Two Types of Planning in Neighborhoods

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68338/2/10.1177_0739456X8400300209.pd

Central City Revitalization: A Predictive Model

The object of this paper is to increase the understanding of the gentrification process by developing a set of representative indices that could be used to assess the likelihood of gentrification occurring in a central city neighborhood. Using Boston, Massachusetts as a representative city, economic, housing, social and amenity variables were collected from the 1970 U.S. Census. A sample of blocks that did and did not revitalize after 1970 was chosen. As the gentrification outcome was known with certainty, a logistic regression model was estimated. The estimated model quite accurately classified the neighborhoods into their respective grouping, resulting in a block-level statistical model of housing revitalization. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

The Equity Impacts of Municipal Tax Incentives: Leveling or Tilting the Playing Field?

The widespread use over the past two decades of Michigan's PA 198 Industrial Tax Abatement program provides an opportunity to assess the inter-urban equity impacts of this economic development tool. Not only has PA 198 been used relatively more often by suburban municipalities, local governments at the metropolitan periphery are more likely to use abatements to attract new plants and new jobs. The older central cities primarily use the program to retain existing jobs, albeit at high cost of lost tax revenues. On balance, it appears that PA 198 has done little to alter the location decisions of participating firms. Copyright 2006 by The Policy Studies Organization.

"When the banks withdraw, slum landlords take over": The structuration of neighbourhood decline through Redlinging, Drug Dealing, Speculation and Immigrant Exploitation

Rather than viewing neighbourhood decline as a natural process resulting from the in-flow of low-income households, this study uses a socio-spatial approach that looks at the structuration of neighbourhood decline by emphasising the power of agents/actors, linking the structure of the real estate industry to the development of the neighbourhood. Landlords and banks are not merely automata of the price mechanism that steer the natural operation of the market, but should be seen as intentionally and unintentionally restructuring the local real estate market and thus possibly producing, or contributing to, processes of neighbourhood decline. This paper presents the Tarwewijk (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) as a case study of neighbourhood decline. Attention is paid to the social and physical decline of the neighbourhood, drug dealing, undocumented immigrants and processes impacting the housing market such as speculation, blockbusting, milking and redlining. It is argued that the retreat of ‘formal’ actors, such as banks and bona fide landlords, stimulates the rise of the underworld in both the housing and drugs markets.status: publishe