Land Use Prof Blog

Carlson on Priceless Property

Kirsten Matoy Carlson (Wayne State) has posted Priceless Property, forthcoming in the Georgia State University Law Review.  The abstract:

In 2011, the poorest Indians in the United States refused to accept over $1 billion dollars from the United States government. They reiterated their long held belief that money – even $1.3 billion dollars – could not compensate them for the taking of their beloved Black Hills. A closer look at the formation of the Sioux claim to the Black Hills helps us to understand why the Sioux Nation has repeatedly rejected over $1 billion dollars in compensation for land taken by the United States over 100 years ago. This article seeks to understand why the Sioux view the Black Hills as priceless by studying the formation of the Black Hills claim. It constructs a new, richer approach to understanding dispute formation by combining narrative analysis with the sociolegal framework for explaining dispute formation. The article argues that narratives enrich the naming, claiming, and blaming stages of dispute creation and illustrates the usefulness of this new approach through a case study of the Black Hills claim. It uses the autobiographical work of an ordinary Sioux woman to provide a narrative lens to the creation of the Sioux claim to the Black Hills. American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Sa presents a narrative of Sioux life around the time of the claims emergence. By contextualizing and humanizing the claim, my analysis provides insights into why the Sioux claim to the Black Hills emerged into a legal dispute and helps to explain why the Black Hills remain priceless property to the Sioux Nation today.

This article employs more of a law-and-humanities approach focusing on social and historical context and personal stories, which I think makes it an interesting read.

Matt Festa

Alexander on Hip-Hop and Housing

It was great to see Matt, Ngai, Ken, Steve Clowney (PropertyProf blog) and a bunch of other friends at ALPS this past weekend.  I was very glad to have the chance to meet Lisa Alexander (Wisconsin), whose scholarship Matt (here) and I (here) have blogged about before.  Lisa has posted a new work, Hip-Hop and Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, and Law, 63 Hastings L. J. 803 (2012).  Here's the abstract: 

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based lawmaking. Cultural collective efficacy describes positive social networks that inner-city residents develop through participation in musical, artistic, and other neighborhood-based cultural endeavors. This Article analyzes two examples of cultural collective efficacy: the early development of hip-hop in the Bronx and community murals developed by Mexican immigrants in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. These examples show that cultural collective efficacy can help inner-city residents mitigate the negative effects of living in a poor and segregated community and obtain more concrete benefits from urban revitalization in their communities. Cultural collective efficacy also provides a framework to examine important microdynamics in the inner-city that scholars and policymakers have ignored. Lastly, this Article devises new combinations of place-based laws that might protect cultural collective efficacy, such as: (1) historic districts with affordable housing protections secured through transferable development rights, (2) foreclosure prevention strategies, (3) techniques to mitigate eminent domain abuse, and (4) reinterpretations of the Fair Housing Act's "affirmatively furthering" fair housing mandate. These examples of place-based lawmaking may more effectively promote equitable development and advance distributive justice in U.S. housing law and policy.

Jim K.

Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and Housing

Hope everyone had a good Martin Luther King Day yesterday.  An important part of Dr. King's legacy is his involement in advocating against de facto residential segregation and for fair and affordable housing as part of a broader conception of civil rights.  On this issue, King did more than make speeches-- he actually moved his family's home.  From the Chicago Encyclopedia:

King relied on his lieutenant James Bevel to energize the first phases of the campaign, but in January 1966 he captured national headlines when he moved his family into a dingy apartment in the West Side ghetto. It was not until June that King and his advisors, under pressure to produce results, settled on a focus for the Chicago movement. King himself participated in two dramatic marches into all-white neighborhoods during a two-month open-housing campaign during the summer of 1966. These fair-housing protests brought real estate, political, business, and religious leaders to the conference table for “summit” negotiations.

And the Chicago Tribune:

The marches led to an accord that year between the protesters and the Chicago Real Estate Board. The board agreed to end its opposition to open-housing laws in exchange for an end to the demonstrations. Before he left town, King said it was "a first step in a 1,000-mile journey."

A journey that still continues.

UPDATE: Steve Clowney at Property Prof links to an opinion piece on Dr. King's legacy and fair housing in New Jersey today.

Matt Festa

McFarlane on Instability and Minority Homeownership

My former colleague, Audrey McFarlane (Baltimore), has posted The Properties of Instability: Markets, Predation, Racialized Geography, and Property Law, 2011 Wisc. L. Rev. 855 (2011).  Here's the abstract:

A central, symbolic image supporting property ownership is the image of stability. This symbol motivates most because it allows for settled expectations, promotes investment, and fulfills a psychological need for predictability. Despite the symbolic image, property is home to principles that promote instability, albeit a stable instability. This Article considers an overlooked but fundamental issue: the recurring instability experienced by minority property owners in ownership of their homes. This is not an instability one might attribute solely to insufficient financial resources to retain ownership, but instead reflects an ongoing pattern, exemplified throughout the twentieth century, of purposeful involuntary divestment of land owned by members of racial minorities, particularly Black Americans. The subprime mortgage crisis, the most current manifestation of this involuntary land loss, can be attributed to property doctrine’s policy embrace of markets and importation of contract principles such as the “freedom of contract.” This embrace of markets and contracts ignores the reality that real estate markets are racially segregated, and due to the nature of those disparate markets, easily exploitable. The current racially concentrated subprime mortgage crisis has torn the stable property image apart by revealing longstanding truths: that fraud, exploitation, and desperation are not anomalous. These truths present a disquieting reality: that the persistent and enduring experience for minorities is instability. They also present an overlooked insight that there is a dark side of property ownership: that fraud, exploitation, and desperation are the bad that enables the good of property markets. Because this “bad” is both ubiquitous and geographically situated, it suggests that stability for some within the system of property ownership is provided at the expense of instability for others. This Article argues that we should begin to pay attention to an under-theorized stick in the bundle of property rights: “the right to keep.”

Jim K.

Chan, Gedal, Been, & Haughwout on the Role of Neighborhood Characteristics in Mortgage Default

Sewin Chan (NYU Wagner), Michael Gedal (NYU Wagner), Vicki Been (NYU Law), and Andrew Haughwout (Federal Reserve Bank-New York) have posted The Role of Neighborhood Characteristics in Mortgage Default Risk: Evidence from New York City. The abstract:

Using a rich database of non-prime mortgages from New York City, we find that census tract level neighborhood characteristics are important predictors of default behavior, even after controlling for an extensive set of controls for loan and borrower characteristics. First, default rates increase with the rate of foreclosure notices and the number of lender-owned properties (REOs) in the tract. Second, default rates on home purchase mortgages are higher in census tracts with larger shares of black residents, regardless of the borrower’s own race. We explore possible explanations for this second finding and conclude that it likely reflects differential treatment of black neighborhoods by the mortgage industry in ways that are unobserved in our data.

Matt Festa

Seicshnaydre on Public Housing and Racial Segregation in Post-Katrina New Orleans

Stacy Seicshnaydre (Tulane) has posted How Government Housing Perpetuates Racial Segregation: Lessons from Post-Katrina New Orleans, 60 Cath. L. Rev. 661 (2011). In it, she explores how quantity-minded public housing advocacy and NIMBY-style public housing resistance has combined to perpetuate the racial segregation that federal law prohibits. Here's the abstract:

This Article contends that post-Katrina New Orleans exemplifies the exclusionary dynamic in which government-assisted housing operates throughout America and the fundamental failure of American housing policy at the federal, state, and local levels to prevent the racial segregation that inevitably results. Federal law has prohibited racial segregation in government-housing programs for decades, yet it has proven difficult to reverse entrenched patterns of segregation in these programs. Patterns of racial segregation have been particularly intractable in New Orleans, which, prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, boasted the second-highest level of poverty concentration in the nation and relatively high levels of poverty concentration in all of the major government-housing programs. Furthermore, low-income white residents in pre-Katrina New Orleans had greater access to middle-income neighborhoods throughout the metropolitan area of New Orleans than low-income black residents, who were overwhelmingly concentrated into high-poverty neighborhoods.

Hurricane Katrina, with its massive levee failures and neighborhood flooding, offered an opportunity for New Orleans to emerge as a more inclusive region; new government-assisted housing could have helped facilitate inclusion, while also responding to the regional-housing needs of the area. However, rental housing bans proliferated throughout the region, primarily in communities that had previously served as affordable suburban alternatives for lower- and middle-income whites in prior decades. These communities sought not only to prevent the development of new rental housing, but also to limit the repair of rental housing that preexisted the storm. At the same time, other communities in metropolitan New Orleans that were the least affordable, most homogeneous, and nationally recognized as desirable places to live were not targeted for government-assisted housing, and thus did not pass similar sweeping rental bans. Therefore, rather than using recovery efforts to reverse racially segregated housing patterns, the region took steps to exacerbate them.

This Article describes a perennial dynamic of two impulses pulling in opposite directions—the anywhere-ist and nowhere-ist impulses, which conspire to perpetuate segregation. The anywhere-ists are primarily focused on securing as much federally assisted housing as possible; the nowhere-ists are primarily focused on keeping it out of their communities. This dynamic has created a “path of least resistance,” whereby government-assisted housing continues to be provided in places where it already exists or in places that are already open and affordable.

Ultimately, federal intervention in the housing market must encompass more than providing a subsidy. It must open neighborhoods not already open, make affordable what is not already affordable, enable housing subsidies to act as gateways to educational and employment opportunity, and inform families historically excluded from housing markets about their choices. Any federal housing interventions that are not so designed will almost certainly exacerbate existing racial segregation and poverty concentration, as they have done for decades, and—as post-Katrina New Orleans illustrates—as they will continue to do, again and again and again.

Jim K.

Chan, Sharygin, Been, & Haughwout on What Happens to Distressed Mortgage Borrowers and Their Homes

Sewin Chan (NYU Wagner School), Claudia Sharygin (NYU Furman Center), Vicki Been (NYU Law), and Andrew Haughwout (Federal Reserve Bank--NY) have posted Pathways after Default: What Happens to Distressed Mortgage Borrowers and Their Homes? The abstract:

We use a detailed dataset of seriously delinquent mortgages to examine the dynamic process of mortgage default – from initial delinquency and default to final resolution of the loan and disposition of the property. We estimate a two-stage competing risk hazard model to assess the factors associated with whether a borrower behind on mortgage payments receives a legal notice of foreclosure, and with what ultimately happens to the borrower and property. In particular, we focus on a borrower’s ability to avoid a foreclosure auction by getting a modification, by refinancing the loan, or by selling the property. We find that the outcomes of the foreclosure process are significantly related to: the terms of the loan; the borrower’s credit history; current loan-to-value and the presence of a junior lien; the borrower’s post-default payment behavior; the borrower’s participation in foreclosure counseling; neighborhood characteristics such as foreclosure rates, recent house price depreciation and median income; and the borrower’s race and ethnicity.

Matt Festa

Anderson and Plaut on Implicit Racial Bias and Residential Racial Segregation

Michelle Wilde Anderson (Cal-Berkeley) and Victoria Plaut (Cal-Berkeley) have posted Property Law: Implicit Bias and the Resilience of Spatial Colorlines, a chapter in Implicit Racial Bias Across the Law (forthcoming 2011, Cambridge U. Press, Levinson & Smith, eds). Here's the abstract:

Subjectivity and discretion exert tremendous influence over property and our built environment. From members of a city council to planning commissioners, from bank actuaries to developers, from tax assessors to neighbors, individuals constantly and silently make consequential judgments. How much is a home worth? How trustworthy is a credit-seeker? Is a proposed development, land use, or landowner suitable for this community? Is this neighborhood safe? Current research in psychology can tell us much about how we make such decisions and how the race of parties involved can shape those outcomes. This chapter investigates the application of unconscious bias research to property and land use decisions that affect where people live, work, shop, and travel - decisions that in turn affect household wealth, educational opportunity, health, and personal safety.

Jim K.

Racist Place Names

Slate has an interesting article on racist places names, a follow up to the controversy about the name of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's family hunting camp (a name I don't feel comfortable repeating here).  I found this interesting because recently in Hall County, Georgia my husband and I traveled on Jim Crow Road.  And this is not something that county officials have simply overlooked, because they proudly advertise the road as the location of a park and regional tennis center on this website.  Now, whether the road is named after a person named Jim Crow, or after the pervasive and violent Southern system of racial segregation, to have a place name like this extant in 2011 seems tone deaf at best.  Perhaps my perception is colored by the fact that we represent an African-American neighborhood in Gainesville/Hall County that was established under racial segregation in the 1930s and is still suffering separate, and unequal, treatment to this day.  (My previous posts on this work are available here.)

Jamie Baker Roskie

Alexander on Lawmaking and the Debate between Place-Based and People-Based Community Development

Lisa Alexander (Wisconsin) has posted Cultural Collective Efficacy, Social Capital and Place-Based Lawmaking: Revisiting the People Versus Place Debate.  In it she renews the debate between those who advocate improving geographic communities and those who emphasize increasing options for economically and socially mobile households.  Here's the abstract:

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practioners are primarily focused on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet, the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists respectively attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a socio-legal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based lawmaking. Cultural collective efficacy describes positive social networks that inner-city residents develop through participation in musical, artistic and other neighborhood-based cultural endeavors. Cultural collective efficacy can help inner-city residents mitigate the negative effects of living in a poor and segregated community as well as obtain more concrete benefits from urban revitalization. It provides a framework to examine important microdyanmics in the “inner-city” that many scholars and policymakers have ignored. This Article devises new combinations of place-based laws that might protect cultural collective efficacy such as: (1) historic districts with affordable housing protections secured through transferable development rights, (2) foreclosure prevention strategies, (3) techniques to mitigate eminent domain abuse, and (4) re-interpretations of the Fair Housing Act’s “affirmatively furthering” fair housing mandate. These examples of place-based lawmaking may more effectively promote equitable development and advance distributive justice in U.S. housing law and policy. 

Jim K.

Von Hoffman on Housing Rights and Inequality in Post-War America

Alexander Von Hoffman (Harvard-Joint Center for Housing Studies) has posted Housing Rights and Inequality in Post-War America, a paper he presented at the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA).  His brief abstract reads:  In the United States the extension of social rights, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been contested and uneven. The politics that have shaped the American welfare state has provided some population groups greater access to these rights than others. By examining the extension of government housing subsidies during the middle decades of the twentieth century era, this paper reveals the dynamics that created social rights for some groups of citizens but not for others.

Jim K.

J.Kelly@nd.edu

Alavi on Kelo Six Years Later

Boston College Third World Law Journal Notes Editor Asher Alavi has written KELO SIX YEARS LATER: STATE RESPONSES, RAMIFICATIONS, AND SOLUTIONS FOR THE FUTURE.  Here's the abstract:

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of eminent domain takings that benefit private developers in Kelo v. City of New London. The case led to public outcry on both the right and the left and the revision of many state eminent domain laws to curtail such takings. However, most of the new laws have been ineffective. In many states, the burden of the takings falls largely onto poor, minority communities while, in others, revitalization projects by private developers are prohibited entirely. This Note examines the negative implications of current approaches to takings on inner-city, minority communities and concludes that states should adopt an approach that allows revitalization of blighted areas by private developers but also provides effective limits such as a narrow definition of blight, enhanced compensation for the displaced, and procedural provisions such as Community Benefits Agreements.

Jamie Baker Roskie

"Transportation as a Civil Rights Issue"

An interesting article in Wired magazine on a new report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights on transportation equity:

According to the report, the average cost of owning a car is just shy of $9,500. That may not sound like much until you realize the federal poverty level is $22,350 for a family of four. One-third of low-income African-American households do not have access to an automobile. That figure is 25 percent among low-income Latino families and 12.1 percent for whites. Racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to use public transit to get to work.

Yet the federal government allocates 80 percent of its transportation funding to highways.

“This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it,” the report states. “Traditional nondiscrimination protections cannot protect people for whom opportunities are literally out of reach.”

Read the full report here.

Jamie Baker Roskie

Closed Pools a Sign of Deeper Local Problems

From The New York Times, an article about the struggles local governments face in keeping their public pools open:

There are few things in life more doleful than a child looking at a closed pool on a steamy summer day, and yet that sad scene has become as common as sunburns and mosquito bites as struggling local governments make the painful choice to shut their pools to save the budget. The list of locales where public pools have been in jeopardy in recent years includes some of the sweatiest spots in the nation, including Central Florida (90s and humid on the Fourth), Atlanta (90), and Houston (97)...

The question of where pools are closed often raises issues of class and race. In the case of Houston, one of the pools closed in June was in Independence Heights, a historically black neighborhood where the median household income in 2009 was about $27,000, according to city statistics.

The city councilman for the area, Ed Gonzalez, said the loss of a pool there would sting worse than in more well-to-do neighborhoods. “There are no other true community assets out there,” he said. “Your neighborhood park and your pools are the only real amenities that some of these communities have.”

Mr. Gonzalez, a former police officer, said it was not just a matter of letting people beat the heat. The lack of a local pool, he said, could have an impact on public safety. “If kids do not have a productive thing to do, like swimming or community centers to go to,” he said, “it’s more idle time they have on their hands.”

Here in Athens the Leisure Services department seems to be doing a good job keeping the pools open, but we went without a public fireworks show this year due to lack of sponsorship.  While these types of amenities are hard for local governments to support in tough economic times, they are also key to a community's quality of life.  It will be interesting to see how deep communities will dig to maintain the rituals of summer in these difficult days.

Jamie Baker Roskie

A Reversal of the Great Migration

If you haven't already used up your June allotment of free articles on The New York Times website, you might find this article interesting.  It's entitled "For New Life, Blacks in City Head South."  An excerpt:

Life has gone full circle,” said Ms. Wilkins, whose grandmother was born amid the cotton fields of North Carolina and moved to Queens in the 1950s.

“My grandmother’s generation left the South and came to the North to escape segregation and racism,” she said. “Now, I am going back because New York has become like the old South in its racial attitudes.”

Many black New Yorkers who are already in the South say they have little desire to return to the city, even though they get wistful at the mention of the subways or Harlem nights.

Danitta Ross, 39, a real estate broker who used to live in Queens, said she moved to Atlanta four years ago after her company, responding to the surge in black New Yorkers moving south, began offering relocation seminars. She helped organize them, and became intrigued.

Ms. Ross said she had grown up hearing stories at the dinner table about segregation. She said the Atlanta she discovered was a cosmopolitan place of classical music concerts, interracial marriage and opulent houses owned by black people.

A single mother, she said that for $150,000, she was buying a seven-room house, with a three-car garage, on a nice plot of land.

Ms. Ross said she had experienced some culture shock in the South, and had been surprised to find that blacks tended to self-segregate, even in affluent neighborhoods.

She said that the South — not New York — was now home.

“People in Georgia have a different mind-set and life is more relaxed and comfortable here,” she said. “There is just a lot more opportunity.”

I'm a bit suprised by this trend, given that unemployment in Georgia, particuarly among blacks, remains very high.  But, cost of living and pace of life do account for a great deal.  Still, it's a interesting reversal of a very long trend of northern migration.

Jamie Baker Roskie

Romero on Race and Place from Berman & Brown to Kelo & Parents Involved

Tom Romero (Denver) has posted Kelo, Parents and the Spatialization of Color (Blindness) in the Berman-Brown Metropolitan Heterotopia, 2008 Utah L. Rev 947 (2008). Here's the abstract:

The article uses the 1954 eminent domain and school integration decisions in Berman v. Parker and Brown v. Board of Education and the more recent Kelo v. New London and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District cases to examine the rise of the multiracial metropolis in the United States. By linking and concomitantly exploring the United States Supreme Court’s eminent domain and school desegregation decisions, the article offers a fundamentally new approach to understanding the consequence and import of these decisions in managing property and race relations in the contemporary United States.
Analytical emphasis on the period extending from Berman-Brown through the Kelo-Parents decisions is especially important for two reasons. First, this era dramatically perfected the ability of the state to define as well as manage property and race relations. A coherent vision of well-ordered and sufficiently contained metropolitan space - represented through eminent domain and other municipal land use powers as well as through school desegregation jurisprudence - both propelled and sustained this order. Second, and intricately related is the paradox of color-consciousness and color-blindness during this period. Particularly as the nation’s racial anxieties played themselves out on a global and increasingly multiracial scale through school integration battles, land use law and takings jurisprudence obscured the multicolor segregation taking place in many of the fastest growing metropolitan areas. Together, the novel effect of each of these landmark decisions put into question the viability of a de jure-de facto distinction that became sacrosanct in American constitutional law.
This article utilizes interdisciplinary methodology and resources to describe the manner by which legally enforced color lines on a local scale became paradoxically proscribed, yet essential to what I call the multi-racial heterotopia. As a consequence of scholars largely having failed to make the link between eminent domain and school integration jurisprudence in the construction of the modern metropolitan United States, the article makes a timely and important intervention to the combined analysis of these most recent Supreme Court cases.

Jim K.

 

NYU Furman Center's State of NYC Housing & Neighborhoods

Vicki Been and the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy have announced the release of their 2010 State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods report.  Here's the email announcement, posted with permission:

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are pleased to present the 2010 edition of the State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods annual report. As you well know, this report is a critical resource for data on housing, demographics, and quality of life indicators for each borough and for the city’s 59 community districts.

This year, we examine multi-family rental properties, a critical source of housing for more than four in ten New Yorkers. We find that multi-family rental properties received more foreclosure notices in the last two years than any period since the early 1990s. The study finds that smaller multi-family rental buildings (5-19 units) are most likely to receive a foreclosure notice among the multi-family properties, while the largest properties (100 or more units) have experienced the sharpest uptick in foreclosures in the recent years. The report also finds evidence that renters experience deteriorating living conditions when multi-family rental properties fall into financial distress and foreclosure.

This year’s report also includes new chapters: Getting to Work in New York City, which presents an analysis of commuting patterns in New York City, and Public and Subsidized Rental Housing in New York City, which finds that nearly one in five residential units (18.4%) in the city is publicly supported.

A look at the trends in this year’s State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods reveals that the state of New York City’s housing market remains uncertain.  After dramatic declines in housing prices in 2008 and 2009, the prices of condominiums and multi-family buildings began to bounce back in 2010, but the prices of single-family and 2-4 family homes continued to decline. In Manhattan, where the market avoided the sharp declines of the outer boroughs, housing prices are down only 9.9 percent from their peak, compared to 27.8 percent citywide.

Mortgage lending remained low in 2009, but the number of refinancing loan originations jumped as homeowners took advantage of historically low interest rates. While the housing crisis has been felt across the city, it has had a disparate impact on different racial and ethnic groups. Homeownership grew more quickly among white and Asian families in the last decade than Hispanic or black households, and declines in home purchase during the recession were most dramatic among black and Hispanic borrowers.

Despite the recession, most of the city’s social and economic indicators have improved in the last decade. Median inflation-adjusted incomes increased about five percent between 2000 and 2009. Poverty declined citywide, falling from 21.2 percent in 2000 to 18.7 percent in 2009. The population has continued to grow, led by the Asian population, which increased by 32 percent between 2000 and 2010. Health and quality of life factors have improved since 2000, and the city has experienced overall reductions in asthma hospitalizations, infant mortality and crime.

As always, we eagerly await your comments and feedback. If you would like to receive a hard copy, please email furmancenter@nyu.edu.

Vicki Been, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sarah Gerecke

Fascinating information; you can download the full report at the link.

Matt Festa

Glover Blackwell on Social Equity and Geographic Inclusion

 
Just in time for this week's discussion of the Mt. Laurel responses to exclusionary zoning, Shelterforce, the magazine of the National Housing Institute, features an article by PolicyLink's founder and CEO, Angela Glover Blackwell.  In Equity Is Not Optional, she makes the case for both social equity as indispensable to sustainable national success and commitment to inclusionary, place-based strategies as critical to social equity.  She then sets out five principles for a social equity strategy illustrating each with model programs such as Harlem Children’s Zone and San Diego's Market Creek Plaza.   With Patrick Maier's sidebar on Inclusionary Zoning, it may make for some timely supplemental reading.

Jim K.

Tribes, Land, and the Environment

I just returned from a stimulating one-day conference at American University's Washington College of Law called Tribes, Land, and the Environment. Organized by Ezra Rosser and Sarah Krakoff,  it was a great mix of speakers on Indian law generally and environmental issues affecting/involving tribes significantly. Land use gets even more complicated when we add tribes to the mix and need to address the special issues of working with sovereign entities and federal law. I presented some of the initial findings of a larger study I am undertaking on how tribes use conservation easements. Specifically, I was examining instances where tribes hold conservation easements over land off-reservation. Much like other governments [as I have written about here], tribes use conservation easements to protect areas and ecological amenities outside their jurisdictions. I have been particularly intrigued by (1) whether tribes need to adhere to state law when entering into such agreements and (2) considering how the use of conservation easements interacts with tribes' views of property and the natural world. Intriguing stuff. If you see any examples of tribal holders in your necks of the woods, please let me know!

Many of the presentations at the conference, will appear in an edited volume of the same name.

- Jessica Owley

NPR on Desegregation's Dragging Pace

This morning NPR broadcast an interview with Brown sociologist John Logan regarding his research on the intractability of black-white residential segregation.  Logan documents the persistent unwillingness of Whites to move into stable neighborhoods in which African-Americans make up 40% or more of the area population.  The story notes that Whites are more likely to join a residential community in which they are in the minority if other Asian-Americans and/or Hispanics are also present in significant numbers.

Jim K.