Neighborhoods of last resort: How landlord strategies concentrate violent crime

Studies of crime hot spots have argued that landlords’ management styles, specifically their tenant screening and property monitoring techniques, affect crime. These studies, however, have rarely considered the political–economic contexts in which these actions take place: specifically, how landlords’ behaviors are shaped by, and themselves reproduce, larger rental market structures. Drawing on data pertaining to eviction rates, criminal incidents, housing code violations, and landlord behavior in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this study documents how extractive rental management strategies, such as weak tenant screening, frequent eviction filings, and property disinvestment, concentrate crime at particular properties. In turn, high rates of crime in a neighborhood incentivize these extractive landlord strategies. By showing how landlords’ economic strategies are central to urban crime geographies, this study contributes to our understanding of third-party policing by revealing the limits of market-based solutions to place management dilemmas.     

住房公积金制度对公务员住房消费的支持作用分析

本文提出,住房公积金制度对公务员住房消费具有促进住房消费资金的自我积累、实现住房消费互助、提供实现住房平滑消费的低成本信用工具、供给政策与商业性个人住房消费贷款组合产品、丰富住房分配货币化和住房保障途径等重要作用,并对这些作用的重要性进行了分析,以期为做好公务员的住房公积金管理工作提供理论依据。     

Experiencing liminality: housing,renting and informal tenants in Astana

ABSTRACT

This article is intended to contribute broadly to research in post-socialist urban studies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with ‘newcomers’ to the capital, Astana, from different parts of Kazakhstan, I examine the renting practices of newcomers. I analyse the experiences of newcomers in their new urban milieu of Astana, and try to answer the question of what it means to live in the city for various groups of individuals on a daily basis. I examine the Soviet and post-Soviet housing and the continuities of the Soviet legacy when it comes to the institution of propiska (city registration). I show that living in shared flats is a coping strategy to deal with expensive rents and meant to be a transitory step towards homeownership. For this reason many accept high rents and crowded housing as ‘normal’. Furthermore, I argue that informal renting practices are acceptable mostly for young and single people, who are free to experiment with city life, and are on their way to establishing careers and personal lives. However, elderly newcomers and young families with children who do not wish to live in shared flats, but have to rent, feel ‘homeless’ and trapped in ‘liminal housing’. For them, renting is undesirable, and they feel a sense of incarceration if they fail to secure housing.     

商品房买卖预约合同强制履行的适用研究

对于商品房买卖预约合同强制履行的问题,理论界在争议过程中基本形成了"强制缔结本约-强制履行本约"的通说。但是该通说无法避免自身的缺陷,而且司法实务中肯定或否定商品房买卖预约合同强制履行的裁判立场并存,该争议并无真正的定论。通过选取样本,统计分析商品房买卖预约合同实务案例中体现出的违约方、违约原因、卖方和卖方的违约比例等,根据利益平衡和保护购房者一方的理念,应仅支持商品房买受人关于商品房买卖预约合同强制履行的主张,而房地产开发企业作为出卖人的情形,不支持其关于强制履行的请求。     

Housing Affordability and Health: Evidence From New York City

It is generally understood that households make tradeoffs between housing costs and other living expenses. In this article, we examine the relationship between health-related outcomes and housing-induced financial burdens for renters in one of the most expensive cities in the world, New York, New York. Drawing from the Housing Vacancy Survey for 2011, a representative survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau of more than 16,000 households in New York City, we estimate the effect of housing cost burden on the overall health of renters and the extent to which they have postponed various types of medical services for financial reasons. Results show that higher out-of-pocket rent burdens are associated with worse self-reported health conditions and a higher likelihood to postpone medical services for financial reasons. This relationship is particularly strong for those households with severe rent burdens. In addition, housing cost burden is equally or more important than other physical housing characteristics in explaining the variation in self-reported general health status and health care postponement. These findings are robust across specifications with different degrees of household, unit/building, and neighborhood controls, and among longstanding and newer renters. Our findings point to the importance of considering health-related outcomes when designing housing policies, and that housing subsidies should target both renters' out-of-pocket costs and place-based repair and maintenance.     

The Geography of the Recent Housing Crisis: The Role of Urban Form

This study maps the geography of the recent housing crisis within and across American metropolitan areas, and evaluates how it is related to a series of spatial and socioeconomic variables at neighborhood and metropolitan levels. It finds that the spatial patterns of housing recessions vary widely by region. In general, fast-growing metropolitan areas in the Southwest and Florida experienced not only deeper but also longer housing recessions. In contrast, metropolitan areas in the South (except in Florida) saw shallower and shorter housing recessions. Metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast had fewer price declines in the crisis, but their housing recessions tended to be longer. Housing recessions tend to be deeper and longer in larger metropolitan areas. Neighborhoods located closer to city centers experienced shallower and shorter recessions compared with those in fringe areas. Even after controlling for many other variables, automobile dependency is still a strong and positive predictor of housing recession depth and duration. The effects of other urban form variables, such as land-use density and mixed use, are mixed and vary by region. The significance of the effects of neighborhood demographic variables on recession depth is highly dependent on the inclusion of high-risk loan in the model, suggesting that predatory and high-risk lending is one major reason why lower income and minority neighborhoods were hit harder by the recent housing crisis. The effects of high-risk loan and neighborhood demographic variables on housing recession duration, however, are rather weak.     

Household Energy Consumption and Housing Choice in the U.S. Residential Sector

Energy use in residential buildings accounted for 21% of U.S. CO₂ emissions in 2013. Efforts to reduce energy use in the residential sector have been overly focused on improving energy efficiency of buildings. This article incorporates housing policy debate into energy policy, hoping to provide new opportunities for planners to participate in residential energy policy. Using data from the latest Residential Energy Consumption Survey, structural equation modeling has been applied to isolate the direct and indirect effects of household and housing characteristics on residential energy use. Results show that more than 80% of a household's indirect effect on energy consumption happens through the building characteristics, which is characterized as the housing choice effect on energy consumption. Planners can participate in residential energy management efforts by influencing housing needs and priorities of communities towards more sustainable compact housing units.     

Section 8 Renters in the Phoenix,Arizona, Foreclosure Crisis: Implications for Poverty Deconcentration

How the recent U.S. foreclosure crisis affected federal housing mobility programs has not been well studied. This article explores the crisis’s impact on low-income renters receiving Section 8 vouchers in Phoenix, Arizona. We find that (a) 8% of voucher holders lived in homes that underwent foreclosure, (b) they were in comparably affluent neighborhoods, and (c) most eventually moved after foreclosure. Yet, those who moved after foreclosure were not overtly disadvantaged in the housing market. This unexpected finding may be explained by the opening up of new housing opportunities for voucher holders as foreclosures in more affluent areas were converted to rentals. Overall, this research suggests that the foreclosure crisis did not adversely affect the Section 8 program’s goal of deconcentrating poverty in Phoenix and may have even advanced it—a dynamic potentially occurring in other formerly booming and economically distressed Sunbelt regions.     

Spaces of exception: governing fuel poverty in England’s multiple occupancy housing sector

Homes in multiple occupancy (HMOs) – residential properties containing common areas shared by several households – are a growing feature of the housing landscape across the UK. They have often been subject to political stigmatization as a result, in part, of comprising poor quality dwellings. This paper uses a “spaces of exception” framework to explore the juridical and material mechanisms involved in the rise of fuel poverty among people living in HMOs. Having analysed evidence from interviews, census data and the secondary literature pertaining to the English context, we highlight the processes that have led to the biopolitical othering of this housing stock in institutional and infrastructural terms. We argue that the expansion and persistence of fuel poverty in HMOs are promoted not only by the disproportionate concentration of low-income residents in relation to the rest of the private rented sector, but also by the socio-technical configurations that underpin this type of housing. Fuel poverty can thus be seen as the joint outcome of broader practices of legal, political and material delegitimization.     

Rising Damp in the Suburbs. Or ‘Whatever Happened to the Villa Tory?’

The suburban areas that were initially stereotyped in the late nineteenth century as ‘Villa Tory’ strongholds and exemplified by Hackney and Islington had, by the 1980s, become ‘bedsitter’ areas dominated by the political left. An examination of the evolution of electoral behaviour in these areas shows that conservatism did indeed dominate the villa suburbs, and that although there were previous intimations of decline, it was not until 1945 that Labour broke the Conservatives’ grip. The causes of this are identified as an outward movement of the population to interwar suburbia, the breaking up of villas into flats, and Labour's increasing appeal to middle class electors. In this category of seats, Labour has outperformed the party's national achievement consistently since 1955; the party's exceptional results here in the 2017 election are, therefore, a new peak on a long‐term trend rather than a breakthrough.