Leah Brooks

From Today's City to Tomorrow's City: An Empirical Investigation of Urban Land Assembly

Because cities are constrained by the boundaries of land ownership, fundamental urban modifications require land delineation changes. We evaluate whether there is enough land assembly--the joining together of two or more parcels of land--to put land to its highest value use. We hypothesize that in the absence of market frictions such as holdouts, the price of land sold for assembly should not exceed the price of land sold for other uses. Empirically, we find that to-be-assembled land in Los Angeles trades at a 15 to 40 percent premium and conclude that significant frictions prevent assembly.

Spending within Limits: Evidence from Municipal Fiscal Restraints

This paper studies the role of a constitutional rule new to the literature: a limit placed by a city on its own ability to tax or spend. We find that such a limit exists in at least 1 in 8 cities, and that limits are not adopted in response to high levels of or variability in taxation. After limit adoption, municipal revenue growth declines by 16 to 22 percent. Our results suggest that institutional constraints may be effective when representative government falls short of the median voter ideal.

Where Does the Bucket Leak? Sending Money to the Poor Via the Community Development Block Grant Program

Since the inception of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program in 1975, cities and large urban counties have been entitled to funding based on a formula designed to approximate community need. As with any such federally funded and locally administered program, there is a tension between federal and local control. At the federal level, one of CDBGs main goals is to benefit low- and moderate-income (LMI) people and places. While a substantial literature assesses how well CDBG funds are targeted to needy recipient jurisdictions, evidence on how funds are distributed within recipient jurisdictions is much more limited. In this article, we examine the distribution of CDBG funds relative to the share of LMI people at the council-district and neighborhood levels in Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California, for 1998 – 2004. In Los Angeles, we find that relatively poorer council districts receive more than they would were funds distributed following the share of LMI people. In contrast, Chicagos relatively poorer council districts receive lower funding than predicted by their share of the LMI population. This difference across council districts within the cities is partially explained by the greater sensitivity of allocations in Chicago to the location of high-income households. Despite these disparities, policy answers are not obvious; any policy that aims to enhance CDBGs reach to LMI people must contend with the erosion of broad-based political support that this would engender.