Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTBetween 1934 and the time of the 1940 Census, the US government built and leased 30,151 units of public housing, but we know little about the residents who benefited from this housing. We use a unique methodology that compares addresses of five public housing developments to complete-count data from the 1940 Census to identify residents of public housing in New York City at the time of the census. We compare these residents to the larger pool of residents living in New York City in 1940 who were eligible to apply for the housing to assess how closely housing authorities adhered to the intent of the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the Housing Act of 1937. This comparison produces a picture of whom public housing administrators considered deserving of this public benefit at the dawn of the public housing program in the United States. Results indicate a shift toward serving households with lower incomes over time. All the developments had a consistent preference for households with a "nuclear family" structure, but policies favoring racial segregation and other discretion on the part of housing authorities for tenant selection created distinct populations across housing developments. Households headed by a naturalized citizen were favored over households headed by a native-born citizen in nearly all the public housing projects. This finding suggests a more nuanced understanding of who public housing administrators considered deserving of the first public housing than archival research accounts had previously indicated.

This research investigates if and how much the shapes of school attendance zones contribute to racial segregation in schools. We find that the typical school attendance zone is relatively compact and resembles a square-like shape. Compact zones typically draw children from local residential areas, and since local areas are often racially homogeneous, this suggests that high levels of racial segregation in the largest school districts are largely structured by existing residential segregation. Still, this study finds that the United States contains some attendance zones with highly irregular shapes—some of which are as irregular as the most irregular Congressional District. Although relatively rare, attendance zones that are highly irregular in shape almost always contain racially diverse student populations. This racial diversity contributes to racial integration within school districts. These findings contradict recent theoretical and empirical scholarship arguing that irregularly shaped zones contribute to racial segregation in schools. Our findings suggest that most racial segregation in school attendance zones is driven by large-scale segregation across residential areas rather than a widespread practice among school districts to exacerbate racial segregation by delineating irregularly shaped attendance zones.

A significant amount of travel is to find food. This paper examines challenges in measuring access to food using GIS, of importance in studies of both travel and eating behavior. It compares different sources of data available including fieldwork, land use and parcel data, licensing information, commercial listings, taxation data, and online street-level photographs. It proposes how to classify different kinds of food sales places in a way that says something about their potential for delivering healthy food options. Analysts need to clearly conceptualize key variables, document measurement processes, and be clear about the strengths and weaknesses of data.