The New Jersey Constitution states that, “[t]he Legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of 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.” Although it has been about four decades since the first New Jersey decision that determined that relying solely on local property taxes was an unconstitutional way to fund public education, at-risk districts in New Jersey are still inadequate in comparison to their more affluent counterparts.
Read MoreThe change in median household income between 2009 and 2011. To ensure accuracy for smaller geographies like municipalities, the annual figures are actually five-year averages. For example, the data for 2011 is an average of data from 2007-2011. Click on a municipality to the median income for each year and the change. Explore the interactive map here.
Read MoreGrowing concerns about wealth inequality and the expanding racial wealth gap have in recent years become central to the debate over whether our nation is on a sustainable economic path. This report provides critical new information about what has fueled the racial wealth gap and points to policy approaches that will set our country in a more equitable and prosperous direction.
New research shows the dramatic gap in household wealth that now exists along racial lines in the United States cannot be attributed to personal ambition and behavioral choices, but rather reflects policies and institutional practices that create different opportunities for whites and African-Americans. So powerful are these government policies and institutional practices that for typical families, a $1 increase in average income over the 25-year study period generates just $0.69 in additional wealth for an African-American household compared with $5.19 for a white household. Part of this equation results from black households having fewer opportunities to grow their savings beyond what needed for emergencies.
Read MoreSUMMARY: Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, as amended (Fair Housing Act or Act), prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of dwellings and in other housing-related activities on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, or national origin.1 HUD, which is statutorily charged with the authority and responsibility for interpreting and enforcing the Fair Housing Act and with the power to make rules implementing the Act, has long interpreted the Act to prohibit practices with an unjustified discriminatory effect, regardless of whether there was an intent to discriminate. The eleven federal courts of appeals that have ruled on this issue agree with this interpretation. While HUD and every federal appellate court to have ruled on the issue have determined that liability under the Act may be established through proof of discriminatory effects, the statute itself does not specify a standard for proving a discriminatory effects violation. As a result, although HUD and courts are in agreement that practices with discriminatory effects may violate the Fair Housing Act, there has been some minor variation in the application of the discriminatory effects standard.
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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.
Read MoreWhat is the ‘American Dream’? When asked that question, many may envision houses with white picket fences coupled with children, hardworking parents and let us not forget the dog. A quite modest picture is painted, however the question and its subsequent answer that will have the most consequence for the future of America revolves around who and not what. Who is able to achieve the ‘American Dream’? Is everyone afforded the same opportunity to achieve the ever so coveted ‘American Dream’? As we perform an equity analysis on cities and suburbs …
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This paper will compare the townships of Maplewood and Irvington, New Jersey. Although the towns share a geographic border, the difference between the two communities is considerable. In Part I, I survey the financial differences and fairly typical Census measurements. In Part II, I will review how opportunity for class mobility is present or not present in each community. For this analysis, I am looking at how concentrated poverty in Irvington restricts mobility as compared to Maplewood where such hyper-segregation and concentrations of poverty do not exist.
Read MoreThe New Jersey Supreme Court‘s Mount Laurel decisions (1975 and 1983) ruled that local zoning had to take into account regional housing needs, obligating the state‘s 566 localities to provide their ―fair share of affordable housing. Although these two decisions havelong been seen across the nation as seminal ones with respect to land use and affordable housing opportunity, their role in New Jersey land use regulation and practice remains hotly contested many decades later. The cumbersome procedures and micro-management of local planning that have …
Read Moren the Baltimore region, a successful housing mobility program is providing families living in very disadvantaged inner city communities with a new home and a chance for a new life. Minority voucher holders in the federal Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly titled Section 8) have often been limited to living in “voucher submarkets” where racial and economic segregation is high and opportunities are limited. The Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, a specialized regional voucher program operating with deliberate attention to expanding fair housing choice, has overcome some of the biggest barriers to using vouchers in suburban and city neighborhoods where opportunities are abundant. The program’s results-oriented approach has produced a replicable set of best practices for mobility programs while presenting an important model for reform of the national Housing Choice Voucher Program. This report, New Homes, New Neighborhoods, New Schools: A Progress Report on the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, provides the first-ever comprehensive description of the program.
Read MoreThe community land trust (CLT) movement is young but expanding rapidly. Nearly 20 community land trusts are started every year as either new nonprofits or as programs or subsidiaries of existing organizations. Fueling this proliferation is a dramatic increase in local government investment and involvement. Over the past decade, a growing number of cities and counties have chosen not only to support existing CLTs, but also to start new ones, actively guiding urban development and sponsoring affordable housing initiatives.
Two key policy needs are driving increased city and county interest in CLTs, particularly in jurisdictions that put a social priority on promoting homeownership for lower-income families and a fiscal priority on protecting the public’s investment in affordable housing.
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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.
Read MoreIn the decade before and after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, de jure segregation, the system of racially identified space, coalesced with formal land use planning to institutionalize de facto segregation in the city and suburbs of New Orleans, notwithstanding some of the most considerable early antisegregation forces in the nation’s history. Although the actual geographic fault lines changed over time, the basic color scheme did not. Race-neutral land use regulation reproduced the patterns of racial inequality that slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation …
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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.
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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.
Read MoreEXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This report presents results from the first phase of the latest national Housing Discrimination Study (HDS2000), sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and conducted by the Urban Institute. These results are based on 4,600 paired tests, conducted in 23 metropolitan areas nationwide during the summer and fall of 2000. In a paired test, two individuals—one minority and the other white—pose as otherwise identical homeseekers, and visit real estate or rental agents to inquire about the availability of advertised housing units. This methodology provides direct evidence of differences in the treatment minorities and whites experience when they search for housing.
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