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This book reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, Los Angeles and Tokyo. This is the first book to directly focus on exits from homelessness in American or Japanese cities, and it is the first targeted comparison of homelessness in two global cities. The book argues that homelessness should be understood primarily as a socially generated, traumatic, and stigmatizing predicament, rather than as a stable condition, identity, or culture. It pushes for movement away from the study of “homeless people” and “homeless culture” toward an understanding of homelessness as a condition that can be transcended at individual and societal levels. The book prescribes policy changes to end homelessness that include expanding subsidized housing to persons without disabilities and experiencing homelessness chronically, as well as taking broader measures to address vulnerabilities produced by labor markets, housing markets, and the rapid deterioration of social safety nets that often results from neoliberal globalization.

In the past three decades, urban real estate megaprojects—massive, master planned, for profit urban developments—have captured the imagination of politicians and policy-makers across Asia. This book argues that state actors have been major drivers of these transformative projects, and have realized them through increasingly aggressive efforts to reclaim or acquire land, and to transfer land rights to corporate developers. State actors have specifically sought to monetize land as a strategy of state empowerment, a means to generate budget revenue, distribute patronage, and drive economic growth. This newly assertive state role in land markets constitutes the real estate turn in urban politics in the subtitle of the book. This real estate turn has significant implications for social, political, and ecological change in these societies. The book explores the varied spatial impacts of this real estate turn in three cities—Jakarta, Kolkata, and Chongqing—that differ in their systems of property rights and urban governance.

The book analyses two different forms of economic adversity faced by urban regions – external shocks and chronic economic distress. It then examines whether and why some regions are resilient to these different forms of adversity while others are not. The study includes quantitative analyses of the experience of all metropolitan areas from 1978-2014, including a special analysis of the Great Recession. It also includes intensive case studies of six regions. The case studies focus on the problems faced by each of the regions and the public policies adopted to deal with these problems. Two chapters are then devoted to an in depth discussion of whether the most common policies and/or practices employed were likely to have been successful. The final chapter asks what we can expect of explicit economic development policies as contributors to resilience and what are the lessons for economic development policy makers and practitioners?

This book addresses the role of suburban elites in setting development agendas for urban municipalities and their larger metropolitan regions. It shows how major nongovernmental, nonmarket institutions are taking responsibility for reshaping Philadelphia, led by suburban and state elites who sit on boards and recruit like-minded suburban colleagues to join them. In Philadelphia and other American cities, Third-Sector organizations have built and expanded hospitals, universities, research centers, performing arts venues, museums, parks, and waterfronts, creating whole new districts that are expanding outward from the city's historic downtown. The book argues that suburban elites have recognized the importance of the central city to their own future and have intervened to redevelop central city land and institutions. Suburban interests and state allies have channeled critical investments in downtown development and K–12 education. The book contrasts those suburban priorities with transportation infrastructure and neighborhood redevelopment, two policy domains in which suburban elites display less strategic engagement. The book is a rich examination of the promise and difficulty of governance that is increasingly distinct from elected government and thus divorced from the usual means of democratic control within an urban municipality.

This book is the fascinating and dramatic story behind New York City's struggle to build a new subway line under Second Avenue and improve transit services all across the city. The book reveals why the city's subway system, once the best in the world, is now too often unreliable, overcrowded, and uncomfortable. It explains how a series of uninformed and self-serving elected officials have fostered false expectations about the city's ability to adequately maintain and significantly expand its transit system. Since the 1920s, New Yorkers have been promised a Second Avenue subway. When the first of four planned phases opened on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 2017, subway service improved for tens of thousands of people. Riders have been delighted with the clean, quiet, and spacious new stations. Yet these types of accomplishments will not be repeated unless New Yorkers learn from their century-long struggle. The book offers valuable lessons in how governments can overcome political gridlock and enormous obstacles to build grand projects. However, it is also a cautionary tale for cities. It reveals how false promises, redirected funds, and political ambitions have derailed subway improvements. Given the ridiculously high cost of building new subways in New York and their lengthy construction period, the Second Avenue subway (if it is ever completed) will be the last subway built in New York for generations to come.

The book examines two contrasting housing policy approaches to achieving racial justice. Integration initiatives and community development efforts have for decades constituted contrasting means of achieving racial equity through housing policy. The book traces the tensions between these two approaches as they have been manifest in different ways since the 1940s. The core argument is that fair housing advocates have adopted a spatial strategy of advocacy that has increasingly brought it into conflict with community development efforts. The book presents a critique of integration efforts of fair housing for targeting settlement patterns while ignoring underlying racism and issues of economic and political power. In the pursuit of regional equity and racial justice, causes that both sides of the integration / community development dispute claim as important, it is the community development movement that has the greatest potential for connecting to social change and social justice efforts.

This book shows how cities can be places of opportunity rather than places with problems. With strongly revived cities and suburbs, working as places that serve all their residents, metropolitan areas will thrive, thus making the national economy more productive, the environment better protected, the citizenry better educated, and the society more reflective, sensitive, and humane. The book argues that America has been in the habit of abusing its cities and their poorest suburbs, which are always the first to be blamed for society's ills and the last to be helped. As federal and state budgets, regulations, and programs line up with the interests of giant corporations and privileged citizens, they impose austerity on cities, short-change public schools, make it hard to get nutritious food, and inflict the drug war on unlucky neighborhoods. Frustration with inequality is spreading. Parents and teachers call persistently for improvements in public schooling, and education experiments abound. Nutrition indicators have begun to improve, as rising health costs and epidemic obesity have led to widespread attention to food. The futility of the drug war and the high costs of unwarranted, unprecedented prison growth have become clear. The text documents a positive development: progressive politicians in many cities and some states are proposing far-reaching improvements, supported by advocacy groups that form powerful voting blocs, ensuring that Congress takes notice. When more cities forcefully demand enlightened federal and state action on these four interrelated problems—inequality, schools, food, and the drug war—positive movement will occur in traditional urban planning as well, so as to meet the needs of most residents for improved housing, better transportation, and enhanced public spaces.

Land use policy is at the center of suburban political economies because everything has to happen somewhere but nothing happens by itself. This book explores how well a century of strategic land-use decisions served the public interest in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Transformed from a rural hinterland into the home of a million people and a half-million jobs, Montgomery County built a national reputation for innovation in land use policy—including inclusive zoning, linking zoning to master plans, preservation of farmland and open space, growth management, and transit-oriented development. A pervasive theme of the book involves the struggle for influence over land use policy between two virtual suburban republics. Developers, their business allies, and sympathetic officials sought a virtuous cycle of market-guided growth in which land was a commodity and residents were customers who voted with their feet. Homeowners, environmentalists, and their allies saw themselves as citizens and stakeholders with moral claims on the way development occurred and made their wishes known at the ballot box. This book evaluates how well the development pattern produced by decades of planning decisions served the public interest.