Rolf Pendall

Opposition to Housing NIMBY and Beyond

Whether new housing is government assisted or market rate, it can face opposition from established residents. Some observers contend that such opposition arises from “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) sentiments. The author uses research on controversies in the residential development approvals process in the San Francisco Bay Area to develop insights on whether this characterization is justified. He finds that people give many reasons for their opposition to new houses; some are related to their effects on people next door. Quantitative analysis suggests that projects generating NIMBY protests are distinct from projects that generate other kinds of protests, especially those against growth more generally.

Vulnerable people, precarious housing, and regional resilience: an exploratory analysis

This article has two purposes. First, it explores the ideas of vulnerability, precariousness, and resilience as they apply to people, housing, neighborhoods, and metropolitan areas. People might be more vulnerable to shocks or strains, we propose, if they are members of racial/ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, non-high school graduates, are children or over 75 years old, disabled, recent veterans, living in poverty, or living in single-parent households. Housing may be more precarious, we propose, when it is rented, multi-family, manufactured, crowded, or subject to overpayment. The article goes on to document the relationships between potential personal or household vulnerability and potentially precarious housing conditions. Microdata from the 2005–2007 American Community Survey suggest that an important minority of people have multiple vulnerabilities; these vulnerabilities associate with residence in precarious housing. We suggest that policy be directed toward precarious situations most likely to afflict the most vulnerable populations, especially single-parent households and immigrants.

Why High-Poverty Neighborhoods Persist The Role of Precarious Housing

Why do we see persistence, recurrence, and new emergence of concentrated poverty in U.S. cities? In this article, we explore an understudied connection: whether an important part of the built environment—a series of attributes that constitute precarious housing—constitutes a durable substrate on which concentrated poverty predictably emerges and recurs and if so, how this might vary across the United States. Poverty grew fastest between 2000 and 2005–2009 in tracts that began the decade with high levels of rented one- to four-family housing, multifamily housing, housing between 20 and 25 years old, and households paying over 30% of their income for housing costs. In addition, poverty grew fastest in tracts with high percentages of black or Hispanic households in 2000.

Transportation Access, Rental Vouchers, and Neighborhood Satisfaction: Evidence From the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is designed in part to expand the neighborhood choices of assisted households, thereby enabling assisted households to find a living environment that simultaneously meets their housing and neighborhood preferences. While several studies have examined the impact of rental subsidies on neighborhood satisfaction, few have examined whether access to adequate transportation enables HCV recipients to locate housing in more desirable locations. This article relies on data from the Moving to Opportunity experiment to examine the impact of transportation access, rental housing vouchers, and geographic constraints on neighborhood satisfaction. We find that access to both vehicles and public transit positively influences neighborhood satisfaction, and the influence of vehicle access varies with transit proximity. These findings point to the importance of transportation in helping low-income assisted renter households locate housing in more desirable neighborhoods.

NEIGHBORHOOD‐LEVEL ECONOMIC ACTIVITY AND CRIME

ABSTRACT Theories of criminology suggest that neighborhood‐level economic activity affects the conditions that make crime more likely. However, most studies on neighborhoods and crime focus solely on residential characteristics and ignore the commercial ones. In this article, we estimate the effect of neighborhood‐level economic activity on crime holding residential characteristics constant. To do so, we use crime and census data combined with a detailed data set on establishments in Washington, DC from 2000 to 2010 to create a comprehensive measure of neighborhood‐level economic activity. We exploit the panel nature of the data to identify the directionality of the results by removing unobserved heterogeneity and estimating lags and leads of economic activity. Results indicate that increases in economic activity are associated with reductions in property crime, but that the reduction in property crime occurs before the growth in economic activity and rises afterward. Violent crime declines the same year as growth in economic activity.

Ballot box planning: Rail referenda implementation

Metropolitan areas in the United States frequently finance new rail lines with local option taxes, and, as a result, rail plans and associated taxes often come before voters as ballot measures. Existing research finds that rail ballot measures are more likely to pass when taxes are linked to specific projects and planning has broad stakeholder involvement. Such studies, however, have not examined to what extent agencies implement voter-approved projects. This research fills this gap and finds the interrelated variables of ballot measure provisions, campaign supporters and strategies, and planned rail projects contribute to varied progress toward implementation in Denver, Houston, and Miami. In addition, a fourth variable, transit agency capacity, is critical for implementation and for securing federal support. Because electoral strategies may contribute to or mitigate implementation challenges, rail and regional advocates should weigh the long-term consequences of ambitious rail plans and consider transit agency capacity.

The Growth of Control? Changes in Local Land-Use Regulation in Major U.S. Metropolitan Areas From 1994 to 2003

ABSTRACT Amid concerns that increasingly stringent local land-use regulations are constraining housing development across the United States, there is a need for an empirical investigation into whether, how, and where such regulations are being enacted. In this article, we report the results of a nationwide (n = 728 jurisdictions, representing almost a quarter of the U.S. population) survey of local land-use regulation, unprecedented for having been conducted at two distinct points in time (1994 and 2003). Using descriptive statistics and logistic modeling, we arrive at four main findings. First, we find that regulations are in flux to an underappreciated degree, being frequently enacted but also often abandoned. Second, we find a strong regional orientation to the use of certain regulatory tools. Third, we find more evidence in support of land-use regulations being used to solve local problems than to intentionally exclude new residents. Finally, we find that high levels of education are frequently associated with the use of tools that have a redistributive or proaffordable housing intent.