Stop and Frisk Practices in New York City
Racial profiling, and geographic-racial profiling, have long been pervasive features of policing in American cities. In New York City, the police department's "Stop and Frisk" policy has been at the center of major controversy, public protest, and litigation. In this project, we'll explore a dataset that the NYPD was obligated to create in order to monitor policing activities in communities across the city.
Global Suburbanism: Continuity and Change in Canadian Suburbia
Urban research has always portrayed suburbia as subordinate. Yet the overwhelming mode of production of new urban places is now taking place in settings that have always been understood as suburban -- newly-developing areas on the fringe of existing, built-up sections of the urban fabric. In a world where urbanization has become suburbanization, what does the city-suburb dichotomy mean?
Roger Keil, at the City Institute at York University, is leading an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers in studying global suburbanism. Markus Moos and Elvin Wyly are leading one small component of this research project -- a baseline spatial analysis of the dimensions of Canadian suburbanism.
Affordable Housing: Contested Supply and Demand in New Orleans
Before Hurricane Katrina, there was already an affordable housing problem in New Orleans. More than half of the housing units in New Orleans that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina were affordable housing units. After the storm, rents rose by 44%, fuelled by strong demand for a drastically reduced number of apartments. Increased increased insurance and operating costs further tightened the market for affordable units.
In the years after Katrina, there was great uncertainty over the extent of residential displacement, and the pace of household return to New Orleans neighborhoods. Recently, however, new sample estimates became available for the first time from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS). ACS data are by no means perfect -- they have a very large margin of error, since the samples are smaller than the old long-form census reports that the ACS was designed to replace. There is no question that data from the ACS will the subject of considerable discussion, debate, and local political struggle. Emily Rosenman is currently working on her Master's thesis in the Geography Department on this issue.
In this project, however, it is crucial to obtain a first glance at what the data suggest in terms of demographic changes in New Orleans neighborhoods since 2005. You can examine two reports on housing needs and supply by the Louisiana Housing Finance Authority and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Using these reports as guides, you can then use the newly-released ACS data to provide an updated report on the state of affordable housing in New Orleans. The ACS website allows you to download data in a variety of aggregations, including for all of New Orleans or for individual census tracts within the city. Possible projects could compare the new ACS data to previous data (e.g., 2008 and earlier), or could be a case study comparing housing conditions in a few census tracts with diverse demographic characteristics.
Flexible or Precarious? Labour Market Restructuring and Urban Transformation in Vancouver, Canada
Over the past two decades, it has been recognized that labour markets are becoming increasingly flexible and precarious in the current era of global capitalism. These two concepts represent two similar yet distinctive ways to understand transformations in the nature of work and employment. A flexible labour market is essentially one in which labour market actors can quickly respond to changes in business conditions. As such, while both employers and employees can utilize flexible labour markets to satisfy their labour market needs, it has been the growing use of flexibility by the former which has garnered much attention. Employers seeking to keep up with a fast-moving and fickle marketplace have utilized different forms of flexibility in the workplace in order to stay competitive. These include: numerical flexibility (the right to hire and fire without restriction), wage flexibility (the right to set the wage at a competitive level) and functional flexibility (the right to set and change work tasks as needed). While these forms of flexibility have enabled employers to be lean, agile and competitive, they have also had the effect of introducing precariousness into the labour market.
Precarious labour markets are those in which workers are, in various ways, vulnerable and insecure. A growing literature in labour studies, sociology, and other social sciences documents the rise of flexible labour markets and precariousness. Elliott Siemiatacki, a Doctoral Candidate in Geography at UBC, is investigating two aspects of this transformation. First, from a geographical perspective, researchers have clearly illustrated that flexibility and precariousness are established, regulated and experienced differently in different countries. In this sense, there is a recognition that geography matters. Yet, over the last two decades, economic geographers have shown that labour markets function and are differentiated not only at the national scale, but perhaps more importantly at the city-regional scale. There is, therefore, a need to bring the analysis of flexible and precarious labour markets down to the city-regional scale in order to understand the way in which different urban economies produce different profiles of flexibility and precariousness. Second, and more conceptually, the majority of research has focused on low-end service and manufacturing labour markets since these economic sectors tend to utilize flexibility the most. To be sure, examples such as retail work or foreign migrant work are likely the most readily apparent and risk-laden settings for precarious employment, but there has been a growing recognition that flexibility and precariousness are moving into professional, creative and high-tech industries as well. Thus, there is a need to supplement the existing literature on flexibility and precariousness by studying the way in which these dynamics are instituted and experienced in higher-end labour market settings.
Two articles nicely illustrate the kinds of evidence that we will need to evaluate the growth of flexibility and preciariousness in the context of Vancouver.
Altared Spaces: Gentrification, the Post-Industrial City, and Inner-City Churches in Toronto and London
For most of human history, spirituality and religious institutions were key elements of the urban experience. Churches, temples, mosques, and other institutions anchored urban neighborhoods, while integrating local faithful into regional, national, and global communities of belief and commitment. Since the first diagnosis of "postindustrial" society in the West beginning about forty years ago, however, things have changed dramatically. Most Western societies have followed a path of "secularization," with declines in the share of the population participating in formal, organized religious institutions. This process is not linear, and there are exceptions: secularization has been slowed in many Western European societies by the arrival of Muslim immigrants, while immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America have brought millions of new practicing Catholics to the United States.
In many circumstances, however, secularization has altered urban redevelopment processes in ways that hold significance for religious institutions, local cultural relations, and daily life in the inner city. Nicholas Lynch, Doctoral Candidate in Geography at UBC, is studying these linkages with respect to the current trend of inner-city church conversions from spaces of sacred, religious practice to spaces of commodified consumptions. Put simply, churches are going condo.
Nicholas is focusing on these processes in Toronto and London, and he proposes four hypotheses. First, in response to a decline in demand for organized religions, many Christian organizations and their church managers have been forced not only to re-scale their services, but also to also integrate a corporate ethic into their practices. Many church managers have undertaken 'rationalization' of church properties, illustrated through the private sale and re-development of church buildings. Second, he suggests that this growing trend of releasing inner-city churches to the real-estate market is made possible by a rising demand for symbolically and functionally unique inner-city properties sought by an aesthetic and class-conscious cohort of urban developers, planners and inner-city residents. When all the old funky industrial-era brick warehouses have been turned into trendy lots, what's next? Churches, in this sense, can be understood as a new architectural frontier for inner-city chic. Third, he posits that the re-development and marketing of church properties by this cohort is producing a novel inner-city aesthetic. Integral to this aesthetic is an appropriation and commodification of Christian heritage and material culture re-positioned as unique markers of lifestyle, taste and moral value. Certain middle- and upper-class residents use these signs of heritage and history to help define and differentiate themselves through their choices of house and home. Fourth, this kind of urban redevelopment has the effect of reshaping the inner city to serve the needs of certain kinds of home-buyers -- mobile, wealthy, with aspirations of cosmopolitan consumption -- while excluding other uses and other members of the urban community.
Two articles illustrate the themes of Nicholas' work. Since the population censuses in Canada and the U.K. ask people about their religious affiliation, there are several possibilities. What is the relationship between the geography of religious affiliation and the geography of recent gentrification? What are the distinguishing housing and built-environment characteristics of neighborhoods with the strongest degrees of religious affiliation?
Global Capital, Local Catastrophes: The Subprime Mortgage Boom and the Foreclosure Crisis
Through the 1980s, many financial institutions in the United States discriminated against people and places identified as racial and ethnic minorities -- especially African American communities. Community organizing and public policies challenged this practice of "redlining" -- quite literally, drawing red lines on a map to indicate where loans would simply not be made -- and beginning in the early 1990s many lenders began to find profitable, new "underserved markets" in places that had previously been excluded. Unfortunately, key changes in the lending industry -- and the loopholes of certain laws regulating what banks were allowed to do -- also encouraged a new breed of lenders and brokers to actively seek out low-income borrowers for financial exploitation in a syndrome known as "predatory" lending, often in the "subprime" or "B-and-C" market. A pattern of reverse redlining began to appear in many cities: unscrupulous lenders targeting minority neighborhoods for expensive credit with hidden or deceptive terms, and which often led to defaults and borrowers eventually losing their homes. Subprime lending began as a small segment serving low-income borrowers with bad credit histories, but grew rapidly through the 1990s, and accelerated from 2002 until a dramatic and catastrophic collapse that unfolded in early 2007. Much of this growth was driven by the pressures of Wall Street investment banks. Thanks to a practice known as "securitization," most individual home loans (and many other kinds of debt obligations) are packaged together into complex pools, and the resulting "mortgage-backed securities" are traded much like mutual funds on Wall Street and other financial markets around the world. Sophisticated risk assessment models had transformed loans to risky borrowers into financial instruments that, for many years, offered solid investment yields with very few losses for investors.
But it turned out that borrowers stuck with these loans were often in severe distress, and wound up being forced to sell and lose everything when they fell behind on their payments. Many of the worst subprime loans were structured in such a way that default was inevitable. As long as national home values were increasing each year, it did not matter to investors if some people lost their homes -- the home could be sold for more than the balanced owed, and everybody -- the broker, the lender, the investors -- was protected from loss. Everybody, that is, except for the homeowner. These distorted incentives eventually reached their limits, however, and after the long boom in housing prices began to slip in 2006, more and more people wound up slipping into foreclosure. And since home values were falling, this time a default meant that investors who held mortgage-backed securities might lose money. For at least a decade, community activists concerned about low-income communities and racial justice had been sounding the alarm, but powerful individuals and institutions devoted to financial deregulation fought off nearly all attempts to crack down on these abusive practices. But in early 2007, stock analysts who read financial reports carefully to advise investors began to see the results of the abusive practices that were finally reaching their limits. From late February, 2007, right up to now, each week has brought new twists and turns to a financial crisis that has truly gone global. First the riskiest companies in the subprime market went belly up. Then the mortgage-backed securities began to lose most of their value, since it was not clear how many of the borrowers would be able to keep up with their payments. Then the banks that had big stakes in these securities began to write off these losses, while seeing their own stock values collapse. Then it was disclosed that many institutions and investors had bought a new kind of insurance against these kinds of losses -- but the insurance, known as a "credit default swap," was totally un-regulated, and had reached a global volume of some $60 trillion -- yes, that's a "t". Of course, insurance is not much good if the company selling it goes out of business. That began to happen in 2008, forcing the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve to orchestrate increasingly frantic interventions in desperate attempts to restore the credit markets, support stock prices, and avoid a recession. These efforts prevented a total collapse of the financial system. But they did not prevent a recession, and painful wave of financial losses. Stocks listed on the New York exchanges alone lost nearly $7 trillion of value in 2008 -- with various indices losing more than 35 percent of total corporate value -- and many measures posted their worst performance since the mid-1930s.
But this is not just a story about global financial stuff. It's an intensely local story. Remember all those subprime loans in those fancy mortgage-backed securities? What about the people who got those loans? Some of these people may have tried to buy houses beyond their means, or perhaps they borrowed a bit too much on a home equity loan. But a lot of these people were actively deceived. And now hundreds of thousands of these people are losing their homes -- and some are losing their jobs, too, thanks to a terrible and deepening recession. One activist has described the wave of foreclosures sweeping through city neighborhoods as "Katrina without the water."
For several years, Kathe Newman, Associate Professor in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, has been studying the neighborhood-level effects of subprime lending and foreclosures in Newark, New Jersey, and its nearby suburbs in Essex County. She's worked with students in planning and policy to gather information on foreclosures, and to lead a task force -- the Essex-Newark Foreclosure Task Force -- of attorneys, community activists, researchers, and municipal officials. Most of Kathe's work has involved laborious efforts at the state courthouse and county registrar to sort through legal records to get information on foreclosures in Essex County. But her project would also benefit from contextual information on the subprime lending boom -- which gathered momentum in 2004 and then began to collapse towards the end of 2007 -- across the entire state of New Jersey. Fortunately, there is a widely-used public dataset -- the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records -- that gives us certain information on every person who requests a loan to purchase, renovate, or refinance a single-family home (including duplexes, condos, etc.) in any urban or suburban neighborhood. Moreover, these data also tell us a little bit about the lending institution that took the application, and what the decision was (denied, approved, and whether the loan was classified as a "high-cost" subprime note). Some of the questions we will explore in this project will include: how did racial and ethnic inequalities change in the turbulent period of 2004-2007 when the industry's push for more borrowers, and more profits, led to ever more risky practices? Were there signficant changes in the kinds of neighborhoods where subprime lending was most prevalent? What institutions were most responsible for the subprime wave in particular places?