面对低收入群体的工会对策

在我国结构调整和深化改革的进程中,一些深层次的矛盾不断暴露,近年来出现了一个低收入职工群体,客观上要求工会在维护困难职工群体合法利益的同时,也要关注低收入群体的特殊利益,发挥工会在维护社会政治稳定中的作用。     

The Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment on Participants’ Residential Environments

We used the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment to inform how Housing Choice Vouchers and housing mobility policies can assist families living in high-poverty areas to make opportunity moves to higher quality neighborhoods, across a wide range of neighborhood attributes. We compared the neighborhood attainment of the three randomly assigned MTO treatment groups (low-poverty voucher, Section 8 voucher, control group) at 1997 and 2002 locations (4–7 years after baseline), using survey reports, and by linking residential histories to numerous different administrative and population-based data sets. Compared with controls, families in low-poverty and Section 8 groups experienced substantial improvements in neighborhood conditions across diverse measures, including economic conditions, social systems (e.g., collective efficacy), physical features of the environment (e.g., tree cover) and health outcomes. The low-poverty voucher group, moreover, achieved better neighborhood attainment compared with Section 8. Treatment effects were largest for New York, New York, and Los Angeles, California. We discuss the implications of our findings for expanding affordable housing policy.     

The Origins of the Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and the End of Public Housing

The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) Program is designed to address a $26 billion public housing capital needs backlog. New investment is leveraged by converting public housing to project-based assistance, with ownership transferred to nonprofit and private entities. In other words, RAD is expediting the end of the country’s 80-year-old public housing program. While this may seem like a dramatic policy shift, there is actually little about RAD that is new. This investigation of RAD’s origins reveals it to be the coalescence of existing programs, established policies, and longstanding trends multiple decades in the making. This in turn helps explain why RAD has expanded so quickly and why its expansion is likely to continue. There exists a great need for more research on and monitoring of RAD’s implementation, and for a reassessment of the policy priorities that produced both the program itself and the problem it attempts to solve.     

After-School Programs as a Prosocial Setting for Bonding Between Peers

This study reports on the longitudinal analysis of a structured after-school arts program for Canadian youth, ages 9 to 15 years, from low-income communities where the relationship of peer social support, family interactions, and psychosocial outcomes is evaluated. Multi-level growth curve analyses suggest an increase in prosocial development with peer social support and a decrease in prosocial development when negative family interactions are present. Comparisons between matched controls, using estimated linear propensity scores, revealed significant improvement in prosocial behaviors for the intervention group. The structured after-school arts program was found to increase prosocial behaviors and bonding with peers for youth from low-income communities.     

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.     

Is preserving small,low-end rental housing feasible?

This paper uses multiple national datasets to examine the financial, structural, neighborhood, and tenant characteristics of 1–4 unit low-end rental properties, which house 44 percent of all poor renters in US cities. We investigate the feasibility of two strategies to stabilize these properties: (1) outsourcing property management, and (2) transferring bundles of properties to large owners to generate economies of scale, cash reserves, and lower financing costs. We find that approximately five percent of small affordable rental properties are stable, 65 percent are salvageable but at risk, and about 30 percent are not salvageable. For roughly 19 percent of the salvageable properties, a key problem is high vacancy rates, which could be addressed by professional tenant placement services. Bundling has greater potential, but requires purchases at below market prices, amounting to a subsidy.     

A different lens: administrative perspectives on portability in Illinois' Housing Choice Voucher Program

Over the last decade, the Housing Choice Voucher Program has grown to become the USA's primary strategy for providing safe, decent, and affordable housing. Annually serving more than 2 million low-income households, the program is designed to help low-income households afford private market rental housing. The program also allows for the “portability” of vouchers nationally between housing authority jurisdictions. Both features aim to mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty. Research on the Moving to Opportunity Program and the Gautreaux consent decree have produced data confirming that residential mobility can at times lead to positive opportunities for assisted households. This past research has been conducted on specific programs occurring outside of the general Housing Choice Voucher Program framework and has focused on household-level outcomes, paying little attention to the ways in which program administration may affect outcomes for voucher households. This article aims to understand voucher portability from the perspective of housing authority executive directors and program administrators, in order to better understand how program administration impacts the types of household outcomes observed in prior research. The results reveal that housing authority administrative practices and inter-housing authority relationships play a significant role in shaping the types of outcomes realized by porting voucher households. These findings suggest several changes to program administrative design and policy that may improve support for voucher households as they make portability moves.     

Impacts of the Community Reinvestment Act on Neighborhood Change and Gentrification

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages bank lending in low- and moderate-income areas. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the relative-income threshold that distinguishes CRA-eligible from ineligible neighborhoods (census tracts) and find little evidence that CRA has contributed to neighborhood changes associated with gentrification in eligible areas. Over the 1989–1999 period, we find that eligible tracts had greater increases in mean income relative to ineligible tracts, but we find little evidence that the CRA caused decreases in the proportion of long-term residents or increases in the proportion of White or college-educated residents.     

Why Low-Income Households Become Unstably Housed: Evidence From the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

ABSTRACT

Because of a severe shortage of affordable housing in the United States, an increasing number of low-income households suffer from housing instability. However, little evidence exists as to why they experienced housing instability, although they were stably housed at other times. By applying hybrid models to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, this study estimates the effects of potential household-level predictors on the likelihood of experiencing housing instability. The results show that changes in family employment structure, job insecurity, automobile ownership, and the number of adult family members within a household correlate with housing instability after controlling for changes in household income and housing costs. Moreover, I find that households with children are particularly vulnerable to housing instability. These results contribute to identifying valid household-level predictors of housing instability and developing preventive policy interventions that help unsubsidized low-income households achieve housing stability.     

Comment on Kirk McClure's “Are low-income housing tax credit developments locating where there is a shortage of affordable units?”

Kirk McClure's article makes important contributions to our understanding of the way in which state allocating agencies are using the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). However, one of the premises of his analysis – that allocating agencies should encourage the location housing developments in census tracts with a “surplus” of low-income renters – is mistaken. Census tracts are too small to be considered closed-system housing markets. Additionally, the LIHTC program does not exist in isolation, but instead as part of a combined national rental housing policy that includes both supply-side programs (LIHTC) and demand-side programs (housing vouchers). A final flaw in the notion that LIHTC units should be built in census tracts with a surplus of renter households in the 30% to 60% of AMI range compared with the units affordable to them is that increasing the amount of affordable housing in those tracts could have the effect of further concentrating households by income and race.