Sustainable Food Systems At Urban Public Universities: A Survey Of U‐21 Universities

Urban communities are challenged by the conventional food system in diverse ways. To mitigate these challenges, a growing sustainable food system (SFS) movement mobilizes existing resources—including public institutions—to resolve disparities in access to healthy food, increase economic opportunities, conserve natural resources, and build a stronger, more local food system. Many public universities located in inner cities have adopted missions committing themselves to the improvement of their cities and regions. They also perform anchoring roles to revitalize their immediate neighborhoods, and, in a contemporary extension of their civic purposes, embrace sustainability as an institutional goal. Urban public universities therefore can play many SFS leadership roles, including through links to innovative scholarship, campus dining halls, other food retail such as farmers markets, and civic engagement activities such as community gardens. Through a study of 21 urban public universities, this paper investigates the presence and characteristics of SFS leadership, underlying rationales, and factors that support and oppose leadership.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112274/1/juaf12149.pd

State Mandates, Housing Elements, and Low-income Housing Production

In order to create low-income housing opportunities and mitigate exclusionary zoning, in 1968 Congress mandated that municipalities receiving comprehensive planning funds must create a housing element. In tandem, many states mandated that municipal housing elements must accommodate low-income housing needs. After examining empirical research for California, Florida, Illinois, and Minnesota, this review found aspirational success because those states rewarded the municipal planning process. In order to increase low-income housing, this review argues for state housing policy reform. Under US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s revised fair housing rule, which requires an assessment of local data, states can no longer ignore the exclusionary behavior of municipalities