Our Research

This article examines residents’ perceptions of inner-city revitalization in legacy cities. The analysis focuses on neighborhoods undergoing revitalization in a legacy city, Buffalo, NY. The article draws from data for a larger research project called Turning the Corner which was sponsored by the Urban Institute. The focus of that project was to identify planning strategies to address negative externalities caused by neighborhood change and heightened risks of displacement due to revitalization. Data were collected through a series of focus groups with residents and stakeholders
in working-class, minority neighborhoods which were identified as being in the early stages of revitalization. Two findings emerged from the analysis. First, residents perceived urban revitalization to have a destabilizing effect on traditional neighborhoods. Second, residents perceived revitalization as detrimental to the sustainability of family-friendly neighborhoods. Insights from the analysis are used to prompt planners’ advocacy for revitalization strategies aimed at protecting minority, working-class neighborhoods when institutionally driven revitalization occurs.

This article revisits Arnstein’s “ladder of citizen participation” focusing on inner-city residents’ perceptions of public input in neighborhood revitalization projects. It draws from data collected in Buffalo, New York for a larger project that aimed to address negative externalities caused
by neighborhood change. Data were collected using focus groups in neighborhoods in the early stages of revitalization. Nine focus groups took place across three neighborhoods experiencing encroachment from hospitals and universities. Data analysis was guided by standpoint theory, which
focuses on amplifying the voices of groups traditionally disenfranchised from planning processes. The findings suggest that the shortcomings of public input identified by Arnstein a half century ago remain problematic. Residents continue to perceive limited access to urban planning processes
and believe outcomes do not prioritize their interests. This is particularly problematic in minority, working-class neighborhoods when institutionally driven development occurs. Recommendations emphasize enhancing planners’ fidelity to strategies that expand citizen control.

This article examines perceptions of institutional encroachment and community responses to it in Buffalo, NY. Specifically, we focus on residents’ perceived effects of anchor institution (e.g. hospital and university) expansion on core city neighbourhoods. Through this analysis we offer insights into the processes driving neighbourhood displacement in the contemporary period. Data were collected through a series of focus groups with residents and other stakeholders in working class, minority neighbourhoods which were identified as being in the early stages of neighbourhood revitalization. A total of nine focus groups were held across three neighbourhoods experiencing encroachment due to institutional investments. The focus groups were held during the fall of 2017. The data were coded and analysed using ATLAS.ti software. The analysis was guided by standpoint theory, which focuses on amplifying the voices of groups traditionally disenfranchised from urban planning and policy processes. The findings from the analysis highlight how the expansion of anchor institutions transforms the built environment, neighbourhood identity, and everyday life in urban communities. Residents perceived change brought on by institutional encroachment as relatively unabated and unresponsive to grassroots  concerns. On balance, residents perceived the benefit of neighbourhood revitalization accruing to anchor institutions while low-income, minority
residents cope with negative externalities in a disproportionate manner. This led to heightened concerns about residential displacement and concomitant changes in their neighbourhoods’ built and social environments.

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With no moral compass, the current higher education civic engagement movement has wreaked havoc on inner city communities, especially for low-income people and people of color. This chapter explains why this happened, who it benefits, and why it largely continues unquestioned. A bold new vision is charted for higher education’s civic engagement movement that is built upon principles of systems change and a fundamentally reimagined version of cities founded on social justice. Theoretical and practical solutions are also discussed.

Kronick, R. F., Ed. (2020). Emerging Perspectives on Community Schools and the Engaged University. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-7998-0280-8

Click here to see the full chapter

Kelly Patterson and Robert Silverman of the University at Buffalo have completed a review of first year implementation of the HUD Small Area Fair Market Rent rule (adopted in 2016, suspended in 2017, reinstated by litigation, and effective April 2018).  One important takeaway of their survey is a troubling trend in a number of PHAs that are using their flexibility in setting “payment standards” to blunt the positive effect of the rule by raising rent caps in low income neighborhoods and lowering rent caps in higher income neighborhoods. The report also explores voluntary adoption of “SAFMRs” by looking at the potential in the Buffalo region.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued its final rule for the implementation of Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) in November of 2016 (Federal Register, 2016). In August of 2017, HUD attempted to suspend the SAFMR rule, but in December of 2017 a U.S. District Court judge ordered it to be reinstated (Open Communities Alliance v. Carson, 2017). The new rule became effective in January of 2018, with implementation in mandatory areas beginning in April of 2018. There are currently 24 metropolitan areas mandated to implement SAFMRs. The adoption of SAFMRs is voluntary in all other metropolitan areas.

The SAFMR rule is intended to better align the setting of payment standards for the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program with the goals of promoting residential choice and mobility. The rule is needed since the traditional method of setting payment standards based on the 40th or 50th percentile of rents in a metropolitan region (“Fair Market Rents or FMRs”) has contributed to the concentration of HCVs in low-income and minority neighborhoods. The SAFMR rule bases payment standards on average rents in ZIP codes, a geography more sensitive to rental variation across metropolitan areas. Basing payment standards on SAFMRs is argued to provide voucher holders with greater access to employment, quality schools, transportation, and other desired amenities (i.e. high-opportunity neighborhoods). SAFMRs expand access to housing in ZIP codes where average rents are higher than metropolitan FMRs. They also avoid overpaying landlords in low-rent areas like those examined by Desmond and Wilmer (2019).

The spatio-temporal relationship between tourism product similarity and spatial proximity has not been adequately studied empirically because of data and methodological limitations. New forms of data available at high temporal frequencies and low levels of spatial aggregation, together with large commercial data and expanding computational ability allow a variety of theories, old and new to be explored and evaluated more meticulously and systemically than has been possible hitherto. This study uses spatial visualization and data harvesting to synthesize a variety of data for exploring the evolution of hotel clusters and co-location synergies in US cities. The findings question the reliability of the current data to be used for identifying and analyzing the formation of tourist destination clusters and their dynamics. We conclude that synthesizing social media and large commercial data can generate a more robust database for research on tourism development and planning and improving opportunities for the examining spatial patterns of tourism activities. We also devise a protocol to combine ‘social media’ sources with big commercial sources for tourism
development and planning, and eventually other sectors.

Affinity propagation (AP) is a clustering algorithm for point data used in image recognition that can be used to solve various problems, such as initial class representative point selection, large-scale sparse matrix calculations, and large-scale data with fewer parameter settings. However, the AP clustering algorithm does not consider spatiotemporal information and multiple thematic attributes simultaneously, which leads to poor performance in discovering patterns from massive spatiotemporal points (e.g., trajectory points). To resolve this issue, a multidimensional spatiotemporal affinity propagation (MDST-AP) algorithm is proposed in this study. First, the similarity of spatial and nonspatial attributes is measured in Gaussian kernel space instead of Euclidean space, which helps address the multidimensional linear inseparability problem. Then, the Davies-Bouldin (DB) index is applied to optimize the parameter value of the MDST-AP algorithm, which is applied to analyze road congestion in Beijing via taxi trajectories. Experiments on different datasets and algorithms indicated that the MDST-AP algorithm can process multidimensional spatiotemporal data points faster and more effectively.

This essay analyzes and syntheses key theories and concepts on neighborhood change from the literature on anchor institutions, university engagement, gentrification, neighborhood effects, Cold War, Black liberation studies, urban political economy, and city building. To deepen understanding of the Columbia University experience, we complemented the literature analysis with an examination of the New York Times and Amsterdam newspapers from 1950 to 1970. The study argues that higher education’s approach to neighborhood revitalization during the urban renewal age, as well as in the post-1990 period, produced undesirable results and failed to spawn either social transformation or build the neighborly community espoused by Lee Benson and Ira Harkavy. The essay explains the reasons why and concludes with a section on a more robust strategy higher education can pursue in the quest to bring about desirable change in the university neighborhood.

Reflections of an Activist Scholar: Henry Louis Taylor Jr. on The Planners Network‘s online page. The Planners Network is an association of professionals, activists, academics, and students involved in physical, social, economic, and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, who promote fundamental change in our political and economic systems.

Interview with Henry Louis Taylor Jr. about his role as an activist, a scholar, an urban planner and an historian by the Social Science Space blog website, an online social network on social sciences.

Chapter 18 in the Higher education for diversity, social inclusion and community: A democratic imperative publication.

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The present study investigates the extent to which a program guided by the principles of critical pedagogy, which seeks to develop critical consciousness, is associated with the improved academic performance of students attending a low-performance middle-school in Buffalo, New York.
The students were enrolled in an in-school academic support program called the Community as Classroom, which used critical project-based learning to show students how to improve neighborhood conditions. The study found that the Community as Classroom program bolstered student
engagement as reflected in improved attendance, on-time-arrival at school, and reduced suspensions. Although class grades did not improve, standardized scores, particularly in Math and Science, dramatically improved for these students from the lowest scoring categories. We suspect that given increased student engagement and dramatically improved standardized test scores, teacher bias might be the cause of no improvements in class grades. We conclude that critical pedagogy, which leads to increased critical consciousness, is a tool that can lead to improved academic performance of students. Such a pedagogy, we argue, should be more widely used in public schools, with a particular emphasis on their deployment in Community Schools.

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Much of the taxi route-planning literature has focused on driver strategies for finding passengers and determining the hot spot pick-up locations using historical global positioning system (GPS) trajectories of taxis based on driver experience, distance from the passenger drop-off location to the next passenger pick-up location and the waiting times at recommended locations for the next passenger. The present work, however, considers the average taxi travel speed mined from historical taxi GPS trajectory data and the allocation of cruising routes to more than one taxi driver in a small-scale region to neighboring pick-up locations. A spatio-temporal trajectory model with load balancing allocations is presented to not only explore pick-up/drop-off information but also provide taxi drivers with cruising routes to the recommended pick-up locations. In simulation experiments, our study shows that taxi drivers using cruising routes recommended by our spatio-temporal trajectory model can significantly reduce the average waiting time and travel less distance to quickly find their next passengers, and the load balancing strategy significantly alleviates road loads. These objective measures can help us better understand spatio-temporal traffic patterns and guide taxi navigation.

Much of the physical activity and built environment literature has focused on composite walkability indices based on the D variables– design, density, diversity, destination accessibility, and distance to transit. This literature, however, has largely ignored the microscale streetscape features that affect the pedestrian experience. Five street level urban design qualities were recently identified and defined for quantitative measures although these  measures are mostly through subjective field observation. View related features such as long sight line and proportion of sky have not yet been objectively measured due to the limitation of data and method. This study uses both 2D and 3D GIS to objectively measure street level urban design qualities in Buffalo, New York and tests their correlation with observed pedestrian counts and Walk Scores. Our results showed that 3D GIS helped to generate objective measures on view related features. These objective measures can help us better understand the influence of street level urban design features on walkability for designing and planning healthy cities.

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This article synthesizes existing literature to examine the emerging concept of neighborhoods of opportunity and places it in the context of past efforts to define neighborhood opportunity. Place-based and people-based approaches to urban revitalization and community development are linked to this concept. The place-based approach focuses on promoting inner-city revitalization in order to create neighborhoods of opportunity and the people-based approach focuses on connecting people to opportunities that already exist in the regions where they live. These approaches are
examined in relation to how they influence emerging models for siting affordable housing in both distressed inner-cities and more opportunity rich suburbs that surround them. The article concludes with recommendations for a new tiered approach to place-based and people-based strategies for affordable housing siting in core city and regional contexts

The proliferation of impervious surfaces results in a series of environmental issues, such as the decrease of vegetated areas and the aggravation of the urban heat island effects. The mapping of impervious surface and its spatial distributions is of significance for the ecological study of urban environment. Currently, the integration of optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data has shown advantages in accurately characterizing impervious surface. However, the fusion mainly occurs at the pixel and feature levels which are subject to influences of data noises and feature selections, respectively. In this paper, an innovative and effective method was developed to extract urban impervious surface by synergistically utilizing optical and SAR images at the decision level. The objective of this paper was to obtain an accurate urban impervious surface map based on the random forest classifier and the evidence theory and to provide a detailed uncertainty analysis accompanying the fused impervious surface maps. In this study, both the GaoFen (GF-1) and Sentinel-1A imagery were first used as independent data sources for mapping urban impervious surfaces. Then additional spectral features and texture features were extracted and integrated with the original GF-1 and Sentinel-1A images in generating impervious surfaces. Finally, based on the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory, impervious surfaces were produced by fusing the previously estimated impervious surfaces from different datasets at the decision level. Results showed that impervious surfaces estimated from the combined use of original images and features yielded a higher accuracy than those from the original optical or SAR data. Further validations suggested that optical data was better than SAR data in separating impervious surfaces from non-impervious surfaces. The fused impervious surfaces at the decision level had a higher overall accuracy than those produced independently by optical or SAR data. It was also highlighted that the fusion of GF-1 and Sentinel-1A images reduced the amount of confusions among the low reflectance of impervious surface and water, as well as for low reflectance of bare land. An overall accuracy of 95.33% was achieved for extracting urban impervious surfaces by fused datasets. The spatial distributions of uncertainties provided by the evidence theory displayed a confidence level of at least 75% for the impervious surfaces derived from the fused datasets.

This paper investigates the growing gap between the rich and the poor in America and the over-representation of people of color among low-wage workers.

This article introduces an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together sympathetic trends in qualitative geographic visualization (from the perspective of one author who is a geographer) and contemporary generative artistic practices (from the perspective of the other author, who is an artist and theorist)—attempting to represent a diverse array of creative and multi-modal data through generative and participatory digital methods. We present how this convergence expands categories of meaning, allowing us to explore experiential/embodied as well as creative/imaginative engagements with everyday geographies distinct to a digital age. The article mediates on the idea of mapping the imagination and the ways we imagine quotidian spaces, as well as possibilities for new methods for the analysis and representation of spatial and emotional complexity. We particularly explore strategies of integrating multiple technologies and multiple-modes of representation for mapping and re-mapping complexities of social and creative living in order to help provide alternate ways to imagine, represent and engage different forms of embodied and imaginative geographies. This article presents a case study with the artist Andrew Buckles, in Seattle, Washington, correlating representational and participatory digital data including geospatial, temporal, audio, video as well as electroencephalography readings from brainwave sensors.

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This article focuses on the manner in which affordable housing fits into anchor-based strategies for urban revitalization. It involves quantitative analysis of the location of existing HUD-subsidized housing in relation to neighborhood characteristics. The goal of the article is twofold. First, we examine the degree to which neighborhood characteristics associated with neighborhoods of opportunity correlate with the location of HUD-subsidized housing in shrinking cities. Second, we make recommendations for more equitable approaches to anchor-based urban revitalization. Our analysis uses a unique database developed to measure neighborhood characteristics in shrinking US cities. Our findings suggest that the location of affordable housing is not correlated with proximity to institutional and neighborhood amenities, where anchor-based revitalization is targeted. As a result, we make recommendations to link future affordable housing siting to anchor-based strategies for inner-city revitalization.

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Policies focusing on enforcing property code violations and the improvement of vacant properties are argued to be more efficacious than demolition policies to fight urban blight. This study applies parcel level data to a multi-year hybrid modeling structure. A fine-grained analysis is conducted on the dynamic patterns of abandonment and demolition for a unique period of four years before and after the City of Buffalo’s stepped-up demolition efforts. Results showed that proximity to vacant and abandoned properties, sustained over the years, had the greatest impact on the possibility of a property being abandoned. The second greatest positive impact on property abandonment was small lot front size. Results also showed that neighborhood vacancy density had the greatest negative impact on surrounding housing sales prices over the years. There was no significant impact of demolition on housing sales prices. These findings suggested that the City should aim to have more incentive programs that are tailored to control the number of vacant properties, rather than focusing primarily on demolition-oriented programs.

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The purpose of this article is to examine municipal property acquisition patterns in shrinking cities. We use data from the City of Buffalo’s municipal
property auction records to analyze the spatial distribution of properties offered for sale in its annual tax foreclosure auction. In addition to these data, we examine demolition and building permit records. Our analysis suggests that cities like Buffalo follow strategies based on an urban growth paradigm when responding to abandonment. This paradigm operates under the assumption that growth is a constant and urban development is only limited by fiscal constraints, underdeveloped systems of urban governance, environmental degradation, and resistance by anti-growth coalitions. We recommend that planners in shrinking cities de-emphasize growthbased planning and focus on rightsizing strategies. These strategies are based on
the assumption that growth is not a constant. Consequently, urban revitalization is concentrated in a smaller urban footprint.

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Due to rapid urbanization, auto-mobility, and industrialization, the increasing desire to protect environments and satisfy residents has led to an emphasis on the creation of sustainable urban environments in China. This paper is an empirical study using hedonic price models to examine a comprehensive set of environmental sustainability elements including green space, transit systems, and central business districts (CBDs) and compare their relative importance in Wuhan, China. The results show that among all housing characteristics, environmental sustainability elements had the greatest impacts on house prices. Natural water resources have the most significant positive effects on property values when they are integrated with cultural, tourism, and commercial resources to form natural recreation clusters or areas. Also, home buyers are willing to pay more for housing clusters or subdivisions with proximity to CBDs. In addition, the significant negative effects of light rail on house prices within a 1-mile radius indicate that it has not become an attractive amenity to home buyers, due to combined effects of other neighborhood amenities, little land use diversity, and the fare system. These results have implications for local and regional governments in setting priorities for sustainable development.

New sources of data such as ‘big data’ and computational analytics have stimulated innovative pedestrian oriented research. Current studies, however, are still limited and subjective with regard to the use of Google Street View and other online sources for environment audits or pedestrian counts because of the manual information extraction and compilation, especially for large areas. This study aims to provide future research an alternative method to conduct large scale data collection more consistently and objectively on pedestrian counts and possibly for environment audits and stimulate discussion of the use of ‘big data’ and recent computational advances for planning and design. We explore and report information needed to automatically download and assemble Google Street View images, as well as other image parameters for a wide range of analysis and visualization, and explore extracting pedestrian count data based on these images using machine vision and learning technology. The reliability tests results based on pedestrian information collected from over 200 street segments in Buffalo, NY, Washington, D.C., and Boston, MA respectively suggested that the image detection method used in this study are capable of determining the presence of pedestrian with a reasonable level of accuracy. The limitation and potential improvement of the proposed method is also discussed.

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Planners and landscape architects have long recognized the critical role of green space in urban environments. This cross-sectional field study of 68 adolescents determined the association between percent neighborhood park area and perceived stress among adolescents, while controlling for physical activity. This study is the first to examine this association using objective measures of park area and adolescents physical activity. A multivariate regression model indicated that percentage of park area (β = -62.573, p < 0.03) predicts perceived stress among adolescents. Access to neighborhood parks buffers adolescents against perceived stress after controlling for socio-economic status and physical activity. Policy recommendations for incorporating parks into neighborhood design are given.

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The purpose of this article is to examine municipal property acquisition patterns in shrinking cities. We use data from the City of Buffalo’s municipal property auction records to analyze the spatial distribution of properties offered for sale in its annual tax foreclosure auction. In addition to these data, we examine demolition and building permit records. Our analysis suggests that cities like Buffalo follow strategies based on an urban growth paradigm when responding to abandonment. This paradigm operates under the assumption that growth is a constant and urban development is only limited by fiscal constraints, underdeveloped systems of urban governance, environmental degradation, and resistance by anti-growth coalitions. We recommend that planners in shrinking cities de-emphasize growth-based planning and focus on rightsizing strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that growth is not a constant. Consequently, urban revitalization is concentrated in a smaller urban footprint.

This paper offers a microscale exploration of the role of park design on the intensity of physical activity among youth. The actual, unstructured use of a park—specifically, Delaware Park, an Olmsted-designed park in Buffalo, New York—by ninety-four children was observed and analyzed objectively using geographic information systems, global positioning systems, and accelerometers. Data were analyzed at the scale of 25 ft × 25 ft cells overlaid as a grid on the entire park. Results from the regression analysis show that particular features of parks—especially complexity in landscape surfaces, proximity to sport facilities and playgrounds, and the availability of pedestrian trails—enable greater intensity of youth physical activity in a park.

This paper investigates the impact of street network connectivity on pedestrian volume. Street
network connectivity measured in most current studies captures only the metric characteristics
of streets or physical connectivity. A whole different type of connectivity, visual connectivity, is
largely ignored. Described in basic terms, higher physical connectivity means shorter travel time
to reach the same number of destinations while higher visual connectivity means fewer turns to
see the same number of destinations. Despite the correlation of these two connectivity constructs, studying both physical and visual connectivity is essential to better understand the role of
street network on pedestrian activity. Using pedestrian counts of 302 street segments in Buffalo,
New York, structural equation modelling highlights the multiple relationships between street network connectivity, built environment characteristics, and pedestrian volumes. Our findings
suggest that both the conventional metric-based measure of physical connectivity and geometric based measure of visual connectivity have significant positive impacts on pedestrian volumes,
together with job density and land use mix. This outcome can encourage practitioners to pay
attention to both the geometry of street network and its metric characteristics in order to create
a pedestrian-friendly environment.

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The purpose of the Community Health Needs Assessment is to identify the unmet health challenges of the Greater Buffalo United Ministries (GRUM) communities in Erie and Niagara Counties. It will outline a strategy for addressing those needs, and to develop a set of performance indicators and metrics to monitor progress in meeting those needs. This assessment will provide GRUM and the Greater Buffalo United Affordable Healthcare Network (GBUAHN) with the framework needed to forge an implementation strategy to address the unmet health needs of the GRUM community.

Much scholarly attention has been paid to the school-to-prison pipeline and the sanitized discourse of “death by education,” called the achievement gap. Additionally, there exists a longstanding discourse surrounding the alleged crisis of educational failure. This article offers no solutions to the crisis and suggests instead that the system is functioning as it was intended—to disenfranchise many (predominately people of color) for the benefit of some (mostly white), based on economic principals of the free market. We begin by tracing the economic interests of prisons and the prison industrial complex, juxtaposing considerations of what we call the “educational reform industrial complex.” With a baseline in the economic interests of school failure and prison proliferation, we draw on the critical race theory concept of racial realism, to work toward a theory of educational and penal realism. Specifically, we outline seven working tenets of educational and penal realism that provide promise in redirecting the discourse about schools and prisons empowering those interested in critically engaging issues of racism that permeate U.S. orientations to education and justice.

Racism is a multilevel and multidimensional system whereby minority groups are oppressed and scapegoated by the dominant group. Claims that America has become a post-racial society notwithstanding, manifestations of racism are all around us, especiallyin the state of Louisiana. Louisiana is home to some of the poorest, and the leasteducated citizens in the nation. The state is also the site of one of the country’s mostnotorious prisons. Angola, a former—and present penal—plantation, is a majority black prison where the inmate ‘rodeo’ provides annual entertainment for largely whiteaudiences and hundreds of thousands of dollars to supplement services for prisoners thatcould arguably be paid for in less dehumanizing ways. White racial frame is a useful paradigm for understanding the linkages between mass incarceration, the exploitation ofthe Black body, the miseducation of Black youth, as well as the persistent racialeconomic inequality in Louisiana and in US society as a whole. We extend the idea of white racial frame further by introducing a concept we call “bridges to benefits”. Bridges to benefits are networks of white privilege, which flow between institutions, such as education, the economy, and the law, which involve capitalizing on the misery of Blacks while simultaneously protecting white supremacy.

The popularity of geotagged social media has provided many research opportunities for geographers and GIScientists in the digital age. This article reviews innovative approaches to studying spatially linked social media, and applies lessons taken from qualitative GIS and geographic visualization to improve these approaches. I introduce the idea of “code clouds” as a potential technique for the qualitative geovisualization of spatial information. Code clouds can depict and visualize analytic codes, or codes identifying key ideas and themes, that are generated through digital qualitative research. Rather than transforming qualitative forms of data into categories or numbers, code clouds attempt to preserve and represent the context of data as a visualized outcome of qualitative analysis. Professor Jung use examples from an exploratory case study of geotweets in King County, WA, to demonstrate how code clouds can be applied to the production of meanings through qualitative geovisualization.

Community is an ambiguous concept, and the meanings of community as a subject of study have received a great deal of attention across various disciplines. This paper discusses how children’s diverse meanings of community shape and are shaped by the social, cultural, and physical environments of their everyday lives. To explore these meanings I combine principles of child-centered research and qualitative geovisualization into a research methodology. I demonstrate that this integration displays the transformative nature of qualitative analysis and visualization to support interpretive analysis of various forms of qualitative and spatial data together, and offers us a hybrid methodological framework for gaining insights into the diverse meanings of community held by the children. The main case study is drawn from a multi-year research collaboration called the Children’s Urban Geography (ChUG), in which I participated along with children who lived in a relatively poor but emerging multi-cultural Hispanic neighborhood in Buffalo, NY.

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This article revisits the debate about school reform and homeownership-based strategies for neighborhood revitalization. It is based on an analysis of school districts in New York State using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the New York State Education Department (NYSED). Findings indicate that the relationship between schools and housing values varies across urban, suburban, and rural school districts. It is recommended that education reformers and urban planners advocate for states and the federal government to assume a more central role in the promotion of educational equity and the subsequent stabilization of neighborhoods in older core cities.

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The Perry Choice Neighborhood Planning grant (PCN) produced a plan that transforms the BMHAPCN into a viable and sustainable mixed-income neighborhood that functions as a platform which enables residents to become economically secure and self-sufficient, to realize their full potential and to develop the critical consciousness and capacity that empowers them to guide the development of the community over time. To realize this outcome in practice, the Perry Choice Neighborhood planning initiative is informed by three core goals, which are viewed through the lens of neighborhood, housing, and people that inform all aspects of the planning process.

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This report describes the Perry Choice Neighborhood – Safe Neighborhood Initiative, designed to transform the PCN into a safe and secure community.

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The Mini-Education Pipeline represents the education and school reform strategy that accompanies the broader Perry Choice Neighborhood Transformation Plan.

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The purpose of this report is to determine the the estimated expenses and income for the BMHA-PCN proposed Life Chances Center (LCC).

By focusing on a federal Choice neighborhood initiative, this study will not only make the case for connecting school reform and neighborhood development but also present a model that demonstrates how this can happen. The study will also make a stronger case for the university’s unique role in fostering neo-collaborative structures fit to take on wicked problems of neighborhood distress and urban decline.

This article focuses on a specific component of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) strategy to implement a fair housing strategy, its requirements for local jurisdictions that receive community development block grant (CDBG) dollars to prepare an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice (AI) report.

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Where you find distressed neighborhoods, you will also find poorly performing public schools. Yet many contemporary school reform efforts ignore neighborhood-level factors that undeniably impact school performance. The purpose of this study is to use a case study approach with social institutional and urban school reform regime frameworks to demonstrate why school reform and the re-creation and redevelopment of distressed neighborhoods should occur simultaneously. At the same time, researchers will examine the role of higher education in catalyzing partnerships with so-called anchor institutions for the explicit purposes of simultaneously improving neighborhoods and reforming schools. By focusing on a federal Choice neighborhood initiative, the study will not only make the case for connecting school reform and neighborhood development but also present a model that demonstrates how this can happen. The study will also make a strong case for the university’s unique role in fostering neo-collaborative structures fit to take on wicked problems of neighborhood distress and urban decline.

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This article focuses on a specific component of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) strategy to implement fair housing policy, its requirement for local jurisdictions that receive community development block grant (CDBG) dollars to prepare an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice (AI) report. The article’s analysis is based on an evaluation of the City of Buffalo’s 2004 AI report. The evaluation was conducted by a local fair housing organization in collaboration with university-based researchers. The findings from the evaluation revealed that the City had made little progress in implementing the action plan from its AI report over an eight year period. This was an outgrowth of local funding constraints, limited staff capacity, ambiguous HUD rules for AI reporting, and a lack of political will to pursue fair housing in Buffalo. In light of these findings, we recommend that HUD: mandate timeframes for AI implementation, require AI updates at regular intervals, and more clearly specify the format and content of AI reports. We also recommend that HUD require jurisdictions to include evaluation plans in their AI reports and measure outcomes from the implementation of AI action plans. These reforms will enhance the ability of AI reports to serve as effective planning tools for the affirmative furthering of fair housing policy.

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Significant research has been conducted on how environmental attributes influence people’s decisions to walk. In much of this
research, however, environmental attributes are averaged for neighborhoods or census geographies for sampled populations. Moreover, the
effect of an agent’s walking choices on other actors is not adequately represented by either objective or perceived measures in the literature.
Macro-level patterns of walkability arise from interactions across actors and urban environments. The agent-based approach allows for
modeling individual uses of the environment by treating the populations as objects that can interact with the environment and other people.
This study builds on previous research on pedestrian movement and geographic information system (GIS) measures of the built environment
using the agent-based approach to explore the dynamics of the built environment and people’s decision-making processes concerning walking. The results show that models that take individual perspective into account and include social interaction can better capture characteristics
of the built and social environment that influence people’s walking choices. This method lays out a new framework for assessing macro-level
patterns of walkability across a city using micro-level data.

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Despite the documented importance of the neighbourhood environment on youth physical activity, little empirical research exists regarding the geographical boundaries of neighbourhoods within which youth are physically active around their homes. Studies and public policies often arbitrarily assume the extent of these boundaries, which vary from study to study. This paper combines GPS data, diaries and accelerometry to delineate empirically the local area and distance within which youth play in Erie County, New York. The study found that youth tend to be physically active within a quarter-mile radius around their homes and to focus on one section of the often assumed circled neighbourhood.

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This study provides an analysis of the number, composition, and types of businesses found in the Perry Choice Neighborhood.

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This report provides a needs assessment of the Perry Choice Neighborhood and a comprehensive Support Services Plan for the neighborhood.

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This report described the Perry Choice Neighborhood Supportive Service Network. The proposed PCN Supportive Services Network will provide high quality case management and service coordination for residents through a partnership with the UB School of Social Work and the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority to ensure that the challenges facing residents wellbeing are met holistically and that residents receive the technical support they need to connect to appropriate services.

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This report describes the results of the Perry Choice Neighborhood Walking Tours. The walking tours were designed to create person-to-person conversations with neighborhood residents and members of the planning team.

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This report is part of a working paper series on the Perry Choice Neighborhood Mini-Education Pipeline Strategy. This working paper details the goals, structure, and organization of the Mini-Education Pipeline System.

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This report is part two of a working paper series on the Perry Choice Neighborhood Mini-Education Pipeline Strategy. This working paper provides and analysis and inventory of the existing in-school supportive services in the four MEP partner schools.

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This concept paper outlines a strategy to use the HUD Section 3 Act to “capture” business development and employment opportunities to empower and produce economic self-sufficiency among public housing residents and other very low- and very-low income groups and to use these resources to transform their neighborhoods into great places to live, work and raise a family.

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This report outlines the management structure for the Perry Choice Neighborhood – Neighborhood-Based Supportive Service System.

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The Supportive Service Collaborative is a component of the PCN Supportive Services System. This report details the need for, the organization of, the mission and organization and management structures of the Collaborative.

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This preliminary assessment analyzes potential funding sources for the PCN Supportive Service Network.

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This report provides an overview of the BMHA-PCN Life Chances Center (LCC). The LCC is a proposed neighborhood-based multi-service community center which seeks to create a neighborhood anchor and centralized hub of activity in the Perry Choice Neighborhood.

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This report provides an overview of each of the partners in the Perry Choice Neighborhood Supportive Service Network.

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This report outlines a threshold plan for improving the supportive service infrastructure in the Perry Choice Neighborhood (PCN). This threshold plan provides a set of baseline ideas about the enhancement of supportive services in the PCN.

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This report examines the spatial distribution of supportive services and institutions within the framework of the Perry Choice Neighborhood and Commodore Perry Development and examines the perspectives of both the residents and the service providers with regards to the current service delivery framework.

This article examines US fair housing policy from a critical perspective.

This article examines residential vacancy patterns in Buffalo, NY, using data from a unique data set.

This article examines charter schools applying a nonprofit conceptual frame of reference.

This article compares charter schools and other public schools in New York State.

This article examines charter schools applying a nonprofit conceptual frame of reference. The proliferation of charter schools is framed as a form of nonprofitization of public education. The implications of this trend are discussed. This discussion is contextualized through an examination of charter schools in New York. The case analysis is supported with data from the New York State Department of Education, the US Census Public Education Finance Report, and IRS Form 990 data. The findings suggest that there is mixed evidence for better school outcomes between charter schools and other public schools, while differences that do exist may be driven by socio-economic inequalities and other factors. This raises questions about the future of nonprofit schools and the degree to which they are accountable to traditional constituencies served by the public education system.

This article examines US fair housing policy from a critical perspective. We describe the impact of the expansion of neoliberal ideology on the fair housing assistance program (FHAP), the fair housing initiatives program (FHIP), and the scope of US Department of Justice activities. Prior findings from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and IRS Form 990 are summarized. We argue that neoliberalism has contributed to the underdevelopment, underfunding, and poor implementation of US fair housing policy. We offer three recommendations for fair housing reform. The first focuses on the need to remove fair housing activities from HUD and place them in an independent fair housing agency. The second focuses on the need for the federal government to mandate fair housing enforcement across all governmental programs and agencies. The third focuses on the need for increased lobbying, litigation, and activism by community-based advocacy organizations for reform.

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This report is on the first of three meetings with residents of Buffalo’s Fruit Belt Neighborhood, which will be held regarding the construction of 49 new town houses that St. John Fruit Belt Community Development Corporation will be building in the neighborhood.

This article examines how local public officials, nonprofit providers, and elected officials in the suburbs of Erie County, NY perceive impediments to fair housing.

This paper seeks to examine executive directors’ perceptions of the relationships between access to funding and an organization’s programmatic and advocacy activities.

This article compares nonprofit outcomes in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program to outcomes in the private and public sector.

This article focuses on black professionals’ perceptions of career opportunities in the real estate industry and discrimination in housing markets. The analysis is based on a national survey of black real estate professionals administered between July and December of 2009.

Every year, millions of people exit American jails and prisons and attempt to reintegrate into society. Ex-offenders face many obstacles during the transition. Scholars contend that securing employment is central to a successful transition. A job that allows an ex-offender to earn an income above the poverty line is especially significant, recent studies have shown. Consequently, many prisoner reentry initiatives are focused on expanding employment opportunities for ex-offenders. However, the almost exclusive emphasis on employment as the measurement of economic well-being is short-sighted because it ignores the importance of financial education and asset ownership. Prisoner reentry programs should include an emphasis on financial education in addition to an emphasis on employment as a means of reducing recidivism rates and improving the economic well-being of the ex-offenders and receiving communities. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy implications.

This research investigates current and potentially desired opportunities available for children’s afterschool activities in the U.S. Buffalo metropolitan area. By analyzing and geographically visualizing travel paths, excluded children’s activity space, and existing activity opportunities in the 3D view using GIS, the study looks at how children’s activity opportunities are limited by any socio-spatial factors such as racial distribution,
median income, current transportation system and geographical distribution of activity opportunity. Especially, it focuses on finding out if there have been children’s unequal activity opportunities between the city and the suburban area. There is an abundance of research that has looked at accessibility to opportunities based on the transportation system. However, only few studies have focused on children’s mobility even though their mobility is typically constrained and tied to those of adults in the household. With more direct engagement with children and representation of their activity space in GIS, this article is intended to discuss transport exclusion and related socio-spatial constraints from the perspective of children.

This chapter examines two community development case studies related to social inclusion and exclusion in the public participation process. Each focuses on dimensions of public participation in community development organizations and processes. The first case study examines the role of public participation in the governance of community-based housing organizations in Buffalo, NY. Here, public participation is examined in relation to organizational autonomy, patronage politics and bureaucratic structures. This case study illustrates how grassroots control of community-based housing organizations is reduced by institutional constraints placed on community development activities. The second case study examines a neighborhood planning project in Depew, NY (an industrial suburb of Buffalo). The scope and impact of public participation is explored in the context of planning techniques applied to neighborhood revitalization efforts in Depew. Competing interests among residents, business and local government are explored. This case study focuses on the manner in which university-based consultants working on community development projects approach resident empowerment. Constraints on achieving full participation due to limited capacity in the public sector are discussed. Combined, the two case studies highlight the barriers to expanding the voice of disenfranchised groups in the governance of grassroots organizations and the planning of neighborhood development projects. Lessons are drawn from these case studies to outline strategies for expanding the scope of public participation in community development activities, particularly in relation to the role of disadvantaged groups in grassroots decision-making.

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Purpose – This paper seeks to examine executive directors’ perceptions of the relationship between access to funding and an organization’s programmatic and advocacy activities. Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on data from a national survey of executive directors of non-profit advocacy organizations in the USA. The organizations were selected because they served minority and disadvantaged groups, and were heavily reliant on public funding. Findings – The findings indicate that several factors are associated with how organizations balance their programmatic and advocacy activities. They include dependence on public funding, constituencies served, and perception of funders. Despite evidence for institutional pressures to reduce advocacy activities, the results indicate that such activities are sustainable in organizations with a strong individual donor base. In essence, a stable source of grassroots resources can counter institutional pressures to reduce advocacy. Research limitations/implications – This study focuses on a specific subgroup of advocacy organizations. Although it offers insights into their perceptions, the findings do not necessarily reflect more general perceptions. Social implications – The findings enhance understanding of impediments to non-profit advocacy that stem from trends in public funding and regulations related to non-profit lobbying and advocacy activities. The findings also enhance understanding of the extent to which the influences of the emerging non-profit industrial complex are offset by traditional grassroots support for non-profit advocacy. Originality/value – This paper adds to the body of research on non-profit decision making in relation to the balance between programmatic and advocacy work. It adds to the understanding of how organizations interface with larger institutions in society and the constraints that institutional ties entail.

This article examines voting results for school district budgets in New York from 2003-2010. Despite annual local property tax increases, 91.9% of proposed school district budgets were approved by voters during the period examined. Using data from the New York State Education Department (NYSED) and the American Community Survey (ACS), several socioeconomic variables influencing school district budget voting are examined. The findings indicate that school districts serving larger populations are more likely to vote for local property tax increases. However, these effects are mitigated by the size of minority populations in a district, overall growth in school budgets, and increased voter turnout. In light of these findings, recommendations are made to assist school boards and administrators in planning school finance policy. It is argued that school districts should adopt participatory budget tools and enhance community-based decision-making in order to promote sustainable educational resources.

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This Nomination Document is the product of the Step 2 Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) Program for the Highland Community Area in Niagara Falls, NY. The City of Niagara Falls, through their involvement in the BOA Program and the development of this document, has embarked on a journey to transform approximately 560 acres – of which more than 275 is brownfield land – into a more prosperous, economically diverse, socially strong, high quality, safe destination for new employment, residential and community uses.

The number of non-married women is on the rise in America and these women are making their presence known, especially where homeownership is concerned. Non-married women are among the fastest growing segment of first time home buyers. Despite these recent trends, few studies have examined the determinants of homeownership for this group. For the few studies that have not ignored this population, most examine differences between non-married Black and White females, but most do not address within group differences. The present study uses data from the 2000 decennial census to determine if ethnicity matters for non-married Black women. The results show that ethnicity explains some, but not all, of the variations of homeownership for non-married Black women

A number of approaches for integrating GIS and qualitative research have emerged in recent years, as part of a resurgence of interest in mixed methods research in geography. These efforts to integrate qualitative data and qualitative analysis techniques complement a longstanding focus in GIScience upon ways of handling qualitative forms of spatial data and reasoning in digital environments, and extend engagements with ‘the qualitative’ in GIScience to include discussions of research methodologies. This article contributes to these emerging qualitative GIS methodologies by describing the structures and functions of ‘computer-aided qualitative GIS’ (CAQ-GIS), an approach for storing and analyzing qualitative, quantitative, and geovisual data in both GIS and computer aided data analysis software. CAQ-GIS uses modified structures from conventional desktop GIS to support storage of qualitative data and analytical codes, together with a parallel coding and analysis process carried out with GIS and a computer-aided data analysis software package. The inductive mixed methods analysis potential of CAQ-GIS is demonstrated with examples from research on children’s urban geographies.

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This concept paper outlines a strategy to use the HUD Section 3 Act to “capture” business development and employment opportunities to
empower and produce economic self-sufficiency among public housing residents and other low- and very-low income groups and to use these resources to transform their neighborhoods into great places to live, work and raise a family

Abstract:

The authors present the results of a neighborhood-scaled exploratory study that tests the association of the
food environment and the built environment with women’s body mass index (BMI) in Erie County, New
York. The proximity of women’s homes to a supermarket relative to a convenience store is associated with
lower BMI. A diverse land use mix in a neighborhood is positively associated with women’s BMI, especially
when restaurants dominate nonresidential land use. The article offers suggestions for how food environments
may be improved using planning strategies

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This report sets clear public participation and community outreach strategies for the Highland Avenue ‐ Step 2 BOA Nomination Study.

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This plan details the results of a community outreach strategy to inform the creation of a community benefits agreement among UB, he BNMC and the Fruitbelt Neighborhood.

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This report is a proposal to the St.John Fruit Belt Development Corporation for the completion of a comprehensive study for a resettlement plan for residents of McCarley Gardens in Buffalo.

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This report proposes the creation of the Futures Academy Community Garden in a series of vacant, city-owned parcels across from Buffalo Public School 37.

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This report provides and overview of the history of blacks in Buffalo’s Fruit Belt and the classic tale of how urban policies have destabilized the African American community and robbed low to moderate‐income blacks of the wealth producing power of home-ownership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how executive directors of nonprofit organizations perceive local government performance in affordable housing. It builds on a larger body of research concerning the affordable housing activities of government and community-based nonprofit housing organizations at the local level.

This article compares how local public administrators and executive directors of community-based housing organizations (CBHO) perceive nonprofit funding decisions.

A growing number of geographers are conducting mixed methods research involving the integration of quantitative and qualitative data in GIS. Contributing to these efforts, this chapter describes software-level modifications that adapt GIS to enable inclusion of qualitative data as well as interpretive codes associated with these data. These innovations enable GIS to serve as a platform for dynamically integrating quantitative and qualitative data throughout the analysis process. Further, this chapter shows how GIS may be meshed with computer-aided qualitative analysis software (CAQDAS) to support inductive interpretive analysis. The value of GIS is in its ability to represent both qualitative and quantitative data along with their spatial information, and the value of CAQDAS lies in its ability to provide better means of storing, managing, and analyzing qualitative data. The system described here enables researchers to take advantage of all of these capabilities as they are working with multiple forms of data. Further, the linkage between GIS and CAQDAS that I have developed enables researchers to carry out many different forms of analysis, such as exploratory data visualization, conventional forms of spatial analysis, grounded theory, and other approaches.

Universities, because of their vast human and fiscal resources, can play the central role in assisting in the development of school-centered community development programs that make youth development their top priority. The Futures Academy, a K-8 public school in the Fruit Belt, an inner-city neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, offers a useful model of community development in partnership with the Center for Urban Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The goal of the project is to create opportunities for students to apply the knowledge and skills they learn in the classroom to the goal of working with others to make the neighborhood a better place to live. The efforts seek to realize in practice the Dewey dictum that individuals learn best when they have “a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead.”

This article examines how directors of community-based housing organisations (CBHOs) in the US define the role of citizen participation in their organisations. In particular, it describes how local political and administrative structures affect the scope of citizen participation in the governance and decision-making processes of CBHOs. This is an important topic since these organisations implement housing and community development programmes in urban neighbourhoods, and citizen participation has been considered important to the legitimacy of these efforts. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with CBHO executive directors in Buffalo, New York. In particular, the executive directors of CBHOs that concentrate their efforts on the management, development and rehabilitation of affordable housing were interviewed. In addition to data from in-depth interviews, data from fieldnotes, the US census, IRS 990 forms and informal conversations with local government officials and representatives of intermediary organisations were used in the analysis. Existing theories concerning citizen participation and non-profit administration are elaborated upon and applied to CBHOs. The extent to which these organisations create opportunities for grassroots planning is considered and recommendations for expanding citizen participation are proposed.

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This publication reports on the completion of a Brownfield Mini-Course that was to created to solidify a common knowledge base and language on brownfield development between neighborhood residents and stakeholders and City Officials and the project consultant team and to provide residents with deeper insight into brownfield development so that might participate at a higher level in community visioning and planning sessions.

The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the development of the Penn Thesis by identifying the major challenges that must be overcome to advance Dewey’s goal of transforming the United States into a socially just, participatory, democratic society.

This article examines the use of citizen participation techniques during the planning process for neighborhood revitalization in the Village of Depew which is an industrial suburb of Buffalo, New York. The article focuses on how research principles can inform and enhance traditional approaches to citizen participation.

This article examines patterns of mortgage lending in metropolitan Buffalo, New York.

Since the late 1960s, community based organizations (CBSs) have become increasingly responsible for implementing affordable housing policy. Scholars have referred to this process ass the non-profitization and devolution.

This article examines public administrators’ perceptions on the effects of non-profit networks on local affordable housing activities of community-based organizations (CBSs).

This article examines how directors of community-based housing organizations (CBHOs) in the US define the role of citizen participation in their organisations.

Research has shown that blacks are relatively disadvantaged when compared with whites on a host of sociological indicators including on income, education and occupational status. Recent research has shown blacks are not all equally disadvantaged. In some cases such as in the case of blacks in Queens County, New York, blacks surpass whites in terms of median income, especially foreign-born blacks. Yet, blacks fare worse when compared with whites on indicators of asset ownership. Despite that, some black ethnic groups including those with roots in the Caribbean or from Africa have been shown to have higher rates of home ownership and higher housing values than African-Americans. However, few studies include measures of asset ownership beyond these indicators when assessing the extent to which ethnicity matters for blacks. The present study examines the following research questions: (1) What factors explain variations in the likelihood of ownership and the levels of interest, dividends and rental income owned for blacks? (2) Is ethnicity a significant predictor for black respondents? (3) Does education and occupation matter more for some black ethnic groups than for others? The findings reveal that ethnicity plays a significant role in the acquisition and accumulation of interest, dividends and rental income, but it does not account for all of the variations observed for blacks. The findings shed further light on the complexities associated with understanding wealth inequality and racial and ethnic group variations.

Home ownership represents much more than shelter; home ownership is also indicative of an individual’s or a group’s social and economic standing. Racial and ethnic differences have been observed not only in home ownership but also in housing values. The present study examines the extent to which differences in housing values between Asians, blacks, Hispanics and whites, and among black ethnic groups, can be attributed to race and ethnicity or to other sociological factors such as age, gender, marital status, region, occupational score, nativity, year of immigration and English proficiency. Changes in the determinants of housing values between 1970 and 2000 are assessed over time as well as changes in the level of inequality on housing values between whites and non‐whites. The findings reveal that the housing gap between whites and non‐whites over the past few decades has actually grown over time. As home values make up the largest component of the average American’s portfolio, these findings may be significant in understanding and explaining the persistence of the racial wealth gap in America.

The black middle class has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly inquiry. Recently, scholars have directed their attention towards understanding how middle class blacks negotiate their racial identity. Some contend that blacks engage in strategic assimilation, working and sometimes living alongside members of the dominant group, while simultaneously maintaining social ties with members of their own racial group. To examine changes in the size and composition of the black middle class in various suburban contexts comparisons were made of selected demographic data from 1990 and 2000. The purpose of the study is to see if middle class blacks are engaging in strategic assimilation. The findings reveal that the size of the black middle class increased between 1990 and 2000 and that demographic differences exist between members of the black middle class based upon whether or not they reside inside or outside of the suburbs. The findings support the contention that middle class blacks are not engaging in strategic assimilation.

Following the fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, a somber Fidel Castro informed the Cuban
people that their Revolution hovered on the brink of disaster. Faced with an
unprecedented economic crisis and few options, the Cuban government, reluctantly
returned to international tourism as the foundation for economic salvation. Since then
international tourism has multiplied fifteen-fold. While reintroducing tourism may have
saved Cuba from a political and economic catastrophe – foreign tourists, mostly from
capitalist countries, have enabled Cuba and the Revolution to survive – this use of
capitalism to save socialism has also produced formidable challenges. In particular, the
emergence of a consumer culture and the subsequent ‘‘dollarization’’ of the economy, pose
a grave threat to Cuban society as products are increasingly evaluated, purchased, and
consumed on the basis of their symbolic content and meaning for social status.
Nonetheless, it will be argued in this paper that since Cuban society remains anchored by
highly functional, stable, well-organized neighborhoods and a flourishing, innovative
informal economy, embedded values of cooperation may serve as a counteractive force to
the rise of a culture of consumerism and materialism. Based on this premise, the paper
concludes with an examination of three possible scenarios for the future of tourism in
Cuba.

This article examines the use of citizen participation techniques during the planning process for neighborhood revitalization in the Village of Depew which is an industrial suburb of Buffalo, New York. The article focuses on how action research principles can inform and enhance traditional approaches to citizen participation. In particular, we discuss our role as university-based consultants in the local planning process and how drawing from action research principles helped us remain focused on advocating for broad-based citizen participation. Our analysis was based on the application of action research principles and participant observation techniques. During the time that each of us was involved in the planning process for Depew’s neighborhood revitalization, reflexive field notes and other data were collected. The article critiques how citizen participation was used to plan for neighborhood revitalization in Depew, and discusses the degree to which action research principles can be applied to future citizen participation efforts.

Abstract
Race and class factors have been studied as underlying causes of segregation for many
years. Individual choices on race and economic constraints of living in one area versus
another play an important role in residential segregation. An attempt has not yet been
made to simulate the interplay of neighborhood racial and economic composition
in forming segregation using empirical micro-level data. Using City of Buffalo data,
this study explores how individuals’ housing location choices with respect to racial
composition and housing sale prices in their neighborhoods can give rise to aggregate
patterns of residential segregation and how segregation at one point in time was
contributing to increased segregation at later stages. The results show that observed
patterns of segregation in the city could plausibly arise from the interaction of racial
and economic factors. This study also demonstrates the application of such models
on exploring the possible effects of proposed integration efforts.

Abstract:

With the threat of wildfire hanging over many communities in the Western and Southern United States, wildfire mitigation is evolving into a significant public responsibility for rural and urban edge county governments. Regional governance is an important piece of the effort to reduce wildfire risks although still weakly developed as a policy arena. This project explores two dimensions in which planning support systems can support regional governance: assessing patterns of wildfire risk accumulation; and, evaluating land use planning alternatives and their effects on cumulative risk levels. These tools are examined for regional governance using a prototype planning information system, the Alternative Growth Futures (AGF) tool, a scenario-building approach developed at the University of Colorado Denver. The project develops a hybrid urban growth model that integrates logistic regression techniques and methods for simulation of growth alternatives. This model is used to evaluate the attractiveness of undeveloped building sites with respect to natural amenities, distance to primary urban services and site characteristics such as slope. The model and scenario-testing framework are reasonably robust and suggest that regional spatial accounting methods have potential as a framework for inter-governmental and public discussion around wildfire planning.

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This proposal outlines a regeneration strategy for Niagara Falls’ Highland Avenue Community. The goal is to develop a strategic plan that identifies five priority projects that will function as catalysts that will spawn the community’s rebirth.

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This is a proposal to the City of Niagara Falls to develop and implement a public participation plan for the Highland Avenue Brownfield Opportunity Area Step 2 Nomination Study.

Prior research has examined the role of intermediary organizations in affordable housing development and community-based housing organization (CBHO) capacity building. This article builds on this work by examining an applied research project aimed at assessing the feasibility of creating a neighborhood housing partnership (NHP) organization in Buffalo, New York.

To increase participation in physical activity, it is important to understand the factors associated with a child’s choice to be physically active or sedentary. The neighborhood and home environments may be related to this choice. To determine whether the neighborhood environment or number of televisions in the home environment are independently associated with child physical activity and television time. The associations of the neighborhood and home environments on active and sedentary behaviors were studied in 44 boys and 44 girls who wore accelerometers and recorded their television watching behaviors. Neighborhood environment variables were measured using extensive geographic information systems analysis. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to predict physical activity after controlling for individual differences in age, socioeconomic status, percentage overweight, and time the accelerometer was worn in Step 1. Sex of the child was added in Step 2. A neighborhood design variable, street connectivity, accounted for an additional 6% (p <or= .01) of the variability in physical activity in Step 3. A block of variables including a measure of neighborhood land use diversity, percentage park area, and the interaction of Percentage Park Area x Sex then accounted for a further 9% (p <or= .01) of the variability in physical activity in Step 4. Increased access to parks was related to increased physical activity in boys but not in girls. The number of televisions in the home accounted for 6% (p <or= .05) of the variability in television watching behavior. Neighborhood environment variables did not predict television watching that occurs in the home. The neighborhood environment is more strongly associated with physical activity of boys than girls. Sedentary behaviors are associated with access to television in the home environment. To promote physical activity in children, planners need to design environments that support active living and parents should limit access to television viewing in the home.

Abstract. Agent-based models offer a promising framework for analyzing interactions between agents
and a heterogeneous landscape. Researchers have identified a complex of factors that influence
exurban development, including demographic shifts and location attractiveness of natural amenities
as a magnet to amenity-seeking migrants. Attractiveness is often defined in terms of local or on-lot
amenities, including scenic views, the availability of natural features, and low levels of noise. However, exurban-growth models have not fully incorporated a fundamental insight of this literature, that
the location behavior of exurban residents is sensitive to fine-grained variations in their biophysical
environment. In this study we evaluate how agents and households operate in exurban environments
and respond to biophysical features. We simulate household decision-making in terms of preferences
for features such as site accessibility, two-dimensional amenities, and three-dimensional scenic views.
Our results show that, as we build two-dimensional and three-dimensional landscape layers, our
model captures the characteristics of landscape change with increasing accuracy. This approach has
considerable potential to improve our ability to describe development dynamics in heterogeneous
land markets.

Abstract

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This report presents finding from four focus group meetings on resident’s concerns about the St. John Church Town House Initiative.

This article aims to examine the mechanisms used by municipalities to stimulate public participation and, in part, to argue that contrasts between the socio-economic make-up of central cities in the USA and Canada explain these divergent techniques.

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This report presents finding from four focus group meetings on resident’s concerns about the St. John Church Town House Initiative in Buffalo, NY.

Purpose – This article aims to examine the mechanisms used by municipalities to stimulate public participation and, in part, to argue that contrasts between the socio-economic make-up of central cities in the USA and Canada explain these divergent techniques. Design/methodology/approach – The article is based on a survey of planning departments measuring the types of public participation strategies used by local governments. Findings – The article’s findings indicate that Canadian municipalities adopt a broader range of public participation techniques related to: voluntarism and public engagement, neighborhood and strategic planning, and e-government. In contrast, the article’s findings indicate that US municipalities are more likely to promote public participation through mechanisms such as annual community meetings and referendums on public issues. Research limitations/implications – The conclusion of the article offers recommendations for expanding the scope of public participation and developing strategies that maximize citizen input in community development activities in both countries. Practical implications – The survey was conducted to identify the scope of public participation techniques used by local governments in the Niagara region. One limitation of this methodology is that it does not gauge the effectiveness of the participation techniques used by local governments or the intensity of public engagement. However, the results from this study provide future researchers with a mechanism for focusing future analysis. Originality/value – The findings can assist in identifying new directions for enhancing public participation in the USA and Canada.

Abstract: Objective.To determine associations of the neighborhood and home television environments with young children’s physical activity.Method.32 boys and 27 girls age 4 to 7 years wore accelerometers for 3 weekdays and 1 weekend day. The number of televisions in the home and television watching of the child were monitored using TV Allowance™units for 3 weeks. A geographic information system was used to measure neighborhood environment variables.Results.Hierarchical regression analysis was used to predict physical activity, initially controlling for sex, age, socioeconomic status, adiposity,and child television watching in step 1. In step 2, the number of televisions did not significantly increase the amount of variability accounted for in the prediction of physical activity. In step 3, housing density and the interaction of housing density by sex accounted for an incremental 12%(p<0.05) of the variability and in step 4 percentage park plus recreation area accounted for a further 10% (p<0.05) of the variability. Greater housing density predicted increased physical activity of boys, but not girls.Conclusion.Neighborhoods with increased proximity between homes and a greater proportion of park area are associated with greater physical activity in young children

This article examines the role of citizen participation in community development corporations (CDCs).

This note examines the effects of community socioeconomic status on mortgage lending patterns in Metropolitan Detroit.

This article examines the effects of population and housing characteristics on mortgage lending patterns in the City of Detroit.

Few people are familiar with the name of Cynthia Hesdra. She was born a slave in the North During her lifetime though, she owned a successful laundry business and real estate in New York and New Jersey. She was also involved in the historic “underground railroad” station in Nyack, NY. She died at the age of 71 with a fortune estimated at around &100,000. By today’s standards she was a millionaire. Her family fought over her estate in a series of trials, which included a precedent setting trial involving handwriting analysis. The story of Cynthia Hesdra provided insight into the economic contributions of blacks in the North prior to the twentieth century. This article examines the life and times of Cynthis Hesdra and other blacks during her lifetime, using historic census data, court records, historic newspaper articles, and other sources. Initially, Cynthia Hesdra’s estate went to her husband, Edward, but the state would eventually take ownership of the ex-slave’s fortune.

Race and gender are strong predictors of asset ownership including home ownership, self-employment and interest, dividends and rental income. Yet, seldom have the two concepts been linked in the socio-logical literature on wealth inequality. Additionally, potentially important determinants such as business income have often times been excluded from the analyses despite findings suggesting that business income may be an important indicator for racial and minority groups who would otherwise be regulated to employment in low status jobs in the secondary labor market.

This note examines the effects of community socioeconomic status on mortgage lending patterns
in Metropolitan Detroit. Data from 2000 HMDA reports and the 2000 U.S. Census are analyzed using
multiple regression. The results from this analysis have two important implications for research on
mortgage lending. First, they indicate that the effects of variables linked to a community’s socioeconomic
status on mortgage lending patterns are highly intercorrelated. As a result, variations in mortgage lending
appear to be the result of the combined effects of a number of socioeconomic variables acting together.
Second, the results from this analysis indicate that the socioeconomic status of a community is positively
correlated with mortgage lending activity. In other words, a decline in neighborhood socioeconomic
status is significantly correlated with a decline in mortgage lending

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The Masten District Plan is a strategy for redeveloping Buffalo’s Masten district and transforming it into a great place to live, work, play and raise a family.

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The Fillmore Avenue Commercial Redevelopment Plan provides a vision for the Fillmore Avenue commercial corridor that is one of a vibrant, thriving passageway that serves as the cultural commons for the Martin Luther King, Jr. neighborhood and a Gateway to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Park. The Fillmore commercial corridor will be a symbol of the vibrancy of King’s Dream and a place that brings people together from across the race and class divide to shop, play, and interact.

This proposal seeks to establish a TIF (Tax Increment Finance) district for this the Fruit Belt and the adjacent Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

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This report provides a strategy for the commercial redevelopment of the Fillmore Avenue commercial corridor in Buffalo, New York. As the gateway to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Park, and the spine that holds the two western and eastern sections of the neighborhood, the redevelopment if the Fillmore Avenue commercial corridor is central to the redevelopment of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Neighborhood.

This article examines the promise and limits of using planning advisory board to augment citizen participation.

This article examines the institutional context in which community-based organisations are embedded.

This article examines the institutional context in which community-based organisations are embedded. Two emergent themes in the literature on community development are
examined critically: the woman-centred model for community organising; and the thesis concerning the community development industry system. The analysis is based upon data from field
research with community development corporations (CDC) in Detroit, Michigan. The findings
from this research indicate that the prospects for developing progressive community development
strategies in grassroots organisations are constrained by barriers to financial resources and
limited access to the policy-making process. As a result, recommendations are forwarded for the
creation of autonomous funding sources, expanded democratic decision-making in communitybased organisations and the linking of progressive reform to broad-based coalition building and
multiple oppression politics.

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The report makes the case for maintaining Buffalo Public School 37, Futures Academy, as a Magnet/Residence School. The retention of the school’s current status is one of the keys to successfully rebuilding the Fruit Belt/Medical Campus neighborhood. A strong pre-K through Eighth Grade elementary magnet/residential school is central to attracting new residents to the community.

In this article the mobilization of social capital is examined as it relates to the formation of collaborative partnerships among charitable organizations

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This study follows two earlier works published by the Center for Urban Studies, The Turning Point: A Strategic Plan of Action for the Fruitbelt/Medical Corridor (March 27, 2001) and Fruit Belt/Medical Corridor Tax Increment Financing District (February 12, 2002). The original report argued that better social, economic and physical connections could be established between the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC), a wealth generating district within the city, and the adjacent Fruit Belt residential area, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Buffalo.

The study documented in this report was the first attempt to visualize the physical potential of the residential neighborhood. The work took as proceeded under the assumptions stated in the earlier reports about the amount of residential and commercial / social amenity space that could be anticipated in this redevelopment. It was viewed as an opportunity for the existing community members to make initial suggestions about development they would like to see.

The purpose of this report is to develop a strategic plan and action agenda for Buffalo’s Masten District, which is based on the turning point threshold concept. Every neighborhood has a turning point threshold, which is that point where a snowballing effect takes place that transform the neighborhood when investments rise above it. The ultimate goal of this project is to outline a plan, which if successfully implemented, will push the Masten District beyond the turning point threshold.

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This report is a strategic plan and action agenda that guides the restoration of Buffalo’s Fruitbelt Neighborhood and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC). The plan and agenda constructs a framework to guide restoration, identifies potential sources of revenue and formulates an implementation strategy.

This article examines the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and community development corporations (CDC).

This article examines how community development corporations (CSC’s) and other nonprofits access social capital when constructing collaborative partnerships for urban revitalization projects.

Sociologists have a long tradition of studying the effects of differentials in indicators of socioeconomic status by race. In fact, since Duncan’s classic study on poverty, differences on such indicators have often been considered a measure of the “cost of being black.” This paper employs the new paradigm in the study of population, Critical Demography, to develop a measure of racism based upon estimates of the differentials in wealth, status and power. Specifically, the study asks three questions: (1) How is racism measured relative to wealth, status and power in the United States? (2) Based upon this measure, how has racism changed over time? and (3) What are the theoretical implications of this measure for the study of race and ethnicity in sociology, demography and the social sciences in general? The findings provide evidence of Mertonian serendipity: once macro-level measures of racism are controlled, blacks actually exceed whites in levels of education, income and housing values. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of measuring racism from a Critical Demography perspective.

This article examines the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and community development corporations (CDC). It is hypothesized that housing tenure and race are correlated with CDC emergence. The methodology for this analysis is primarily quantitative. Variables from the US Census are analyzed using logistic regression. Results from this analysis are augmented with ethnographic and archival data. In particular, data from interviews with CDC directors are examined to understand how neighbourhood characteristics and the community development industry system influence CDC development. This study’s findings assist planners in understanding how demographic characteristics of communities and interorganizational networks shape the services CDCs provide.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into black community wellness by examining a number of health, social, economic, cultural, and lifestyle issues that affect the health status of Buffalo’s Near East Side black community.

This article examines the experiences and attitudes of contemporary Black manufactures in the ethnic beauty aids industry. This industry produces specialized haircare products and cosmetics for Black consumers. Although this article focuses on owners of manufacturing businesses in a single industry, it is important because Black manufactures have historically been active in the ethnic beauty aids industry.

In this paper, the historical development of Chicago’s ethnic beauty aids industry is examined from the perspective of black manufactures. The central argument of this paper is that the business strategies of black manufactures in Chicago’s ethnic beauty aids industry have been shaped by racism and racial discrimination in mainstream society from the industry’s inception to the contemporary period.

This paper is based on a series of interviews with Korean owners of beauty supply stores on the South Side of Chicago which were conducted from January 1996 to August 1996.

This article argues that Korean entrepreneurs on the South Side of Chicago have a sojourning orientation similar to the type described by middleman minority theory.

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This article examines the experiences and attitudes of contemporary Black manufacturers in the ethnic beauty aids industry.

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As part of the University Community Initiative, the Bailey Avenue Project was an undertaking by the UB Center for Urban Studies at the request of University District Council member Kevin Helfer to identify the realities and perceptions of the Bailey Avenue business community.

The purpose of this study is to determine if there is a suburban market for housing in buffalo; and , if such a market exists, what can the city do to capture a greater share. The ultimate goal of the study is to outline an intervention strategy that will enable the city to increase its share of the regions’s middle income housing market.

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This report outlines the strategic planning process of the University Community Initiative. The University Community Initiative was a regional collaboration that brought together people, institutions, and businesses with an interest in the development of the University Community.

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The University at Buffalo Governance Project was an interdisciplinary research effort to study governance issues in Erie County. The Governance Project was founded upon the premise that a vigorous region requires competent, informed decision making, especially in the public sector.

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The study analyzed the impact of a proposed consolidation plan for the Buffalo Police Department in the Martin Luther King Jr. Neighborhood.

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As part of the University Community Initiative, this working paper analyzes the housing market in Erie County, New York.

In this essay commissioned by The Buffalo News, Henry Louis Taylor takes a look at the struggles of community building and neighborhood development within Buffalo’s East Side.