Search

This paper examines taxable sales in the Los Angeles and Miami metropolitan areas to find evidence of the short- and long-run effects of the Rodney King riots and Hurricane Andrew on their respective economies. The comparison of these two events shows that the King riots had a long-term negative effect on Los Angeles' economy while Hurricane Andrew had a short-term positive effect on the Miami economy. The paper also applies the contrasting experiences of Los Angeles and Miami to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. In some ways, Katrina is a hybrid of these two events since it combines elements of both a natural disaster and a social disaster. The paper examines how Katrina is similar to each of the previous incidents and how these similarities might affect the recovery of New Orleans following the storm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to explore the changing geographical distribution of high-poverty neighbourhoods both between and within American metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000. Of particular concern is the relative shift in the number of high-poverty neighbourhoods between central-city, inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs. A classification scheme is developed for identifying these three types of area. The results indicate that there has been an increase in the number of high-poverty neighbourhoods in the urban cores of economically stagnant old industrial cities of the Northeast and an increase in the number of high-poverty inner-ring neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, metropolitan areas in California's Central Valley and a few selected rapidly growing Sunbelt metropolitan areas. The analysis indicates that an increase in the number of urban core high-poverty neighbourhoods is linked to the general health of a metropolitan area's economy and that an increase in the number of inner-ring high-poverty neighbourhoods is linked to rapid population growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]