Three Essays on Public Housing and Social Inequality

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the impact of housing policies and the surrounding neighborhoods on socioeconomically disadvantaged populations living in public housing. In the first chapter, titled The Spillover Effects of Source of Income Anti-Discrimination Laws on Public Housing, I examine whether and to what extent source of income (SOI) anti-discrimination laws affect the sociodemographic composition of households living in public housing. SOI laws make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against the source of rent payment, including housing choice vouchers. Landlord discrimination is a major barrier to voucher utilization, disproportionately affecting extremely low-income families and racial minorities among all voucher holders. Thus, improvements in voucher utilization through SOI laws may affect the pool of applicants and recipients of public housing that operate within the same local public housing authority service areas. I use nationwide public housing authority level data and examine the changes in the composition of households living in public housing before and after SOI laws. I use a difference-in-difference approach, exploiting the variation in the precise timing that state and local jurisdictions enact SOI laws. I find that SOI laws significantly reduce the share of extremely poor households and minority residents in public housing, along with a decline in new entries to public housing. The results suggest potentially positive spillover effects of SOI laws, alleviating concentration of poverty in public housing as a consequence of a policy attempt to improve accessibilities to an alternative housing program. The second chapter is titled Are Public Housing Good for Kids After All? and revisits the popular belief that public housing residency harms rather than helps children\u27s development and academic achievement. Critics charge that public housing projects concentrate poverty and create neighborhoods with limited opportunities, including low-quality schools. However, whether the net effect is positive or negative is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on the characteristics of the neighborhood and schools compared to origin neighborhoods. In this paper, I draw on detailed individual-level longitudinal data on students moving into New York City public housing and examine their standardized test scores over time. Exploiting plausibly random variation in the precise timing of entry into public housing, I estimate credibly causal effects of public housing using both difference-in-differences and event study designs. Further, I explore the role of schools by estimating the effects on school mobility and the quality of the school attended. I find credibly causal evidence of positive effects of moving into public housing, with larger effects over time. Stalled academic performance in the first year of entry reflects, in part, potentially disruptive effects of residential and school moves. I find neighborhood matters: impacts are larger for students moving out of low-income neighborhoods or into higher-income neighborhoods, and these students move to schools with higher average test scores and lower shares of economically disadvantaged peers. The final chapter, titled Does Proximity to Fast Food Cause Childhood Obesity? Evidence from Public Housing, examines the causal link between local food environments and childhood obesity. Using individual-level longitudinal data on students living in New York City public housing linked to restaurant location data, I exploit the naturally occurring within-development variation in distance to fast food restaurants to estimate the impact of proximity on obesity. Since the assignment of households to specific buildings is based upon availability at the time of assignment to public housing, the distance between student residence and retail food outlets is plausibly random. The study results suggest that childhood obesity increases with proximity to fast food, with larger effects for younger children who attend neighborhood schools

Does Proximity to Fast Food Increase the Incidence of Childhood Obesity?

Living near fast food has a greater impact on younger children who attend neighborhood schools. Proximity to fast food restaurants increases the probability of childhood obesity or overweight

Load and Resistance Factor Design of Bridge Foundations Accounting for Pile Group–Soil Interaction

Pile group foundations are used in most foundation solutions for transportation structures. Rigorous and reliable pile design methods are required to produce designs whose level of safety (probability of failure) is known. By utilizing recently developed, advanced, two-surface plasticity constitutive models, rigorous finite element analyses are conducted. These analyses are for axially loaded single piles and pile groups with several pile-to-pile distances in various group configurations installed in sandy and clayey soil profiles. The analyses shed light on the relationships between the global response of the pile-soil system (development of shaft and base resistances) and the behavior of local soil elements (e.g., shear band formation). The influence of the group configuration, pile-topile spacing, soil profile, and pile head settlement on the group effects are studied. Mechanisms of pile-soil-pile interactions in pile groups are revealed. Pile efficiencies for individual piles and the overall pile group are reported for use in pile group design. The instrumentation, installation, and static and dynamic testing of a closed-ended, driven pipe pile in Marshall County, Indiana is documented. The test results along with two other case histories are used to verify the new Purdue pile design method. Probabilistic analyses are performed to develop resistance factors for the load and resistance factor design, LRFD, of pile groups considering both displacement and non-displacement piles, various soil profiles, and two target probabilities of failure. The pile design equations, pile group efficiencies and resistance factors together form the LRFD pile design framework. Two step-by-step design examples are provided to demonstrate the LRFD pile design procedures for single piles and pile groups

Does Proximity to Fast Food Cause Childhood Obesity? Evidence from Public Housing

We examine the causal link between proximity to fast food and the incidence of childhood obesity among low-income households in New York City. Using individual-level longitudinal data on students living in public housing linked to restaurant location data, we exploit the naturally occurring within-development variation in distance to fast food restaurants to estimate the impact of proximity on obesity. Since the assignment of households to specific buildings is based upon availability at the time of assignment to public housing, the distance between student residence and retail outlets—including fast food restaurants, wait-service restaurants, supermarkets, and corner stores—is plausibly random. Our credibly causal estimates suggest that childhood obesity increases with proximity to fast food, with larger effects for younger children who attend neighborhood schools

Examining the Link Between Gentrification, Children’s Egocentric Food Environment, and Obesity

While advocates argue that gentrification changes the neighborhood food environment critical to children’s diet and health, we have little evidence documenting such changes or the consequences for their health outcomes. Using rich longitudinal, individual-level data on nearly 115,000 New York City children, including egocentric measures of their food environment and BMI, we examine the link between neighborhood demographic change (“gentrification”) and children’s access to restaurants and supermarkets and their weight outcomes. We find that children in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods see increased access to fast food and wait-service restaurants and reduced access to corner stores and supermarkets compared to those in non-gentrifying areas. Boys and girls have higher BMI following gentrification, but only boys are more likely to be obese or overweight. We find public housing moderates the deleterious effect of gentrification on children’s weight outcomes, possibly due to different changes to the food environment

Overexpression of Arabidopsis thaliana brassinosteroid-related acyltransferase 1 gene induces brassinosteroid-deficient phenotypes in creeping bentgrass

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are naturally occurring steroidal hormones that play diverse roles in various processes during plant growth and development. Thus, genetic manipulation of endogenous BR levels might offer a way of improving the agronomic traits of crops, including plant architecture and stress tolerance. In this study, we produced transgenic creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera L.) overexpressing a BR-inactivating enzyme, Arabidopsis thaliana BR-related acyltransferase 1 (AtBAT1), which is known to catalyze the conversion of BR intermediates to inactive acylated conjugates. After putative transgenic plants were selected using herbicide resistance assay, genomic integration of the AtBAT1 gene was confirmed by genomic PCR and Southern blot analysis, and transgene expression was validated by northern blot analysis. The transgenic creeping bentgrass plants exhibited BR-deficient phenotypes, including reduced plant height with shortened internodes (i.e., semi-dwarf), reduced leaf growth rates with short, wide, and thick architecture, high chlorophyll contents, decreased numbers of vascular bundles, and large lamina joint bending angles (i.e., erect leaves). Subsequent analyses showed that the transgenic plants had significantly reduced amounts of endogenous BR intermediates, including typhasterol, 6-deoxocastasterone, and castasterone. Moreover, the AtBAT1 transgenic plants displayed drought tolerance as well as delayed senescence. Therefore, the results of the present study demonstrate that overexpression of an Arabidopsis BR-inactivating enzyme can reduce the endogenous levels of BRs in creeping bentgrass resulting in BR-deficient phenotypes, indicating that the AtBAT1 gene from a dicot plant is also functional in the monocot crop.111Ysciescopu

tax_data

This folder includes a Stata do-file (that merges and cleans all the excel files in the folder) and files of tax data downloaded from KOSIS (http://kosis.kr/statisticsList/statisticsList_01List.jsp?vwcd=MT_ZTITLE&parmTabId=M_01_01). Files on tax data were sorted by districts (district codes are used as file names). *Note: please download this entire folder and save the folder as "tax_data" for easier replication. The name will be used in another Stata do-file when merging tax data with other Stata data files

population_election_data

This folder includes a Stata do-file (that merges and cleans all the excel files in the folder), a file of population data downloaded from KOSIS (http://kosis.kr/statisticsList/statisticsList_01List.jsp?vwcd=MT_ZTITLE&parmTabId=M_01_01), and a file of election data collected from South Korea's Local Education Offices websites. *Note: please download this entire folder and save the folder as "population_election_data" for easier replication. The name will be used in another Stata do-file when merging school data with other Stata data files

Dofiles

Final sets of Stata do-files

school_data

This folder includes a Stata do-file (that merges and cleans all the excel files in the folder) and files of administrative data downloaded from KESS (http://kess.kedi.re.kr/index). Files on administrative data were sorted by years, school types, and the types of variables. *Note: please download this entire folder and save the folder as "school_data" for easier replication. The name will be used in another Stata do-file when merging school data with other Stata data files