No Room at the Inn: Housing Policy and the Homeless

My argument can be advanced through a syllogism that I hope to prove in succeeding sections: 1. Homelessness is primarily caused not by personal deficiencies, but by structural problems in metropolitan housing markets. 2. As a housing market problem, it is primarily a matter of inadequate supply, not inadequate economic demand. 3. A major cause of the inadequate supply of low income rental housing in large metropolitan areas with expanding service economies is the unintended effects of government policies. 4. Q.E.D.: to solve the problem of homelessness, it is not enough simply to spend more money on shelters; instead, housing policies, at all levels of government, must be redirected

Rebound Neighborhoods in Older Industrial Cities: The Story of St. Louis

Rebound Neighborhoods in Older Industrial Cities: The Story of St. Loui

Advancing Equity Planning Now

What can planners do to restore equity to their craft? Drawing upon the perspectives of a diverse group of planning experts, Advancing Equity Planning Now places the concepts of fairness and equal access squarely in the center of planning research and practice. Editors Norman Krumholz and Kathryn Wertheim Hexter provide essential resources for city leaders and planners, as well as for students and others, interested in shaping the built environment for a more just world.Advancing Equity Planning Now remind us that equity has always been an integral consideration in the planning profession. The historic roots of that ethical commitment go back more than a century. Yet a trend of growing inequality in America, as well as other recent socio-economic changes that divide the wealthiest from the middle and working classes, challenge the notion that a rising economic tide lifts all boats. When planning becomes mere place-making for elites, urban and regional planners need to return to the fundamentals of their profession. Although they have not always done so, planners are well-positioned to advocate for greater equity in public policies that address the multiple objectives of urban planning including housing, transportation, economic development, and the removal of noxious land uses in neighborhoods

Regional Resilience: A Critical Examination of the Ecological Framework

The different responses of New York City to the terrorist attacks in 2001 and New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have focused the attention of scholars on the ability of metropolitan areas to recover from disasters. In the case of New York City, despite dire warnings that people would flee urban settings that were vulnerable to terrorist attacks, the real estate market in lower Manhattan revived and is now as vibrant as ever. The painful memory remains, but the city has recovered from its wounds. New Orleans is another story. The immediate response to the hurricane was often uncoordinated and ineffectual. The long-run recovery has been slow and uneven. The population of the city is still only at about 72 percent of its pre-Katrina level and while the levees have been repaired theyhave not been built to withstand a category 5 hurricane like Katrina. It is still uncertain as to whether the city will recover enough to sustain the dynamic culture in food, music,and the arts that flourished before Katrina.The word that is increasingly used to describe successful responses to disasters like these is “resilience.” Resilience is an idea that can also be applied to slowly developing challenges as well as sudden disasters.The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of the resilience framework for thinking about how metropolitan areas respond to challenges.1 At this point in its applications to regional studies, resilience is more than a metaphor but less than a theory. At best it is a conceptual framework that helps us to think about regions in new ways, i.e., dynamically and holistically. As derived from the field of systems ecology, the resilience framework encourages us to think about regions as interconnected systems with extensive feedback processes that must be understood for successful human intervention