Funded Proposals: HUD Spatial Research Grant Competition

Title: Subsidized Inequities: The Spatial Patterning of Environmental Risks and Federally Assisted Housing

Principal Investigator: Susan Cutter, Michael Hodgson and Kirstin Dow, Department of Geography, University of South Carolina

Summary
The issue of fairness in the distribution and impact of environmental pollution continues to generate interest and controversy about whether or not low-income and minority communities bear a disproportionate burden of the environmental risks. This research project will examine the following three questions: (1) are facilities handling toxic materials disproportionately located in areas with federally assisted housing; (2) which was located first in the community--the industrial facility or the federally assisted housing; and (3) what is the relative risk from these facilities to the health and well-being of subsidized housing residents. The research plan takes a multiscale approach that analyzes aggregate data for "environmental zones of concern" around individual industrial or hazardous waste management facilities. In addition, the researchers will conduct site specific studies for potential locational inequities related to selected larger housing projects. The results of this research will provide a baseline for assessing whether or not federally assisted housing is disproportionately located in areas with substantial environmental risks for a selected number of metropolitan areas. It also will help establish criteria for siting affordable housing and guide locational decisions including the potential redevelopment of brownfields.

Title: Modeling Neighborhood Economic Transformation In Central Cities: The Role Of Federally Assisted Housing

Principal Investigators: Richard Bingham, Department of Urban Studies, Cleveland State University; Mark Salling, The Urban Center, Cleveland State University

Summary
In recent years, there has been growing concern over the decline and revitalization of central city economies. Such economies have been examined in the context of regional, national, and global economic changes. The decline also must be investigated at the neighborhood level since central city neighborhoods are not homogenous. This project will examine the relationships between federal housing assistance, other neighborhood characteristics, and neighborhood economic structure in Ohio central cities. (The researchers will conduct a more data-intensive analysis of the City of Cleveland.) The data for the project will be taken from seven sources, including the Ohio Economic Development Database, federal housing assistance data from HUD, Census data, property data from the County Auditor, building permit data from the Department of Community Development, crime incidence data from the Police Crime Lab, and data on welfare program recipients from the Department of Human Services. The research team will employ GIS techniques to develop the database and will use econometric modeling and other multivariate methods to explain neighborhood economies based on the concentration of assisted housing and a set of neighborhood stability factors. Examining central city economies at the neighborhood level will contribute to improved understanding of the dynamics of neighborhood economic changes and will be relevant to neighborhood planning and economic development in central cities.

Title: Comparing, Contrasting, and Locating Sites for Section 8 Housing in the Atlanta Metro

Principal Investigator: David Sawicki, Georgia Tech

Summary
The goal of this research is to use data analysis and GIS analysis to identify new locations for successful Section 8 tenant relocations in the Atlanta Metropolitan area. This work will provide an understanding of areas that do not currently possess a concentration of existing housing assistance recipients, but which maintain a standard of living concurrent with HUD and the metro housing authorities' goals for Section 8 relocation. Researchers will collaborate with local housing agencies to produce a data set of Section 8 clients including geographic mobility. They will then rate census tracts for appropriateness in locating Section 8 clients. The resulting template for measuring the quality of neighborhoods for Section 8 clients can be applied in other metropolitan areas.

Title: Research on the Spatial Distribution of Assisted Housing: Identification and Assessment of Tools and Methodologies for Spatial Analysis of Housing Data at Different Levels of Aggregation Using Geographic Information Systems

Principal Investigators: Derek Thompson, Department of Geography, University of Maryland at College Park; Wayne Sherwood, Sherwood Research Associates, Inc.; and David Wong, Department of Geography and Earth Systems Science, George Mason University

Summary
There have been few analyses of the spatial distribution of assisted housing programs and their relationship to the surrounding communities because, until recently, digital data were not available. HUD recently has made available large amounts of data about federally assisted housing programs; however, state, local, and regional agencies have little experience in using such information. The research team will examine critical data processing and analysis issues that apply to many housing analysis topics. The analysis will provide a foundation for the research team to develop a guide on spatial data and methodologies for housing analysis in a geographic information systems environment. The guide will consist of three parts: (1) examples of selected housing policy issues and analyses; (2) GIS issues (e.g., operational aspects, visualization tools, organization of spatial data); and (3) methodological issues (e.g., relative advantages and limitations of disaggregate data and data aggregated to different scales and zones). After completing preliminary tests, the materials will be made available via the World Wide Web.

Title: The Impact of Public Housing on Neighborhood Housing Sales, Affordability, Crime and Public Perceptions of Community Safety

Principal Investigator: John Pollard, Developmental Research and Programs, Inc. with Jon Harrison (ESRI) and Craig Ferris (ESRI)

Summary
This study proposes to investigate the impact of public housing on local neighborhood crime rates and residential housing values. It will address the extent of single family housing price depression resulting from the adjacent location of public housing sites. The study also will attempt to establish a quantifiable relationship between the proximity of public housing sites and criminal activity in the immediate neighborhoods. The proposed methodology is based on the construction of local neighborhood areas of approximately 500 meters centered on public housing sites. Control neighborhoods will be matched with public housing neighborhoods on demographic and community level variables known to be predictive of crime, delinquency, and other forms of antisocial behavior. This methodology is intended to enable researchers to tell whether the effect (if any) of the public housing site on the community decreases with increasing distance of the community from the public housing site.

Title: Welfare Reform, Public Housing, and Job Accessibility

Principal Investigators: Neil Bania, Claudia Coulton, and Laura Leete, Center for Urban Policy and Social Change, Case Western Reserve University

Summary
Due to recent welfare reform legislation, welfare recipients will be seeking jobs. Adequate access to jobs is vital to the welfare recipients success. This study will assess job access difficulties for welfare recipients, particularly public housing residents/subsidy recipients, using Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques and newly developed administrative data sources. The research team will identify concentrations of these populations and job openings in the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area. The research team will then assess the spatial distribution of support services such as daycare and public transportation. Information from the following data sources will be combined to complete the analyses: HUD's Picture of Subsidized Housing, 1990 U.S. Census Summary Tape File, geocoded administrative data on AFDC recipients, a database of location of projected job openings for the Cleveland-Akron area, and job history data for AFDC recipients from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The results of this research will help policy makers identify the scope and scale of necessary policy interventions to create adequate job access, such as daycare, public service employment, and transportation systems. The research team also will benchmark these results against national data in order to indicate the applicability of the Cleveland-Akron results to other U.S. urban areas.

Title: A Spatial Analysis of Crime and Federally Assisted Housing in New York City

Principal Investigator: John Mollenkopf, Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center with Victor Goldsmith, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College; Philip McGuire, New York City Police Department; Sara McLafferty, Hunter College; and Susan Saegert, CUNY Graduate Center

Summary
The proposed research includes a multivariate analysis of the relationship between federally assisted housing types and crime patterns in New York City. It will control for the social characteristics of tenants and the neighborhoods surrounding them, the local physical environment, and neighborhood social organization and participation. Researchers expect to find that crime is spatially correlated with certain socioeconomic and physical characteristics of specific locations, including proximity to public housing. They expect to find a high incidence of various risk factors drawn from social disorganization theory, such as population density, structural density, high population turnover, presence of teenagers, rental housing. They also expect that the presence of or proximity to schools, subway stops, and commercial property will be associated with higher levels of certain crimes. Researchers hypothesize that certain types of federally assisted housing will be correlated with lower crime levels after controlling for other risk factors due to the level of social organization and participation associated with those types of housing. Thus, they hypothesize that higher levels of social organization in some types of assisted housing may deter some kinds of criminal activity.

Title: Heterogeneous Neighborhood Effects of Public Housing

Principal Investigators: Chang-Moo Lee, The Wharton School; Dennis Culhane, School of Social Work; and Susan Wachter, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Summary
Geographic isolation of the poor generates behavioral adaptations called "concentration effects." Studies have shown a consistent relationship between social and spatial isolation; however, little research has examined the effects of public housing developments on surrounding neighborhoods. This research will measure the heterogeneous impacts of public housing, differentiated by the locational and program characteristics, on poverty concentration and property values in the surrounding neighborhoods. The researchers will compare neighborhood housing quality before and after public housing was built. The research team also will develop a localized clustering index and a dynamic definition of a neighborhood based on the location of public housing rather than on the Census tract. The results of this research should provide critical information for the policy-makers who must decide where and how to allocate increasingly scarce housing resources.

Title: The Spatial Mismatching of Community Resources, Employment Opportunities, and Welfare-to-Work Transitions

Principal Investigator: Sheldon Danziger with Scott Allard, Poverty Research and Training Center, University of Michigan School of Social Work

Summary
The success of welfare reform will depend on the human capital resources of recipients, as well as the degree to which they have access to jobs, transportation, child care, and other social services. Unfortunately, spatial disparities across these dimensions have grown and gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged urban populations have widened. This study will analyze how the spatial organization of federally-subsidized housing, employment opportunities, and support services affects the probability that welfare recipients will leave welfare for work. The research team will prepare a file of census tract-level data for all tracts in the Detroit Metropolitan Area taken from databases prepared by HUD, the 1990 Census of the Population, Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, the IRS, and the Michigan Family Independence Agency. Using spatial mapping techniques, the research team will analyze contiguity and proximity patterns to show the spatial relationships between welfare receipt, employment opportunities, and social capital resources. The research team also will model tract-level changes in the welfare caseload as a function of the characteristics of federally assisted housing programs in the tract, neighborhood demographics, social service access, location of employment opportunities, and the presence of non-profit organizations, using multivariate regression techniques. The results of this research should assist policy-makers in identifying the special needs of public housing residents as they move from welfare-to-work.

Title: The Siting of Assisted Housing and Its Impact of Neighborhood Racial Transition

Principal Investigator: William Rohe, Center for Urban and Regional Studies, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Lance Freeman and Jeanne Yang

Summary
This research will answer two questions: (1) what role did neighborhood racial composition play in the siting of assisted housing during the 1980s, and (2) how did the siting of assisted housing affect neighborhood racial transition during the 1980s. The study will examine the links among neighborhood racial composition, the siting of assisted housing, and subsequent neighborhood racial transition and the role race plays in the siting of development built under the Low Income Tax Credit Housing program and their impact on neighborhood racial transition. Using multivariate statistical methods, the research will assess the impacts of these issues. GIS technology will be used to measure the spatial relationships between assisted housing and minority neighborhoods, and map the relationships between neighborhood racial composition, the siting of assisted housing, and neighborhood racial transition. The research will inform policy makers of the effectiveness of existing policies designed to deconcentrate assisted housing recipients, and what role, if any, assisted housing plays in resegregating assisted housing recipient.