Female crime and household control in early modern Frankfurt am Main

This article investigates the way in which informal control by household authorities affected how female crime was prosecuted in early modern Frankfurt am Main. Crime historians have argued that female crime was a particular urban phenomenon during this period. They have attributed this to a relatively high level of independence of women and the existence of many formal social control institutions. This article shows that due to strongly enforced patriarchal ideals concerning household authority in the Holy Roman Empire supposedly ‘rural’ characteristics (low levels of independence and high levels of informal control) could also be found in distinctly urban settings, like Frankfurt am Main. As the household was viewed as the central location for social order, authorities required everyone to reside in an orderly household. Unlike regions in which household control was weaker, the majority of women, including migrants, were therefore incorporated in networks of informal control through their position in the household. This means that strong informal control within the household, which is normally associated with close-knit communities in the countryside, also played a dominant role in the urban community of Frankfurt. The criminal investigation records show that only few domestics were prosecuted formally; rather they were disciplined by their master – leaving a possibly very large dark number of female criminality. Most of the offenders appearing in the criminal investigation records were those that had failed to secure a position within a household. Owing to the reliance on household control, cities like Frankfurt am Main knew a distinct type of urban female offender.     

Health awareness of rural households towards COVID-19 pandemic in India: Evidence from Rural Impact Survey of the World Bank

This paper aims at analysing the level of awareness of the symptoms and the methods of protection from COVID-19 based on the Rural Impact Survey of the World Bank, collected from 5200 households belonging to six states in India that is, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Data has been analysed using chi-square test and regression analysis. Results of the analysis indicate that about 70.8% rural households are aware of the symptom of coronavirus, and 81.9% are aware of the preventive measures for controlling the spread of COVID-19. Analysis indicates a significant association between awareness level on symptoms and prevention of COVID-19 and socio-demographics and location. The study further analyses the key determinants of awareness of COVID-19 symptoms and preventive measures using the logistics regression model, indicating that age, gender, education, income, poverty status, access to information, cash relief and medical services are the determining factors of health awareness on COVID-19 pandemic among rural households in India. Considering the importance of self-protecting measures in fighting the pandemic, this paper highlights the importance of strengthening public awareness for containing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.     

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 ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ in Costa Rica: To What Extent a Conundrum?

Quantitative data from Costa Rica suggest that poverty is 'feminising', especially in respect of female-headed households, who, since the early 1990s, have constituted a progressively greater share of the population classified as poor. This presents something of a conundrum given significant attempts on the part of the state to promote gender equality and to direct public expenditure to low-income women. Some light on this apparent paradox is shed by qualitative fieldwork undertaken in Guanacaste province where female headship seems to have become a more viable, and sometimes, preferred, option among women on account of its role in enhancing well-being. This is largely on account of social and legal changes that have contributed to making women less inclined to tolerate gender inequalities at the domestic level. The findings underline the importance of embracing gendered subjectivities in analyses of the 'feminisation of poverty' and invite caution about the latter being a unilaterally negative phenomenon.     

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.