Bringing Zoning into Focus: A Fine-Grained Analysis of Zonings Relationships to Housing Affordability, Income Distributions, and Segregation in Connecticut

For more than a century, local governments throughout the United States have used zoning to shape future growth. Through rules that regulate what sorts of housing can be built where, localities may either allow for new development or restrict construction to maintain the status quo. Using a first-of-its-kind database of zoning laws across an entire state, we provide evidence that strict zoning regulations limiting construction to single-family homes are associated with inadequate access to affordable housing and with the segregation of people by income, race, and ethnicity.We leverage the Connecticut Zoning Atlas, a unique dataset of zoning texts tied to geospatial files that allow for georeferenced comparisons between the zoning laws adopted by 180 localities. We overlay the geographies of zoning districts on spatially differentiated demographic and economic indicators at the neighborhood level. Analyzing and comparing this information allows us to provide a comprehensive view of the relationships between zoning laws, property values, and residents' demographic and economic characteristics.Our research focuses on a state with stark disparities in residential land uses: only 2 percent of Connecticut's land is zoned to allow the by-right construction of multifamily buildings with three or more units per parcel, while 91 percent of its land allows only the construction of single-family housing by right. Our analysis reveals that suburbs and towns have the most restrictive zoning rules by several measures, while the largest cities more readily permit multifamily construction. We show that the residents of neighborhoods with mostly single-family zoning, on average, have significantly higher household incomes and are much more likely to be white, much less likely to be Black or Hispanic, more likely to have a bachelor's degree, and much more likely to own their homes than residents of neighborhoods where zoning allows for multifamily building construction. These findings paint a picture of a state where localities' zoning either divides or reinforces the division of residents by income, race, ethnicity, and education levels. We also apply a segregation index to explore the associations between zoning rules and neighborhood- and locality-level segregation. After controlling for other characteristics, we find that higher concentrations of high-income and white residents are associated with lower number-of-unit zoning policies. We also find that higher concentrations of low-income, Black, Hispanic, and other residents of color are associated with zoning allowing the construction of two or more housing units per parcel and higher shares of renter-occupied housing.Together, these findings bring new insight into the relationship between zoning policy and residents' geographic distribution. Our results clearly point to the links between zoning laws, rental housing availability, and inequitable distributions of populations within and across jurisdictions. Policymakers considering how to improve access to opportunity while reducing income or racial segregation should evaluate the potential for altering local zoning codes to allow greater diversity of housing construction and tenure types in more places

Experiment to take charge of affordable housing production, 1968-1975

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. [333]-341).A federal-local partnership supports the creation of most new affordable housing in the United States. Washington's subsidies, which fund housing construction, vouchers, and tax credits, are paired with local development groups, which select sites, design projects, and manage operations. Yet for decades, despite their elevated status in the American federal system, state governments have all but abdicated responsibility for the direct production of affordable housing. Partly as a consequence, cities remain without adequate resources to address the dwelling needs of their poorest residents, and many suburbs have chosen to isolate themselves from the problem entirely. Between 1968 and 1975, however, New York State broke the mold by investing considerable resources in the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), a state-run builder that completed over 30,000 apartments for low- and moderate-income households. While contemporary government developers, following the "urban renewal" script, often built monofunctional, architecturally bland, public-finance-only apartment blocks confined to the limits of the inner city, the UDC operated at a statewide scale and constructed mixed-use and distinctively designed structures with the aid of private investment. As such, the agency provides historical evidence of a public sector entity responding to criticisms of previous government housing by innovating in terms of planning, design, and finance. This thesis offers insight into the conditions that influenced the UDC's development approach. Its example constitutes a "usable past" that can inform contemporary struggles to create affordable housing by documenting a potential role for the state in the production process. The agency built more housing, with designs more sensitive to their surroundings, than urban municipal authorities. In the suburbs, the UDC's unique political powers allowed it to address housing needs at the metropolitan scale. In three new communities, the agency articulated a vision of all-purpose developments with populations integrated by class. In all environments, the UDC reformed the government's approach to affordable housing construction-and it did so thanks to the powers it had been granted as a state agency. The agency's extraordinary productivity-combined with its unique approach-is indicative of the value of evaluating the UDC's methods if the goal is to expand the production of affordable housing. The political powers provided to the agency, particularly those that allowed it to override local governments, develop significant efficiencies of scale, and focus on the housing demands of the neediest portion of the population, offer a template for state governments today. Faced with continued challenges to access to quality, reasonably priced housing in many of the nation's metropolitan areas, the UDC demonstrates how a state housing development agency with adequate powers could operate and what benefits it would provide.by Yonah Freemark.M.C.P

Regulations to Respond to the Potential Benefits and Perils of SelfDriving Cars Analysis and Recommendations for Advancing Equity and Environmental Sustainability

The mobility system in the United States is unsafe, inequitable, and environmentally destructive. Most Americans rely on personally owned, individually occupied, and gas-powered cars—a status quo that leads to tens of thousands of people dying each year in collisions, creates barriers to employment and other opportunities for people of color and people with low incomes, and maintains a resource intensive transportation system that contributes to climate change and spurs sprawling land uses that destroy ecologies. Autonomous vehicles (AVs)—self-driving cars that can travel along publicly accessible streets some or all of the time without human involvement—could help mitigate these problems, if they are implemented in a thoughtful, well-regulated manner. However, if deployed haphazardly with inadequate oversight and regulation, they could produce even worse inequities than those caused by the current system.To evaluate the current landscape for AV deployment and use in the United States, we conducted a study focusing on automobile-sized AVs designed for passenger use as opposed to other types of AVs that could be used for public transit service or freight. Through a scholarship review, a scan of legislation nationwide, and interviews with stakeholders, we examine key potential benefits that AVs could generate, as well as the problems they could exacerbate. Carefully designed regulations could help ensure that these new technologies improve access to mobility and reduce pollution

Assessing Journey Time Impacts of Disruptions on London's Piccadilly Line

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-167).Public transport users depend on a reliable level of service on a daily basis. But system disruptions, caused by infrastructure problems, passenger events, and crew duty constraints, can result in reduced reliability for users. Understanding the impacts of those disruptions on customers is vital to evaluating the performance of the system and appropriately communicating delays to passengers. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the impact of certain disruptions on passenger journey times using several new metrics. The thesis has three primary components: First, a description and categorization of incidents that occur on a urban rail transport line over the course of 29 days with some degree of disruption; second, the development of a new measure of impacts on passengers resulting from those incidents using automated fare collection (AFC) data; and third, an exploration of the potential use of AFC data in real-time applications to monitor service. The proposed approach is applied to the Piccadilly Line, one of the London Underground's major rail lines. The line suffers from instances of significant disruption caused by aging technology and infrastructure, but it will not be upgraded for more than a decade. Therefore, insights from existing automated data sources, such as AFC, could play an important role in improving service without capital-intensive improvements. The passenger impact analysis method developed in the thesis relies on dividing the line into sections and aggregating all AFC transactions on all origin-destination (OD) pairs within each section. The resulting disruption impact index summarizes the effects of a disruption on the average passenger for each section of the line. In addition, the accumulation of passengers on a line is introduced as an indicator of delays relating to a disruption. These metrics are each compared with information provided by train-tracking information systems. The methods developed in the thesis were compared with actual passenger notifications on several study days. The results indicate that, despite the methods' limitations, there is potential for using AFC data, along with operational data, to provide more accurate and timely information to the users of the line. The application also leads to recommendations for how the method described for disruptions analysis could be extended to other types of analysis.by Yonah Freemark.S.M.in Transportatio

Life History and Status Classifications of Birds Breeding in Iowa

Life history and status classifications were compiled for 145 bird species that breed in Iowa. Species were classified by food type and substrate, nest substrate, susceptibility to cowbird parasitism, migratory status, predominant habitat use and habitat-use specialization, body mass (an index of home range/territory size), area sensitivity, population trend and vulnerability, and beneficial/harmful aspects in relation to agriculture. Such information may be used to make interspecific comparisons, evaluate interrelationships among life history and status characteristics, and provide insights into the interpretation of previous research. This synthesis also can aid those responsible for making conservation and management decisions about Iowa\u27s avifauna

Prolactin Receptor Signaling Is Essential for Perinatal Brown Adipocyte Function: A Role for Insulin-like Growth Factor-2

BACKGROUND: The lactogenic hormones prolactin (PRL) and placental lactogens (PL) play central roles in reproduction and mammary development. Their actions are mediated via binding to PRL receptor (PRLR), highly expressed in brown adipose tissue (BAT), yet their impact on adipocyte function and metabolism remains unclear. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: PRLR knockout (KO) newborn mice were phenotypically characterized in terms of thermoregulation and their BAT differentiation assayed for gene expression studies. Derived brown preadipocyte cell lines were established to evaluate the molecular mechanisms involved in PRL signaling on BAT function. Here, we report that newborn mice lacking PRLR have hypotrophic BAT depots that express low levels of adipocyte nuclear receptor PPARgamma2, its coactivator PGC-1alpha, uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) and the beta3 adrenoceptor, reducing mouse viability during cold challenge. Immortalized PRLR KO preadipocytes fail to undergo differentiation into mature adipocytes, a defect reversed by reintroduction of PRLR. That the effects of the lactogens in BAT are at least partly mediated by Insulin-like Growth Factor-2 (IGF-2) is supported by: i) a striking reduction in BAT IGF-2 expression in PRLR KO mice and in PRLR-deficient preadipocytes; ii) induction of cellular IGF-2 expression by PRL through JAK2/STAT5 pathway activation; and iii) reversal of defective differentiation in PRLR KO cells by exogenous IGF-2. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that the lactogens act in concert with IGF-2 to control brown adipocyte differentiation and growth. Given the prominent role of brown adipose tissue during the perinatal period, our results identified prolactin receptor signaling as a major player and a potential therapeutic target in protecting newborn mammals against hypothermia

Effect of folic acid and metformin on insulin resistance and inflammatory factors of obese children and adolescents

Background: Considering the increasing trend of obesity, especially in developing countries such as Iran, and the role of inflammatory factors and insulin resistance (IR) in the occurrence of obesity-related complications as well as the safety of some agents such as folic acid and metformin, this clinical trial was designed to investigate the effect of metformin and folic acid on inflammatory factors and IR among obese children. Materials and Methods: In this randomized, double-blind, controlled clinical trial study, sixty obese children aged 6-12 years were enrolled. Selected obese children were randomly allocated in two interventional (1 mg/daily folic acid or 1000 mg metformin for 8 weeks) groups. Biochemical measurements including homeostasis model assessment of IR (HOMA-IR), homocysteine (Hcy), tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and interleukin-8 (IL-8) were measured between and within the groups before and after trial. Results: In each group, thirty obese children were studied. The groups were age- and sex-matched. After folic acid and metformin administration, mean of Hcy, HOMA-IR, TNF-α, and IL-8 decreased significantly (P < 0.05). IL-6 decreased significantly after folic acid use (P < 0.05). Conclusion: The findings of this trial indicated that both metformin and folic acid could decrease IR and level of Hcy in obese children and adolescents. The effectiveness of metformin on IR was more significant than folic acid. Regarding the effectiveness of the two studied agents on inflammatory factors, it is suggested that the role of folic acid was superior to metformin. It is suggested that metformin is a proper agent for obese children with IR and folic acid is an appropriate supplement for obese children with increased inflammatory factors. © 2016 Journal of Research in Medical Sciences