Comment on William G. Grigsby and Steven C. Bourassa's “Section 8: The time for fundamental program change?”

Abstract

Grigsby and Bourassa claim that the major problems with the housing voucher program are that most families with affordability problems are not served and that housing assistance is not part of the federal safety net. They propose replacing the program with a housing entitlement for most very low‐income renters, with eligibility linked to receipt of safety‐net benefits. Resources to serve additional families would be generated in part by changes like those found in the Department of Housing and Urban Development's recent block grant proposals.

The Grigsby‐Bourassa proposal lacks a clear assessment of likely costs. Also, there is a risk that the means the authors propose will be heard, but that their call for expansion will not. Finally, their proposal does not intersect with other ideas to modify a basically successful program to better achieve its goals, and questions about rental markets and family and landlord behavior also must be answered.     

Remembering while Forgetting: The Role of Automorphism in City Management in Warsaw

This article summarizes the results of a study of city management in Warsaw. Contrary to the common opinion, the difficulties in effective city management in Warsaw do not stem from its communist past, but from a veneered sedimentation of a rationalist-legalist frame of action. These problems are aggravated by a negative attitude toward imitation of foreign models. The article discusses possibilities for reframing that are created by automorphism, that is, an imitation of the city's invented tradition.     

Nobody trusts them! Under- and over-policing Native American Communities

Interviews with 278 Native Americans from seven states, and representing eight American Indian nations have revealed startling patterns of racial violence against this community. In part, this may be accounted for by the enabling climate created by law enforcement in these communities. Of particular concern in this paper are patterns of police activity, which simultaneously represent both the under-enforcement and over-enforcement of the law with respect to Native American communities. Participants have reported activities ranging from willful blindness toward Native American victimization at one extreme, to police brutality at the other.     

The Theory of Democratic Peace and Threat Perception

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's assessment of Hitler as a potential threat to American security in the aftermath of the Munich crisis highlights the role of liberal-democratic norms in shaping the threat perceptions of democratic leaders. A critical factor in Roosevelt's post-Munich expectation of future trouble for the United States was his judgment that Hitler's contempt for democratic processes of accommodation forecasted unlimited aims. Since Roosevelt did not link his perception of threat to regime type, however, this episode also calls into question a central tenet of the theory of democratic peace: the notion that democracies invariably harbor a "presumption of enmity" toward nondemocracies. Nevertheless, the Munich case allows us to see which democratic norms do matter in threat perception and establishes that they are not simply the epiphenomena of state interests. Moreover, Roosevelt's response to the Munich crisis shows that threat can be assessed primarily on the basis of intentions and suggests how democratic predispositions can provide indicators of intent. Finally, in analyzing why some democratic leaders derive diagnostic information about aggressive intentions from such indicators, while others do not, this article explores the connection between different leaders' perceptions and the foreign policy processes of democratic states.     

The Writing s on the Wall: Symbolic Orders in The Yellow Wallpaper

When responding to the problem of the feminine condition, most women writers start with the premises that women are superior, inferior or equal to men—and in any case, the man is the Other. The works of Nicole Vedrès imprime this fundamental otherness on which the feminist dispute traditionally fed. The structures of several of her novels suggest an underlying archaic and tribal pattern which coincides in many places with traits of matriarchal societies. They tend to de‐emphasize the individual character in favor of the unity of the clan. The figure of the husband acquires a secondary and transitory aspect. Within this framework, the women are freed from the usual ethical and sociological taboos of the patriarchal system with which we are familiar, while preserving their dignity and their identity. Finally, the true hero of these stories is the clan's executive agent, a self‐effacing and protective male whose function is to ensure the survival of feminine values. In as much as his relationships with the women of the village are nonsexual and of a brotherly nature, his role resembles that of the maternal uncle in matriarchal models. He does not present the alien and aggressive potential of the usual male hero, thus making possible a world in which men and women are close without being antagonistic.     

The history of family and colonialism: Examples from Africa,Latin America,and the Caribbean

The historical study of the family started later in the “Third World” than in Europe and North America, and the link between colonialism and family structures in the colonized or formerly colonized countries has not been explored thoroughly. In this issue we have chosen examples from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean in part because the importance of people of African background in both continents provided a certain link. The main connection, though, was the fact that all examined cultures had to cope with Christian-European family norms and with the values of the colonizers. The aims, forms, and historical circumstances of the colonial situation were quite different in all the cases examined. When changing conditions made traditional kinship bonds less reliable or less workable, people turned to alternative institutions such as gynaegamy or gender groups. If there is one conclusion to be drawn from all the examined cases, it is that colonized societies had the ability to use a variety of family forms as they adjusted to new situations.