Posts in Paper
Inequitable Gentrification: A Form of Exclusionary Zoning that Violates the New Jersey Constitution

From the perspective of many low-income families, gentrification is the ultimate social injustice; where “wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for "improving" a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.”

A social injustice promulgated by local government action, gentrification is no longer confined to our big cities and is increasingly impacting smaller cities and towns as municipalities seek to increase their tax base by luring wealthy residents in search of urban amenities and replace low income residents in the process.

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PaperRutgers CLiMEGentrification, Housing
Trapped in Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality and Law
Trapped in Tragedies: Childhood Trauma, Spatial Inequality and Law

Each year, psychological trauma arising from community and domestic violence, abuse and neglect brings profound psychological, physiological and academic harm to millions of American children, disproportionately poor children of color. This Article represents the first comprehensive legal analysis of the causes of and remedies for a crisis that can have lifelong and epigenetic consequences. Using civil rights and local government law, it argues that children’s reactions to complex trauma represent the natural symptomatology of severe structural inequality—legally …

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PaperGuest UserGentrification, Inequality, Poverty, Race, Trauma
De-Exoticizing Ghetto Poverty: On the Ethics of Representation in Urban Ethnography

INTRO: To write an ethnography about poor urban people is to risk courting controversy. While all ethnographers face questions about how well they knew their site or how much their stories can be trusted, the tone and content of those questions typically remain within the bounds of collegial discourse. Ethnographers of poor minorities have incited distinct passion and at times acrimony, inspiring accusations of stereotyping, misrepresentation, sensationalism, and even cashing in on the problems of the poor (Fischer 2014; see Boelen 1992; Reed 1994; Wacquant 2002; Jones 2010; Betts 2014; Rios 2015).

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PaperRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Inequality, Race
The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates

ABSTRACT: We characterize the effects of neighborhoods on children’s earnings and other outcomes in adulthood by studying more than five million families who move across counties in the U.S. Our analysis consists of two parts. In the first part, we present quasi-experimental evidence that neighborhoods affect intergenerational mobility through childhood exposure effects. In particular, the outcomes of children whose families move to a better neighborhood – as measured by the outcomes of children already living there – improve linearly in proportion to the time they spend growing up in that area. We distinguish the causal effects of neighborhoods from confounding factors by comparing the outcomes of siblings within families, studying moves triggered by displacement shocks, and exploiting sharp variation in predicted place effects across birth cohorts, genders, and quantiles.

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PaperRutgers CLiMEPoverty, Housing
Educational Gerrymandering? Race and Attendance Boundaries in a Demographically Changing Suburb

ABSTRACT: In this article, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley illuminates the challenges and opportunities posed by demographic change in suburban school systems. As expanding student populations stretch the enrollment capacities of existing schools in suburban communities, new schools are built and attendance lines are redrawn. This redistricting process can be used either to foster school diversity or to exacerbate racial isolation. Drawing on data from the U.S. Census, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and the school district, along with mapping software from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Siegel-Hawley examines the relationship between overcrowding, racial isolation, and the original, proposed, and final high school attendance zones in a changing suburban district. Findings indicate that school officials responsible for the rezoning process failed to embrace the growing diversity of the school system, choosing instead to solidify extreme patterns of racial isolation within high school attendance areas. The segregative impact of the district's new attendance zones may be subject to legal scrutiny, a consequence that could—and should—discourage other school systems from adopting similarly harmful redistricting policies.

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PaperRutgers CLiMERace, Inequality, Housing
New Jersey's Apartheid and Intensely Segregated Urban Schools: Powerful Evidence of an Inefficient and Unconstitutional State Education System

INTRODUCTION: In 1875, New Jersey’s legislature and citizenry committed themselves constitutionally to a “thorough and efficient system of free public schools for the instruction of all the children in the State between the ages of five and eighteen years.”

The fact that this education clause was placed in the Taxation and Finance article of the state’s constitution and imposed responsibility on the legislature to provide for the “maintenance and support” of the statewide public education system made clear that funding was considered a key part of the state’s responsibility. Yet, it has taken more than 40 years of litigation, still ongoing, in the state courts to assure that New Jersey’s poorest urban school districts have adequate funding to try to meet their weighty educational obligations.

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PaperRutgers CLiMERace, Inequality
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function

ABSTRACT: The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance before harvest, when poor, as compared with after harvest, when rich. This cannot be explained by differences in time available, nutrition, or work effort. Nor can it be explained with stress: Although farmers do show more stress before harvest, that does not account for diminished cognitive performance. Instead, it appears that poverty itself reduces cognitive capacity. We suggest that this is because poverty-related concerns consume mental resources, leaving less for other tasks. These data provide a previously unexamined perspective and help explain a spectrum of behaviors among the poor. We discuss some implications for poverty policy.

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PaperRutgers CLiMETrauma, Poverty
Economic Impacts of Tax Expenditures: Evidence from Spatial Variation Across the U.S.

ABSTRACT: This paper develops a framework to study the effects of tax expenditures on intergenerational mobility using spatial variation in tax expenditures across the United States. We measure intergenerational mobility at the local (census commuting zone) level based on the correlation between parents’ and children’s earnings. We show that the level of local tax expenditures (as a percentage of AGI) is positively correlated with intergenerational mobility and that this correlation is robust to introducing controls for local area characteristics. To understand the mechanisms driving this correlation, we analyze the largest tax expenditures in greater detail. We find that the level and the progressivity of state income taxes are positively correlated with intergenerational mobility. Mortgage interest deductions are also positively related to intergenerational mobility. Finally, we find significant positive correlations between state EITC policy and intergenerational mobility. We conclude by discussing other applications of this methodology to evaluate the net benefits of tax expenditures.

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PaperRutgers CLiMEInequality
Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty

ABSTRACT: Combining statistical and ethnographic analyses, this article explores the prevalence and ramifications of eviction in the lives of the urban poor. A quantitative analysis of administrative and survey data finds that eviction is commonplace in inner-city black neighborhoods and that women from those neighborhoods are evicted at significantly higher rates than men. A qualitative analysis of ethnographic data based on fieldwork among evicted tenants and their landlords reveals multiple mechanisms propelling this discrepancy. In poor black neighborhoods, eviction is to women what incarceration is to men: a typical but severely consequential occurrence contributing to the reproduction of urban poverty.

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PaperRutgers CLiMEHousing, Inequality, Poverty
The Region And Taxation: School Finance, Cities And The Hope For Regional Reform

ABSTRACT: After briefly discussing the problem of competition and the claims of new regionalists, this Article will track the development of school finance reform, including the recent success of plaintiffs in asserting claims seeking adequacy in education, rather than simply equity in funding. It will show that school districts’ traditional reliance on local property taxes has been effectively lessened by state equalization.

This Article will examine two states where significant changes in school equity occurred in the 1990s: Kentucky and Michigan. This Article will conclude by noting that some form of litigation strategy together with public education and organizing could advance the possibility of regional reform in other areas, such as municipal finance, regional land use and/or governance issues. Finally, the Article will argue that the collaboration necessary to build a school and municipal equity coalition can also be used to build a coalition on land use planning and regional governance.

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PaperRutgers CLiMEInequality
It Takes a Region

ABSTRACT: Suburbanization and sprawl present new issues and challenges of regional inequity and equal opportunity. As awareness of the effects of the impacts of uneven and unhealthy development patterns grow, the debate for dealing with the fallout of sprawl is being taken up and policy agenda is emerging to address smart growth. With the emergence of the region rather than the city as the dominant economic and social geographic unit and key policy changes, the article propounds that the mistakes of the past fifty years can be reversed and regional equity achieved. The article makes it clear that life changes are largely determined by where one lives. The development patterns detailed in the article directly relate to an extreme inequality for poor people of color, but new factors are emerging that create a platform for addressing the inequality.

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PaperRutgers CLiMEHousing, Inequality
The Neighborhood Context Of Wellbeing

ABSTRACT: Health-related problems are strongly associated with the social characteristics of communities and neighborhoods.We need to treat community contexts as important units of analysis in their own right, which in turn calls for new measurement strategies as well as theoretical frameworks that do not simply treat the neighborhood as a “trait” of the individual.

Recent findings from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods support this thesis.Two major themes merit special attention: (1) the importance of collective efficacy for understanding health disparities in the modern city; and (2) the salience of spatial dynamics that go beyond the confines of local neighborhoods. Further efforts to explain the causes of variation in collective processes associated with healthy communities may provide innovative opportunities for preventive intervention.

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PaperRutgers CLiMETrauma, Housing, Inequality