Neighborhood Housing Resilience: Examining Changes in Foreclosed Homes During the U.S. Housing Recovery

ABSTRACT

The surge in foreclosures in the United States that began in 2007 reached a peak in mid-2011, and since then, the rate of foreclosures has been decreasing, providing evidence of the housing market recovery. This study examines factors that affected changes in ZIP code-level foreclosure rates in more than 300 U.S. metropolitan areas during the national housing recovery. Using multivariate analyses of the long- and short-term effects of foreclosures simultaneously, this finding shows that certain characteristics of the mortgage and housing markets led to more rapid neighborhood recovery. Results also indicate, however, that most urban-form variables led to neighborhood resilience over the long term, that high shares of mixed land use were strongly associated with fewer foreclosures, and that high shares of auto dependency were associated with high foreclosure rates. Finally, findings suggest that low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, particularly in cities, were more vulnerable and less resilient to economic shock, and the accumulated effects of foreclosures worsened over the long term. However, low- and moderate-income neighborhoods surrounded by suburban affluent neighborhoods recovered more rapidly than those in cities did. Understanding such resilience to economic crises will provide policymakers with insights that they can leverage to establish housing policies for sustainable neighborhoods.     

U.S.-China Space Cooperation: Balancing Act between the U.S. Congress and President

There are a growing number of U.S. space scientists and managers calling for reinitiating cooperation with China in space. It is well-known that investigations of the U.S. Congress into various allegations involving China have resulted in a series of laws curtailing space cooperation between these two countries. By surveying the concurrent political developments within the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, this article attempts to reveal the domestic compulsions that propelled changes in the U.S. space policy towards China. The fundamental impetus is the power struggle and differences between the U.S. president and Congress in their perception of U.S. economic interests and national security in the context of space technology that strained these relations. Recent U.S. presidents who inherited this situation added to the discourse based on their own perceptions about outer space and China. These perceptions either found congruence with the policy of the U.S. Congress or led to finding ways to circumvent its legal restrictions. Based on these developments, it is concluded that the view of the U.S. president has alternated between necessary, desirable, and objectionable on the issue of U.S.-China space cooperation, and the U.S. Congress has thus shifted from supporting to restricting and then legally banning cooperation.     

The impact of the U.S. war on terrorism upon U.S.-China relations

Using a framework of geopolitical analysis. Oliver Lee argues that the fundamental geopolitical relationships between the United States and China, namely the relationship between the world’s strongest naval and air power and the world’s strongest land power, would not be upset even after the American military presence in central Asia since September 11, 2001. The relationship would remain essentially unaltered because — American initiation of the use of nuclear weapons against China being ruled out for fear of Chinese retaliation — China would be able to withstand any U.S. military offensive conducted with conventional land, sea, and air forces, regardless of whether the U.S. possesses permanent air bases in Central Asia or not, and regardless of how many troops it may station on them. His teaching and research interests include domestic and foreign policies of China and power in America and U.S. foreign policy.     

Healthtown, U.S.A

The landscape of health care is about to change. Under the Clinton proposal every American will choose one of three basic kinds of health plan--HMO, fee-for-service or a combination. The big questions are how much you will pay and how you will choose your doctors. Lost already? Here's a tour of Healthtown, U.S.A.     

Dynamic Responsiveness in the U.S. Senate

I develop a theory of dynamic responsiveness that suggests that parties that win elections choose candidates who are more extreme and parties that lose elections choose candidates who are more moderate. Moreover, the size of past victories matters. Close elections yield little change, but landslides yield larger changes in the candidates offered by both parties. I test this theory by analyzing the relationship between Republican vote share in U.S. Senate elections and the ideology of candidates offered in the subsequent election. The results show that Republican (Democratic) victories in past elections yield candidates who are more (less) conservative in subsequent elections, and the effect is proportional to the margin of victory. This suggests that parties or candidates pay attention to past election returns. One major implication is that parties may remain polarized in spite of their responsiveness to the median voter .     

Policy voting in U.S. House primaries

ABSTRACT

This paper uses exit surveys of voters in four House primaries to ask how well voters are able to use primaries for the purpose of giving policy direction to their congressional parties. The surveys found that nearly half of voters could not recall the names of any candidate and that 11% were uncertain or could not recall for whom they had just voted. The surveys also found that nearly 40% of voters could not offer a political evaluation – that is, a like or dislike having political content – about any candidate, and that fewer than a quarter could offer political evaluations of as many as two candidates. The surveys found no evidence of policy-motivated voting in three of the four primaries, but substantial evidence of it in one. Yet even in that one race, voters split their support among three candidates sharing majority voter opinion on the key election issue and thereby opened the way for nomination of a candidate not sharing majority opinion. The paper concludes from this evidence that voters in these House primaries, and probably more widely, made little use of them for the purpose of giving policy direction to their parties.     

Countercyclical U.S. fertility and its implications

The following article is the verbatim text of a report based on research funded by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Rand Corporation. The report looks at changing fertility rates in the United States and their implications for future population size and age distributions. An economic model of fertility rate is used to explain observed differences in fertility rates amond couples and to predict future rates. The focus is on trends since 1947 because post-World War II data are the most complete. Several explanations for changing fertility rates are examined, and their usefulness in predicting the future is evaluated.     

Issue Accountability in U.S. House Elections

Political Behavior - This paper analyzes the positions Members of Congress take on important aspects of public policy, voters’ preferences on those issues, and individual-level voting...     

Preemption in the U.S. Federal System

The sharp increase in the number of congressional partial andtotal preemption statutes and innovative use of preemption powerssince 1965 have produced major changes infederal-state relations.The Congress has become a unitary government in several regulatoryfields and also finances its policies in other fields inpartby imposing burdensome mandates and restraints on state andlocal governments. Current federalism theories fail to accountfor the changes produced by preemption or to address alternativesto preemption other than conditional grants-in-aid     

European and U.S. aircraft development strategies

A comparison of 20 years of aircraft production in Europe and America. U.S. cost increases in the system acquisition process have resulted in large part from unforeseen (sometimes unforseeable) engineering difficulties in the development phase, and from substantial production commitment before development was complete. Common European strategy completed basic development before beginning production and demonstrated utility through prototypes, using early proof-testing of engines, electronics and airframes. An alternative acquisition strategy to that used in the 1960s in the United States is recommended for the next decade: (1) incremental acquisition, based on a sequence of decision points and a succession of development and production phases; and (2) pronounced austerity in early development phases. These changes would result in lessened cost growth and lower U.S. acquisition costs, as well as in improved predictability of schedule and system performance outcomes.The following statement was prepared for the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, and was presented on December 7, 1971.     

Big Data and U.S. Public Policy

This paper examines the growing recognition of the phenomenon called “Big Data” and the policy implications it poses. It is argued that a core policy issue is personal and organizational privacy. At the same time there is a belief that analysis of “Big Data” offers potentially to provide public sector policy makers with extensive new information that would inform policy at unprecedentedly detailed levels. Despite this potential to improve the policy‐making process data often contain individual identifiable information that would negatively impact American core values such as privacy. This makes the use of these data almost impossible. The paper recognizes that there may be a way to strip individual data from Big Data sets thereby making their analysis more policy useful. This approach is not at this time technically feasible but research is ongoing.