Urban Policy and Community Development
Program

Contemporary trends in housing, crime, transportation, and neighborhood diversity are shaping how urban residents work, interact, and live. IPR’s urban policy and community development faculty are examining the shifting landscape of urban life, considering a myriad of issues related to today’s urban experience. Additionally, many IPR faculty work on projects that are closely tied to urban policy in areas such as education, housing, welfare reform, community policing, and philanthropy. The group, chaired by sociologist Lincoln Quillian, is targeting:

Overview of Activities

Tax Policy and State Expenditures
As part of her work on the state fiscal crises of the early 2000s, strategy and management professor Therese McGuire, ConAgra Foods Research Professor, organized a Washington, D.C., conference on tax policy, “State and Local Finances: After the Storm, Is Smooth Sailing Ahead?” It was sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

McGuire investigated how welfare reform has changed state spending patterns. In a paper published in Working and Poor: How Economics and Policy Changes Are Affecting Low-wage Workers (Russell Sage Foundation), she and her co-author David Merriman of Loyola University Chicago found that state spending on social welfare programs was higher in the post-reform era and appears to have increased with corresponding rises in unemployment. They also showed that public aid spending increased as a total share of state expenditures because of costs associated with Medicaid, which is outpacing all other social assistance spending over the past 25 years.

McGuire is also working on issues related to educational funding. She made a presentation in August on the Illinois system of educational financing to a task force on Illinois state finances of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. She is continuing work in this area in a project with Nathan Anderson of the University of Illinois at Chicago that will examine Illinois property taxes in detail and will eventually explore how they are used to finance schools in the state. The project is supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In a related project, she is working on a paper with Leslie Papke of Michigan State University titled “The Local Funding of Schools: The Property Tax and Its Alternatives,” which will appear in the Handbook of Education Policy.

With Kim Rueben of the Urban Institute, McGuire undertook a study of the effects of Colorado’s tax limitation measure, the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), on economic growth. Proponents of TABOR had argued that Colorado’s relatively rapid economic growth was due, in part, to TABOR. The authors found no systematic evidence to support this claim. The study was published in State Tax Notes, and its findings were reported in various newspapers in states considering TABOR-like measures on the November 2006 ballot.

Urban Policy and Poverty
At the March 10 policy briefing on “Community Change in Chicago: How is the Landscape Shifting?” IPR faculty, political scientist Wesley G. Skogan, and sociologists Mary Pattillo and Juan Onésimo Sandoval, examined trends in housing, crime, and neighborhood diversity.

Sociologist Juan Onésimo Sandoval is currently at work on a book manuscript titled “The Social Order of the American Metropolis: How Race and Class Have Restructured America’s Colorful Colorline.” It will trace patterns of racial and economic segregation prevalent in American cities.

Sandoval continues to investigate the extent of ethnic and economic diversity in Asian and Latino populations. He has examined pan-Latino identity formation and the diversity of pan-ethnic Latino enclaves in the U.S., and he conducted a comparative study of pan-ethnic Latino and Asian neighborhoods. He shows that pan-Asian enclaves tend to represent a very diverse pan-Asian population while Latino enclaves tend to be more homogeneous.

Sandoval also explored inequality in neighborhood incomes for Chicago from 1980 to 2000. While income disparities have declined in predominantly white neighborhoods, he found they are on the rise in black neighborhoods; racially integrated neighborhoods display a higher degree of income inequality; and income disparity is greater in urban centers than in the suburbs for all racial groups.

Community Development
From the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago to far-flung communities in Ireland, Rwanda, and Ethiopia, the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute is teaching residents how to find and use local resources to rejuvenate their economies, strengthen public and private investments in community, and ultimately rebuild civil society. ABCD is co-directed by John McKnight and John Kretzmann.

In Ethiopia, ABCD has been working with Oxfam Canada and the Coady International Institute on a three-year project that covers a variety of activities such as establishing women’s credit circles and rebuilding roads and wells for several villages. In Rwanda, the institute has partnered with religious organizations in Kigali on community development projects for building roads and creating jobs. Residents of the isolated Rwandan city of Mumbai decided to build a health clinic after reviewing their community assets.

In Ireland, ABCD has been involved in a Dublin Docklands development project. The Docklands is a former dock area on the city’s east side. The project aims to develop this formerly depressed industrial area by 2012 into a sustainable example of inner-city regeneration, with affordable housing, schools, and places to work and socialize. The institute is helping to ensure that the established working-class residents are not pushed aside during the revitalization process.

ABCD worked with the Chicago Police Department to train 1,200 neighborhood representatives through the Community Policing Leadership Development Institute on neighborhood safety projects. Nationally, the institute has designed and helped to deliver community development training to thousands of AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and VISTA leaders and volunteers.