Kevin Kane

Residential development during the Great Recession: a shifting focus in Phoenix, Arizona

Where people choose to live and the type of city their decisions create has formed the basis of decades of scholarly endeavor. While the typical notion of a tradeoff between access and space remains important, residential choice is more than ever shaped by the dynamics of sprawl, polycentricity, land-use institutions (zoning), and the composition of the immediately surrounding area. We analyze these new dynamics with a logistic regression model of the determinants of single-family residential development at the parcel-level in Phoenix, Arizona, during the 2002–2006 real estate boom and the 2006–2012 crash and global recession. Results show a preference for cheaper land and agricultural conversion farther from urban subcenters during the boom, while zoning, though relatively inconsistent with actual land use, is an indicator of future development. Development trajectories change dramatically during the bust, disproportionately impacting agricultural conversions and previously fast-growing areas while highlighting the depth of impact that the financial environment has on land-use change.

ZONING AND LAND USE: A TALE OF INCOMPATIBILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE IN EARLY PHOENIX

ABSTRACT: Little attention has been paid to the role of early land use institutions in development patterns, the creation of disamenity zones of environmental injustice, and the promotion of space-consuming suburban development. This study uses historic Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and spatial analytic techniques to expose zoning’s tendency to spread disamenities and disperse incompatible land uses in early Phoenix. While on paper Euclidean zoning’s stratification of land uses in Phoenix promotes progressive ideals for reduction of blight and improvement of city health, analysis at a finer scale using Sanborn maps reveals that zoning decisions in Phoenix tended to promote the expansion of fragmented land uses, especially disamenity zones that targeted poor minority neighborhoods. Zoning encouraged the expansion of industry while attracting residents to newly developed suburbs with guaranteed protection from blight.

Globalizing manufacturing but not invention: automotive transplants in the United States

ABSTRACT Production by foreign-owned automotive firms in the United States provides an opportunity to investigate the co-location of technological advance and manufacturing. While some scholars report that certain foreign firms are transplanting both of these activities to the United States, others are more circumspect. We first identify automotive patents across American metropolitan areas to develop a new taxonomy of automotive invention. Patent ownership is then traced, showing a clear gap between foreign-owned firms’ production in the United States and formation of invention capital. The findings support a hypothesis that globalization of manufacturing noticeably outpaces the spread of invention assets.

Regional Aspects of Collaborative Invention Across National Innovation Systems

Abstract This article analyzes the association between intraregional collaboration and levels of invention in nine developed countries. Patent data of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) regions of nine inventive countries are used to determine if a significant positive correlation exists between reliance on own region partners and overall invention. Strong intraregional collaboration is also related to the knowledge bases of technologies and to the tendency for inventors to team up in the first place. Results show strong evidence that inventors in highly inventive regions co-patent more with own region partners and that they have a greater tendency to collaborate in the first place. Support for the hypothesis that information and computer technologies favour own region collaboration and that more biotechnology invention encourages external alliances is mixed. However, there is far less evidence that more biotechnology invention encourages more external alliances. Variation in the results between countries is interpreted as evidence that national innovation systems have distinctive internal locational attributes. The findings refute the assertion that strengthening aspatial network proximities has eclipsed the pivotal role of intraregional linkages in technological advance.

Municipal Investment and Property Value Appreciation in Chicago’s Tax Increment Financing Districts

To determine whether Tax Increment Financing (TIF) triggers or captures growth, we examine the relationship between expenditures and property value change in Chicago’s TIF districts. A regression model relates spending type, which varies from infrastructure to developer subsidies, to a district’s property value growth between 2002 and 2012. Results show variation in the impact of spending, with subsidies for commercial development having the clearest positive relationship while infrastructure spending has a negative effect. Although trends are less clear over the long run, these differences underscore how the effectiveness of TIF cannot be surmised without accounting for variations in spending.

Invention in the United States City System

This article draws on several empirical regularities underlying central place theory (CPT) to enhance understanding of the uneven distribution of invention in the U.S. city system, especially the immense array of specializations that comprise national technological advance. CPT depicts city systems as collections of places in which functions expand in number as city size increases. Small cities have few functions and large cities many. A long-term hierarchical system is successively inclusive if large cities have all of the functions of smaller cities and some additional ones. The functions investigated here are 399 patent classes distributed across 366 U.S. metropolitan areas in the period from 2000 to 2011. Evidence is strong that patent classes with large numbers of awards are widely spread across the city system. This leads to the average sizes of places active in generating patents in the robust classes to be significantly smaller compared with the average sizes of areas that generate patents in unusual classes. Small cities are tied to national technological advance through the generation of patents in the most active and ubiquitous inventive specialties. Inventors in large cities are more likely to invent in unusual domains. Bigger areas are significantly more diversified compared with smaller ones. The system is not, however, strictly successively inclusive. Whereas 88.3 percent of all patent class–area pairs are generated in at least 50 percent of equally sized and bigger areas, only 20.5 percent of pairs are 100 percent strictly hierarchical.

Los Angeles employment concentration in the 21st century

This paper is an empirical analysis of employment centres in the Los Angeles region from 1997 to 2014. Most extant work on employment centres focuses on identification methodology or their dynamics during a period of industrial restructuring from 1980 to 2000. We analyse employment centres using point-based, rather than census tract-based employment data and a non-parametric identification method with a single concept of proximity. We focus on changes across five key industries: knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), retail, creative, industrial and high-tech, emphasising changes in centre composition as well as their boundaries. Results show far greater change across centres than previous longitudinal studies. Only 43% of the land area that is in an employment centre is part of one in both 1997 and 2014. Using a persistence score, centres range from stable to highly fluctuating, but emerging, persisting and dying centres are found in core and fringe areas alike. KIBS are most associated with stable centres, while high tech employment is attracted toward emerging areas and retail exists throughout. Emerging centres are more likely to have greater accessibility, while industrial employment becomes far more concentrated in centres by 2014.

Parcels, points, and proximity: Can exhaustive sources of big data improve measurement in cities?

While there has been no shortage of discussion of urban big data, smart cities, and cities as complex systems, there has been less discussion of the implications of big data as a source of individual data for planning and social science research. This study takes advantage of increasingly available land parcel and business establishment data to analyze how the measurement of proximity to urban services or amenities performed in many fields can be impacted by using these data—which can be considered “individual” when compared to aggregated origins or destinations. We use business establishment data across five distinctive US cities: Long Beach, Irvine, and Moreno Valley in California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and the New York borough of Staten Island. In these case studies, we show how aggregation error, a previously recognized concern in using census-type data, can be minimized through careful choice of distance measures. Informed by these regions, we provide recommendations for researchers evaluating the potential risks of a measurement strategy that differs from the “gold standard” of network distance from individually measured, point-based origins and destinations. We find limited support for previous hypotheses regarding measurement error based on the abundance or clustering of urban services or amenities, though further research is merited. Importantly, these new data sources reveal vast differences across cities, underscoring how accurate proximity measurement necessitates a critical understanding of the nuances of the urban landscape under investigation as measures appear heavily influenced by a city’s street layouts and historical development trajectories.

The Effect of the Physical Environment on Crime Rates: Capturing Housing Age and Housing Type at Varying Spatial Scales:

This study introduces filtering theory from housing economics to criminology and measures the age of housing as a proxy for deterioration and physical disorder. Using data for Los Angeles County in 2009 to 2011, negative binomial regression models are estimated and find that street segments with older housing have higher levels of all six crime types tested. Street segments with more housing age diversity have higher levels of all crime types, whereas housing age diversity in the surrounding ½-mile area is associated with lower levels of crime. Street segments with detached single-family units generally had less crime compared with other types of housing. Street segments with large apartment complexes (five or more units) generally have more crime than those with small apartment complexes and duplexes.

What Determines Public Support for Graduated Development Impact Fees

The development impact fee is one growth management tool that is often adopted to reduce externalities associated with development on the urban fringe. But it is also used as a revenue generator that offsets property taxes. While graduated impact fees are a potential means to reduce sprawling development, it is unclear which public constituencies favor their adoption. Using an adjacent category logit model, there is limited evidence for exclusion based on race or class and, surprisingly, homeownership is not a major determinant of support. The model results indicate differences in policy preferences among longtime Phoenix residents, newcomers, city dwellers, and sub/exurbanites, which may suggest a desire to maintain the status quo and shift the burden of new development to developers and homebuyers. This article contributes to local government literature through an empirical examination of how sociodemographic factors drive public support for graduated development impact fees.