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Laws are often ambiguous, requiring organizations to develop strategies to interpret and shape compliance. A structural gap in the middle of this implementation frequently involves broker actors, variously identified in literature as 'regulatory wranglers' and 'translators.' This article builds on that work by identifying circulating experts as playing a role in the legalpolitical field of affordable housing. I argue that previous work highlights mediating brokers as contributing to the vertical flows of regulatory knowledge and practice from law above to practice below. This article focuses attention on the brokers' roles in horizontal information flows, specifically movements across place and across time. For place, this means bringing technical and normative expertise to disconnected local stakeholders. For time, this means tracking iterative public deliberation to see how these meso-level actors engage in claim refinement. Paying attention to the horizontal flow of information, as well as the vertical, will enrich our understanding of regulatory interactions, adoption of law on the ground and the possibility for civic engagement in contested issues. Drawing on over two and a half years of ethnographic observations of public hearings of suburban towns dealing with a state affordable housing law, the case is made for the existence and relevance horizontal flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on working- and lower-middle-class housing in Ireland's urban areas during the late 19th century. Particular focus is given to conditions in the city of Dublin, which the author says became a catalyst for various reforms to urban housing including the Cross Act of 1875. Details related to housing in Belfast, Ireland, and to middle-class housing in the suburbs are presented. Other topics include the Dublin Sanitary Association (DSA), tenements, and municipal corporations.

Those concerned with the geography of crime have long noted that the buffer zones (areas of non-offending surrounding offender residences) and median trip distances are smaller for journeys made in connection with violent as compared to property crimes. Yet buffer zones and trip distances are generally treated as uniform phenomena when considered within crime types. This is misleading. The current study examines 3,238 trips by convicted Danish burglars at six types of residential property. The results suggest that the standard findings concerning buffer zones and crime trip distances are largely driven by data from burglaries at one-family houses. Crime trips to apartment dwellings exhibit no buffer zones whatsoever and limited trip distance (both attributable to rich target backcloth), while trips to farm houses and country houses exhibit extensive buffer zones and extended trip distances (attributable to both limited target backcloth and, in the latter case, methodological biases introduced by vacationing burglars). This study is unique in terms of overall data quality and property-specific sample sizes. While the results are not particularly startling in hindsight, they indicate a need for caution in connection with the reification of notions like "buffer zone" and "average trip distance." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]