Immigrant Engagement in Participatory Budgeting in New York City

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a welcome experiment in participatory democracy in New York City (NYC), one that could produce greater civic engagement of traditionally marginalized groups and more equitable resource distribution. By engaging immigrants, PB aims to affirm and elevate their voices, help develop their civic capacities, and promote their political participation and community empowerment. During the past four years, participation by immigrants (foreign-born residents) in New York City’s PB process (PBNYC) has steadily increased, growing from nineteen to twenty-eight percent of all PB voters. Yet, immigrant participation lags compared to their numbers, with great variation among PB districts. Using a mixed methods approach that incorporates surveys of and interviews with immigrant community members, staff at immigrant serving community-based organizations, and City Council staff, this article aims to parse out the logistical and affective barriers to participation immigrants face in PB districts and how PBNYC’s design attempts to circumvent said barriers and facilitate participation. Ultimately, our study reveals a complex mix of promising practices and structural constraints involved in working toward PB’s “inclusive” and “equitable” aims.     

From Porto Alegre to New York City: Participatory Budgeting and Democracy

Because of its popularity, there is now a large literature examining how participatory budgeting (PB) deepens participation by the poor and redistributes resources. Closer examinations of recent cases of PB can help us to better understand the political configurations in which these new participatory democratic spaces are embedded, and articulate the conditions that might lead to more meaningful outcomes. Who participates? For whose benefit? The articles in this symposium, on participatory budgeting in New York City (PBNYC), highlight both strengths and challenges of the largest American PB process. They focus less on redistribution, more on the dimensions of the process itself and of PBNYC’s successful social inclusion, new dynamics between participants and local politicians, and the subtleties of institutionalization. The symposium also reminds us, however, that contestations over meaningful participation are on-going, and that of all of PBNYC’s multiple goals, equity has proven to be the most elusive.     

Housing Affordability and Health: Evidence From New York City

It is generally understood that households make tradeoffs between housing costs and other living expenses. In this article, we examine the relationship between health-related outcomes and housing-induced financial burdens for renters in one of the most expensive cities in the world, New York, New York. Drawing from the Housing Vacancy Survey for 2011, a representative survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau of more than 16,000 households in New York City, we estimate the effect of housing cost burden on the overall health of renters and the extent to which they have postponed various types of medical services for financial reasons. Results show that higher out-of-pocket rent burdens are associated with worse self-reported health conditions and a higher likelihood to postpone medical services for financial reasons. This relationship is particularly strong for those households with severe rent burdens. In addition, housing cost burden is equally or more important than other physical housing characteristics in explaining the variation in self-reported general health status and health care postponement. These findings are robust across specifications with different degrees of household, unit/building, and neighborhood controls, and among longstanding and newer renters. Our findings point to the importance of considering health-related outcomes when designing housing policies, and that housing subsidies should target both renters' out-of-pocket costs and place-based repair and maintenance.     

The New Enclosures: London,New York City,Philadelphia, and the Transformation of Public Space

ABSTRACT

In recent years, social movements have taken to the streets to protest various forms of economic and racial injustice. However, these attempts to exploit the political opportunities public spaces afford have been compromised by the increasingly private nature of “public” spaces. What has changed is the rise of privately owned public spaces (POPS), areas that appear to be public, but in fact are owned by corporations that prohibit a range of activities, including political protest. This article argues such restrictions of public space are not limited to POPS. Rather, they are just one expression of a far more pervasive phenomenon, novel variations on centuries-old practices by which common or public land has been enclosed. I suggest that four forms of enclosure -for profit, of behavior, of community, and of the public realm- degrade the status of public institutions and insulate private interests from counter-mobilization by groups pursuing egalitarian ends.     

Reforms for Improved Efficiency in Public Budgeting and Finance: Improvements,Disappointments, and Work‐in‐Progress

The past half‐century has brought heightened expectations for what systems of budgeting and finance may be expected to deliver for the public. From systems to provide a first defense against theft and gross misappropriation, they have become systems to help lawmakers direct public resources where they can give the best public return, to help managers efficiently utilize resources under their control, and to communicate plans and results to the public. Government fiscal systems have developed more useful expenditure classification, established new measures for identifying public performance, brought nontraditional spending into control systems, and made finances considerably more transparent. Systems should, in combination with robust democratic institutions, make the public sector perform in the best interests of the citizenry. But in the face of great fiscal system improvements, governments struggle with staying fiscally sustainable, with meeting financial obligations to vulnerable populations, and even with avoiding default, receivership, or bankruptcy. Even as systems improve, government finances decline amid considerable private sector prosperity. Research over the past decade has done little to aid or explain the sweeping expectation and limited success of budget systems to transform essential elements of governance. It is the purpose of this paper to review progress in the development of robust fiscal systems, identify the major obstacles and failures, and link this evidence to the record of recent governmental financial distress, paying particular attention to the struggles of American governments. The broader questions needing to be addressed are the same questions at the forefront of public sector finance 100 years ago; however, the present focus has not been on these broader implications.     

The Use of Rental Housing Assistance by Immigrants in the United States and New York City

Abstract

The large influx of immigrants to the United States and New York City from poorer countries has sparked considerable debate as to whether immigrants are becoming a “public charge” to American society. Most arguments have centered around immigrants’ use of cash assistance programs. This article compares immigrants’ receipt of rental housing assistance with that of native‐born Americans.

Bivariate analyses reveal that immigrants, as a group, are no more likely than native‐born households to use any form of rental housing assistance. Indeed, in most instances immigrants are less likely than native‐born households to receive assistance, with two exceptions: immigrants who have been in the United States since 1970 and immigrants from the former Soviet Union in New York City. Multivariate analyses reveal similar results, except that immigrants who have been in the United States since 1970 are no more likely than other immigrants to receive housing assistance when we control for other factors.     

Public shelter admission rates in Philadelphia and New York City: The implications of turnover for sheltered population counts

Abstract

Previous estimates of the size and composition of the U.S. homeless population have been based on cross‐sectional survey methodologies. National enumeration efforts have yielded point‐prevalence estimates ranging from 0.11 to 0.25 percent of the population. This study reports data from shelter databases in Philadelphia and New York City that record identifiers for all persons admitted and so make possible unduplicated counts of users.

Unduplicated counts of shelter users yield annual rates for 1992 of about 1 percent for both cities and rates near 3 percent over three years in Philadelphia (1990–92) and over five years (1988–92) in New York City. The annual rates are three times greater than rates documented by point‐prevalence studies. Shelter bed turnover rates are reported, as are average monthly first admission and readmission counts over a two‐year period. Implications for future research and public policy are discussed.     

The Impact of School Choice on Public School Budgets: Evidence From Open Enrollment in New York City

This paper examines budgetary responses of public schools to competition from school choice, exploiting a discrete change in the choice set available to New York City high school students in 2003–2004. Schools facing increased competition (zoned, unscreened, and those with few applicants) increase per-pupil expenditures on noninstructional functions, reducing resources for instruction. Thus, schools may face important tradeoffs when competing for applicants, including between quantity and academic quality of applicants and between incentives to reach capacity and to improve academic outcomes. While advocates claim that school choice improves academic achievement, these results may help explain mixed findings in the previous literature.     

Turning Housing Into Driving: Parking Requirements and Density in Los Angeles and New York

This article examines the idea that residential minimum parking requirements are associated with lower housing and population densities and higher vehicle densities (residential vehicles per square mile). Cities frequently use minimum parking requirements to manage traffic, but parking requirements accommodate vehicles, suggesting they should lead to more driving and congestion rather than less. If parking requirements reduce congestion, they likely do so not by reducing the number of vehicles in an area but by reducing the densities of housing and people. We support this idea by comparing the Los Angeles and New York urbanized areas. We show that differences in housing, vehicle, and population densities across and within these urbanized areas are closely correlated with differences in the share of housing units that include parking, and that the share of housing units that include parking is in turn correlated with the stringency of parking requirements. Compared with Los Angeles, New York shifts less of the cost of driving into its housing market. We further show that within New York City, a 10% increase in minimum parking requirements is associated with a 5% increase in vehicles per square mile, a 4% increase in vehicles per person, and a 6% reduction in both population density and housing density. These relationships remain even after controlling for street layout and proximity to the subway.     

Barriers to Integrating New Urbanism in Mixed-Income Housing Plans in Chicago: Developer,Housing Official,and Consultant Perspectives

This article explores the barriers to implementing mixed-income development plans that incorporate the social (income) and physical (new urbanism) mixing goals of HOPE VI. I examine a comparative case study of three HOPE VI planning efforts in Chicago, Illinois, that exhibit different results. I draw from 25 in-depth interviews across three primary types of actors involved in the development process: developers, housing officials, and consultants. This research uses the perspectives of these key actors to identify the barriers that constrain the implementation of new urbanist designs. Current research indicates that mixed-income developments vary in their degree of income mixing and how new urbanist strategies are implemented. However, there is little consensus on why this is so. Findings indicate implementation of new urbanism is constrained by limited interagency coordination, restrictive design policies, low community buy-in, and exclusive marketing and occupancy practices. Overall, the research offers lessons learned from which I recommend changes in planning practices to assist actors in the consistent implementation of new urbanism in mixed-income developments.     

Quantum Change in the Fragmented Metropolis: Political Environment and Homeless Policy in New York City

The dominant paradigm for understanding urban policy change has long been that of “incrementalism.” The incrementalist argument is that institutional fragmentation reduces coordination, and thus discourages what might be called “nonincremental” or “quantum” change. This article seeks to test the incrementalist understanding of urban political change. Is it possible that under certain circumstances fragmentation can encourage quantum change? We will test this possibility with an analysis of homeless policy in New York City. Briefly put, over the last 25 years homeless policy in New York City has developed in a series of quantum jumps with dramatic, short‐term changes in funding, administration, and policy “philosophy.” Policy change followed this trajectory even though New York City's political environment is notoriously fragmented. This pattern contradicts what incrementalism would predict, and therefore suggests that that paradigm must be modified. Urban politics, this study suggests, can sometimes display the nonincremental, entrepreneurial, and “ideational” characteristics that have been identified as typical of the national “new politics of public policy.”