Survival of the Fairest: Examining HUD Reviews of Assessments of Fair Housing

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, arguably the most significant federal effort in a generation to address place-based disparities in access to opportunity and to advance fair housing. In 2018, HUD suspended the rule, it said in part because of the resources it was expending to implement it and in part because of the large share of municipal plans that HUD determined had failed to meet the rule’s requirements. In this article, we present the first analysis of the fair housing plans that HUD did not accept, examining how municipalities failed to meet the rule's requirements, what those failures imply about advancing fair housing, and the extent to which HUD’s enforcement strategy was working before the suspension. Our analysis shows that HUD engaged in detailed reviews of municipalities’ Assessments of Fair Housing and provided constructive feedback. The most common issue with which municipalities struggled was setting realistic goals that would actually advance fair housing and creating measurable metrics and milestones to gauge progress. Several municipalities neglected to conduct thorough regional analyses or analyses of all relevant disparities in access to opportunity. Both shortcomings reflect broader challenges municipalities face in advancing fair housing, particularly in identifying strategies that address interconnected causes of disparities in access to opportunity and in building regional support to address those causes.     

When police pull back: Neighborhood-level effects of de-policing on violent and property crime,a research note

Many U.S. cities witnessed both de-policing and increased crime in 2020, yet whether the former contributed to the latter remains unclear. Indeed, much of what is known about the effects of proactive policing on crime comes from studies that evaluated highly focused interventions atypical of day-to-day policing, used cities as the unit of analysis, or could not rule out endogeneity. This study addresses each of these issues, thereby advancing the evidence base concerning the effects of policing on crime. Leveraging two exogenous shocks presented by the onset of the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and social unrest after the murder of George Floyd, we evaluated the effects of sudden and sustained reductions in high-discretion policing on crime at the neighborhood level in Denver, Colorado. Multilevel models accounting for trends in prior police activity, neighborhood structure, seasonality, and population mobility revealed mixed results. On the one hand, large-scale reductions in stops and drug-related arrests were associated with significant increases in violent and property crimes, respectively. On the other hand, fewer disorder arrests did not affect crime. These results were not universal across neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of debates concerning the appropriate role of policing in the 21st century.     

Government transparency and policymaking

We argue that making lawmakers more accountable to the public by making it easier to identify their policy choices can have negative consequences. Specifically, we analyze a model of political agency with a single lawmaker and a representative voter. In our model, the lawmaker has better information than the voter about the appropriateness of alternative policy courses. In addition, the voter is uncertain about the incumbent's policy preferences – specifically, the voter is worried the incumbent is an ideologue. Our model suggests that when lawmakers expect their policy choices to be widely publicized, for those lawmakers sufficiently concerned about reelection, the desire to select policies that lead the public to believe they are unbiased will trump the incentive to select those policies that are best for their constituents. Hence, lawmakers who would do the right thing behind close doors may no longer do so when policy is determined in the open.     

Preaching politics: Islam and Christianity on the Kenya coast

Focusing on the Kenya coast, this article analyses the developing contrast between the place of Islam and Christianity in public politics. It argues that Islam’s association with criticism of the political order contrasts with Christianity, but that this is not the result of inherent difference between the religions. Both have previously provided a language, and space, for political commentary and activism in Kenya. The contrast is rather the contingent result of particular circumstances in Kenya. Christianity has become increasingly associated with affirming clientelism and the accumulation of wealth in a way which is avowedly non-political but in practice legitimates the current political order. Meanwhile, although individual Muslims are more likely to enjoy high political office than was previously the case, Muslims are also more likely to locate their experience as symptomatic of a wider pattern of exclusion in Kenya and link this sense of local injustice to global inequalities.     

The Scary World of Online News? Internet News Exposure and Public Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice

Objectives

A substantial body of literature indicates that certain forms of media consumption may increase anxiety about crime and support for social controls. However, few studies have examined whether Internet news consumption is positively associated with such attitudes. The void is significant given the public’s increasing use of online news sources. This study addresses this research gap.

Methods

We draw on data from four national surveys conducted between 2007 and 2013, which collectively include interviews with more than 13,000 Americans. Using OLS and logistic regression, we assess the relationships between exposure to traditional and online media and perceptions of victimization risk, support for punitive crime policies, and views about police powers.

Results

Consistent with prior work, we find positive relationships between exposure to traditional forms of media—television news and crime programming—and anxiety about victimization and support for harsh crime policies. In contrast, Internet news exposure is generally not associated with anxieties about crime or support for getting tough on criminals. However, there is evidence of an interactive relationship between political ideology and Internet news exposure.

Conclusions

The results provide little support for cultivation theory in the context of Internet news consumption. We discuss the import of our findings, and suggest new lines of research to explore the correlates and the effects of exposure to online news sources.

     

The Effect of Wanted Posters on Prospective and Retrospective Memory

The experiment tested prospective and retrospective memory for a person pictured on a wanted poster. Participants monitored the videotaped activity of a computer lab; one of their duties involved reporting if they saw a computer hacker. Half viewed a wanted poster of the hacker before the monitoring task and half after. For half the participants, the hacker appeared during monitoring and for half not. A diagnosticity ratio comparing the correct prospective memory identifications with false positive identifications showed that a prospective identification was 3.35 times more likely to be accurate than inaccurate. For those viewing the wanted poster after monitoring, the diagnosticity ratio was 1.21. Based on diagnosticity, a prospective identification had more value than a retrospective identification.     

Approval regulation and endogenous consumer confidence: Theory and analogies to licensing,safety, and financial regulation

Safety regulation – in the form of pre-market approval, licensure, screening, and product entry limitations – governs numerous market realms, including consumer finance. In this article, we ask whether the effects of safety regulation go beyond safety and affect consumers' beliefs about the distribution of products they can use. We model “approval regulation,” where a government regulator must approve the market entry of a product based upon observable, unbiased, and non-anticipable experiments. We show that even if regulator and firm disagree about only quality standards, the disagreement induces the firm to provide more information about its product than it would in the absence of regulation. Put differently, purely first-order disagreements in regulation generate second-order consequences (more certainty about product quality). These second-order consequences of regulation are sufficient to generate first-order effects among end-users (more consumption of superior products), even when users are risk-neutral. In other words, even if approval regulation produces little or no improvement in safety or quality, it still aggregates information useful to “downstream” product users; these users will exhibit higher consumption and will more readily switch to superior products. In contrast with libertarian analyses of entry regulation and licensure, the model predicts that entry restrictions may be associated with greater product or service utilization (consumption) as well as with greater price sensitivity among consumers. Because contemporary cost–benefit analyses ignore these second-order effects, they are unlikely to capture the possible confidence effects of approval regulation.