Annette Steinacker

The Economic Effect of Urban Colleges on their Surrounding Communities

Typical university impact studies in the US have focused on large institutions and their impact on an entire metropolitan region. We know little about the impact of small schools or the impact of a college on just its surrounding city or neighbourhood, despite recent interest in the relationship of colleges to city neighbourhood revitalisation. This article illustrates that, with two simple adjustments, the standard impact study can produce an estimate of a typical urban colleges economic effect matched to its surrounding community, rather than to the urban region as a whole. A case study using this approach found that even a small US college with a predominantly commuter population had a significant effect on the city in which it was located.

Infill Development And Affordable Housing Patterns from 1996 to 2000

The amount of residential development in cities has been much greater than the media coverage of suburban sprawl suggests. Unfortunately, there is also some evidence that cities with higher levels of infill development have more expensive new housing construction than their suburbs. The average price differential is not substantial, but it does suggest that tensions between achieving the two goals of greater infill development and more affordable city housing do exist.

Economic Restructuring of Cities, Suburbs, and Nonmetropolitan Areas, 1977-1992

Earlier research on the impact of national economic restructuring on central-city economies suffered from several problems, including excessive aggregation of the data and reliance on absolute change in economic activity to measure growth. When these factors are corrected, one sees that central cities frequently attracted more new firms than other locations (absolute growth), but their growth rate was below that in suburbs and nonmetropolitan areas (relative growth) as well as the national rate. These below-average rates occurred in many of the 13 economic sectors studied, including low-skill and high-skill services, in which central cities were expected to perform well. The few bright spots—central cities in the South and West, which initially outperformed all other locations in those regions—have faded as well.

PROSPECTS FOR REGIONAL GOVERNANCE Lessons from the Miami Abolition Vote

Circumstances surrounding the 1997 city dissolution vote in Miami were ideal for establishing a metropolitan government, based on arguments from the traditional urban politics literature. Yet it did not happen. How did the issue make it onto the public agenda but fail to be adopted? The author argues that changes in metropolitan governance need to be understood as the outcomes of an agenda-setting process and not solely based on the distribution of winners and losers, as suggested by the public-choice/metropolitan reform literature. The Miami case clearly illustrates the importance of focusing events, a skilled policy entrepreneur, and timing of events as interest fades and the window of opportunity closes. It also illustrates the power of a policy image to trigger emotional attachments that can mobilize inattentive publics.

Message of Appreciation to Our Book Review Editor and Editorial Board

The Urban Affairs Review (UAR) editorial team would like to acknowledge the contributions to the journal by outgoing Book Review Editor, Deborah Martin. She has been a valued member of our editorial team for the last three years and we are grateful for her willingness to serve the journal in this role. We would also like to acknowledge the following 11 individuals who have supported UAR through service on our editorial board for the past three years:

The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land‐Use Policies

vote choice, incumbency and party identification, is not related to candidate sex” (109). The same conclusion applied to the analysis of issues in Chapter 5. A few “gendered” issues, including defense, child care, women’s rights, and attitudes towards the women’s movement played a role in isolated elections (133). Chapter 6 offers some explanations for the inconclusive results regarding the influence of candidate sex on voting behavior. Dolan argues that the electoral environment matters, supporting conclusions about the agenda setting role played by the media. One of the most interesting parts of the book is Dolan’s analysis of media coverage of women candidates, illustrating that 1992 produced record coverage of women candidates followed by declining interest by the media. At the same time, the number of women candidates continues to increase beyond 1992 levels. Consistent with previous research, Dolan also found that voters with low to moderate levels of information are most affected by the electoral environment which is “key in helping to determine whether or not people will be able to connect their interests with women and vote accordingly” (143). In the end, Dolan describes the role of candidate sex as having a “more complex and nuanced impact on voters than we may have imagined” (154). In many ways this is good news for women candidates. Gone are the days when women were openly discriminated against in the political arena. Yet much research remains to be done to fully understand how the public evaluates women candidates. Any potential weaknesses of this study are readily acknowledged by the author, including the limited time span covered and availability of data for less than half of the districts and/or states that fielded women candidates. The disparity of results from the pooled data and the individual election years raises interesting questions about the role of the individual candidates and campaign events. Additional research is needed to explore whether the attitudes towards women candidates analyzed in this study are subject to change over time as the numbers of women in elective office, particularly Republican women, continue to increase. Dolan’s overview of the history of women in elective office combined with quantitative analysis of voter perceptions of women candidates over time (all written in easily understandable language) provides the benchmark for further study.