Do State Affordable Housing Appeals Systems Backfire? A Natural Experiment

Several U.S. states have supplemented traditional judicial review of local land-use regulation with a state affordable housing appeals system (SAHAS). Empirical evidence indicates that a SAHAS can increase the proportion of housing that is affordable to low- and moderate-income households. But some scholars have suggested that an effective SAHAS will ultimately backfire, by producing incentives to prohibit market-rate development, thereby rendering a state’s housing stock less affordable overall. We test this “backfire” hypothesis with a longitudinal comparison of single-family housing development from 1980 through 2007 in municipalities located in adjacent areas of Connecticut (which adopted a SAHAS in 1989) and New York State (which did not have a SAHAS during the study period). Contrary to the predictions of the backfire hypothesis, our fixed effects regression indicates that Connecticut's SAHAS was associated with increased single-family development relative to the New York State jurisdictions in our sample. This result suggests that a SAHAS can increase below-market rate and mixed-income development without impeding market-rate development.     

Lying,Speech and Impersonal Harm

Law and Philosophy - Should the law punish the mere utterance of lies even if the listener has not been deceived? Seana Shiffrin has recently answered this question in the affirmative. She argues...     

The Boundaries of Property: Complexity,Relationality, and Spatiality

What does the property boundary mean to laypersons? How do everyday geographies of property work? Merrill and Smith offer an influential set of hypotheses concerning the boundary's role in communicating simple messages of exclusion in the everyday world. The first goal of this article is to assess these claims. Drawing from qualitative data on gardening from Vancouver, I suggest that the messages of the boundary may also be complex, intersubjective, and ambiguous. The supposedly robust moral intuitions that inform people's interactions with boundaries are not always exclusionary. Drawing from the sharp distinction between the heterogeneity of the empirical record and the studied simplicity of Merrill and Smith's account, my second goal is to make some broader claims regarding property and the boundary. Rather than seeking universality, simplicity, and singularity, I suggest the necessity and value of working with complexity. A relational view of property and space (or “spatiality”), I suggest, offers us a better perspective in which to begin to think about the complex work of the everyday property boundary.     

Peacebuilding for faith-based development organisations: informing theory and practice

Faith leaders and their congregations have been recognised as holding the potential to engage positively in peacebuilding activities in a post-conflict context. Alongside this, faith-based development organisations (FBDOs) have the ability to engage with these constituencies to increase the peacebuilding impact of their activities. This paper presents a framework of faith engagement for FBDOs to work with local faith leaders and people of faith to develop the peacebuilding impact of development activities. A reworking of Anderson's “Do No Harm”, it encompasses the areas that FBDOs need to address in order to be effective peacebuilding actors in a faith context.