clothing industry are vested with Chinese meanings. Intertwined with the issues of modernization and modernity, this dissertation also examines the ways in which Western styles of clothing, design techniques, business models, fashion shows and fashion weeks become localized in China. Thus, this dissertation challenges the Westernization thesis in the study of globalization. In addition, the dissertation also explores the integration of China's clothing industry with the global clothing industry through the examination of the exportation of Chinese made garments to the United States that is predicated on the global political economy. All in all, this dissertation argues that clothing is not just a business, but one that involves cultural logics, and that it is not just economics, but also is endowed with meanings