The contributions of historic preservation to housing and economic development

Abstract

Historic preservation contributes greatly to housing and economic development. Historic preservation has produced almost 250,000 housing units through use of the federal historic rehabilitation tax credit. Additionally, heritage tourism is a multibillion‐dollar industry, and preservation projects help further community revitalization.

Historic preservation also has a downside. Preservation's growing popularity may dilute its imperative and market prowess, and some argue it is used to thwart new development. Preservation requirements may impede affordable housing production and displace area residents. These undesirable consequences are not givens, however. Preservationists are working to become more flexible, and we suggest ways to practice historic preservation while mitigating some of its negative consequences—for example, tax credit changes, more flexible building codes, and a “tiered” system of designating historic properties at varying levels of significance.     

Women Offenders and the Gendered Effects of Public Policy1

At 17%, women represent a significant proportion of all offenders under criminal justice supervision in the US. Drawing on the findings from their report, “Gender-Responsive Strategies: Research, Practice, and Guiding Principles for Women Offenders,” the authors maintain that public policy has ignored the context of women's lives and that women offenders have disproportionately suffered from the impact of ill-informed public policy. This discussion of the implications of gender within the criminal justice system is based on a simple assumption: responding to the differences between women and men in criminal behavior and to their antecedents is critical to gender-responsive policy. Building on the pathway theoretical perspective, we find that in addition to the gendered impact of the war on drugs, policy changes in welfare reform, housing, and other social policy arenas combine to create a disparate impact on drug abusing women and women of color. Key policy areas affecting the lives of women offenders and their children include welfare benefits, drug treatment, housing, education, employment, and reunification with children. We conclude that addressing the realities of women's lives through gender-responsive policy and programs is fundamental to improved outcomes at all criminal justice phases. A blueprint for gender-responsive policy development is described through six guiding principles and their policy implications.     

Alexis de Tocqueville on the Covenantal Tradition of American Federal Democracy

Perhaps no analyst of democracy's potentials for despotism andself-government understood better than Alexis de Tocquevillethe importance of the "favorable circumstances" of America'srepublican and religious origins. America's covenantal heritageinspired the public philosophy of federal liberty and the federalprinciple used to establish governments and political associationsin colonial New England. The Puritans, Tocqueville explained,created the bonds and the liberties of citizenship by theirassent to eternal, transcendent principles, as well as by theirconsent to government. The principles of covenant ultimatelyprovided the institutional and conceptual foundation of constitutionalgovernment, making America's federal democracy less vulnerableto possessive individualism and democratic despotism. Federalprinciples fostered an important indirect role for religionin American politics. Tocqueville not only analyzed the tensionbetween the requirements of faith and democratic norms, butalso distinguished covenantal ways of negotiating these concernsfrom the approach taken by later advocates of religious freedom,fames Madison and Thomas Jefferson. He argued that federalism'smoral foundations will be difficult to preserve if this tensionis resolved in ways that promote individual autonomy by underminingcovenantal thinking.     

Culture,self, and“URI”: Anti-Americanism in contemporary South Korea

As a much debated phenomenon in contemporary South Korea, anti-Americanism has been seen primarily as a response to the perceived political and economic domination of the United States in Korean affairs. This article suggests that such a view, however, is incomplete without consideration of the cultural and psychological context in which contemporary discourses of cultural nationalism have arisen: specifically, an indigenous cultural psychology characterized by an emphasis onuri (“we”)—a collective sense of socially diffuse yet unified and homogenous selfhood. As one variety of contemporary national cultural discourse, anti-Americanism is a response to certain to certain unwelcome trends in cultural development that have already begun to undermine the collective sense of Korean selfhood, as reflected in part in Korean concern over the Western “cultural invasion,” and Korean critiques of American bias and arrogance in dealings with Korea. However, far from being a static concept concerned only with defensive protection of Korean identity,uri also reflects Korean concern for re-formulating national cultural identity in terms more accommodating to the outside. Ultimately, anti-Americanism needs to be seen in the context of a Korean cultural psychology, which posits the enduring value of a collectively defined selfhood as an alternative to the prevailing individualist representations of the West. Diane M. Hoffman is an anthropologist and independent scholar with research interests in contemporary Korean culture and Korean-American intercultural relations.