Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
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Presented November 21, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
Read MorePresented November 7, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
Read MoreIn August 2014, a Ferguson, Missouri, policeman shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. Michael Brown’s death and the resulting protests and racial tension brought considerable attention to that town. Observers who had not been looking closely at our evolving demographic patterns were surprised to see ghetto conditions we had come to associate with inner cities now duplicated in a formerly white suburban community: racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty and unemployment, poor student achievement in overwhelmingly black schools, oppressive policing, abandoned homes, and community powerlessness.
Media accounts of how Ferguson became Ferguson have typically explained that when African Americans moved to this suburb (and others like it), “white flight” followed, abandoning the town to African Americans who were trying to escape poor schools in the city. The conventional explanation adds that African Americans moved to a few places like Ferguson, not the suburbs generally, because prejudiced real estate agents steered black home buyers away from other white suburbs. And in any event, those other suburbs were able to preserve their almost entirely white, upper-middle-class environments by enacting zoning rules that required only expensive single family homes, the thinking goes.
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Presented October 10, 2014 as part of the Equity and Opportunity Studies Fellowship workshop series, a partnership between CLiME at the Rutgers Law School, and the Graduate School at Rutgers University-Newark
Read MoreUnder New Jersey’s Mount Laurel Doctrine on exclusionary zoning and affordable housing, and the state Fair Housing Act enacted in 1985, all New Jersey municipalities and State agencies with land use authority have a constitutional obligation to create a realistic opportunity for development of their fair share of the regional need for housing affordable to low and moderate income households. This housing need, and associated fair share obligations, has three components: Rehabilitation Need, Prior Round obligation (1987-1999) and Prospective Need (post-1999). This document presents the methodology for calculating and allocating regional prospective housing need for 1999-2024 to New Jersey’s 565 municipalities, and then calculating the Net Prospective component of each municipality’s fair share housing obligation. It also provides the results of these calculations for all municipalities, calculating their Net Prospective Need for 1999-2024 using the Prior Round (1987-1999) methodology.
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In order to understand affordable housing and the issues surrounding public housing, we must know the background of how it evolved. The following section will provide landmark history of affordable housing and its development in the United States. This section will also discuss the evolution of affordable housing and the impact it has had on American families.
Read MoreFaced with a growing crisis of homeowner residents whose properties are “underwater” or already in foreclosure, many cities around the United States have explored the possibility of expediting mortgage principal write-downs through the extraordinary exercise of eminent domain. As of this writing, no city has actually followed through, and one, Richmond, California, has already been sued. Several cities in New Jersey are contemplating the use of redevelopment law as the only available local power to stabilize their tax bases and bring relief to homeowners.
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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.
Read MoreIn a 2011 public opinion poll, The Pew Charitable Trusts asked Americans how important they thought a number of factors were in determining whether people in the United States get ahead or fall behind economically. More than 80 percent of respondents identified factors such as hard work, personal ambition, and access to education as key drivers of upward mobility, while less than half viewed growing up in a good neighborhood as an important factor. On the contrary, respondents strongly agreed that a young person with drive, ambition, and creativity growing up in a poor neighborhood is more likely to get ahead economically than someone who grew up in a more affluent neighborhood but lacks those personal attributes.
Contrary to these perceptions, however, evidence is building that location actually matters a great deal and that Americans' economic mobility prospects vary by state, locality, and even neighborhood. This report adds to the growing body of research as it examines economic mobility across 96 U.S. metropolitan areas and the role of place in Americans' prospects of moving up or down the economic ladder.
Read MoreConnectivity is the measurement of how easily one can travel in and out of a place. Connectivity is what makes a commute to work, or a simple trip to the grocery store, possible. A state can have one thousand fancy trains. But, if you have no car, none of those trains stop in your town, and there are no bus stops either, you’re not going anywhere. Conversely, your hometown could be the most well-connected and transit- friendly town on the planet. But, if the job you want is in a town where there is no transit, you cannot get to work.
Read MoreNewark’s story is one that has been told and retold. Once a bustling industrial power and an engine of the middle class, in recent decades the city has been wounded by racial strife, suburban flight, and industrial abandonment. From a high in 1948 of nearly half a million, Newark’s population today has plummeted to 277, 540. The intersection of Broad St. and Market St., once the busiest retail nexus in the country, is now a shadow of its former self. More than a quarter of Newark’s people are in poverty, and its black population is hypersegregated from its white population …
Read MoreINTRODUCTION: 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.
Read MoreEXECUTIVE SUMMARY: New Jersey has a curious status regarding school desegregation. It has had the nation’s most venerable and strongest state law prohibiting racially segregated schooling and requiring racial balance in the schools whenever feasible. Yet, it simultaneously has had one of the worst records of racially imbalanced schools.
In 1881, a New Jersey statute was enacted that prohibited segregated schooling based on race, one of the very first such laws in the nation.1 In 1947, New Jersey adopted a state constitutional provision that specifically prohibited segregation in the public schools.2 It is the only state with such an explicit provision. Connecticut’s state constitution, the next strongest, bars “segregation or discrimination in the exercise or enjoyment of his or her civil or political rights,” but it does not specify the public schools.
Read MoreEducation attainment in the United States has a direct causal link with economic success. In 2012, the plurality of unemployed persons is represented by those with less than a high school diploma; higher level of education has an undeniable negative correlation with unemployment. Furthermore, those with little or no educational attainment who are employed find themselves making wages significantly less than those with a higher level. An individual’s level of educational attainment, therefore, has a direct correlation with his monetary earning, and distance away from …
Read MoreSoon after the initial shock of largest hurricane to ever hit the Jersey Shore began to dissipate, scholars, reporters and advocates began to look deeper at the implications of the disaster. Like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy exposed fundamental inequities in our society that resulted in frightening racial and economic disparities between those devastated by the storm, and those less affected. We learned from Hurricane Katrina that “outsiders who wonder why residents ‘chose’ housing susceptible to flooding disregard the legacy of laws and hostility that excluded …
Read MoreSince 1975, the Mount Laurel doctrine has required that New Jersey municipalities provide their fair share of the regional need for low and moderate-income housing. Yet despite this landmark decision, New Jersey is still one of the top ten most racially and economically segregated states. In this paper, I will provide a working definition of exclusionary zoning in the both the economic and racial contexts. I will argue that despite the powerful efforts of the judiciary to position New Jersey’s at the forefront of inclusionary land use policy, the practice of exclusionary zoning …
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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.
Read MoreABSTRACT: 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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