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"The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age" by Zachary J. Violette and "How the Working-Class Home Became Modern" by Thomas C. Hubka are two books that provide insight into the lives of ordinary people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States. These books challenge the dominant narrative that focuses on the wealthy and their lavish homes, instead exploring the housing conditions and changes experienced by the working class and poor. Violette's book specifically examines the tenements in New York City, highlighting how immigrant builders and architects adapted these structures to meet the needs and desires of the new American residents. The books also discuss the tensions between housing reformers and tenants, with reformers often imposing their values on lower-class immigrants who were satisfied with their homes. The text mentions that Violette criticizes reformer Jacob Riis for his views on tenements, while Hubka focuses on the middle 60% of the income distribution and their housing improvements. It notes that Hubka's book lacks a racial analysis, but praises Violette for addressing the anti-Semitism faced by Jewish immigrants. Both books demonstrate the improvement in living standards for working-class people during this time period, with Hubka's book specifically examining the modernization of homes and its impact on people's lives. [Extracted from the article]

Exploiting quasi-random assignment to NYC arraignment judges with varying propensities to detain, we use a judge fixed effect instrumental variable approach to estimate the impact of pretrial detention on several case outcomes: guilty plea, conviction, and carceral sentence. We find that any period of pretrial detention increases the likelihood of a guilty plea by 23 percentage points, a conviction by 24 percentage points, and a carceral sentence by 35 percentage points. Stratified analyses show differences in the size of the effect by charge severity and race: felony defendants experienced a larger effect on all case outcomes; non-Black defendants experienced a larger effect on guilty pleas and convictions; and Black defendants experienced a larger effect on carceral sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The built environment anchors social, economic, and political community. A limited neighbourhood milieu fosters and maintains relationships that enable a community to realize its values. Fundamental civic activities such as getting out the vote depend on this empowerment. Voting has declined across New York City, but especially in the Bronx, which experienced the largest decline in voting between the 1969 and 2021 mayoral elections. The South and Central Bronx is now the largest city area of extremely low voter participation. This paper explores how public policies generated by the real estate industry – specifically redlining, urban renewal, and planned shrinkage – in conjunction with the Permanent Registration article in the 1938 New York State Constitution suppressed voting. The distribution of premature mortality and other health problems in the Bronx appear to be another consequence of these policies. That is, disempowerment and health erosion appear related and stem from influence of the real estate industry on mayoral policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of 'informal' financial practices in shaping the resilience of immigrant urban communities, many of which are centered around families—nuclear, extended, and chosen. It looks at financial transactions and services, with particular attention to Rotating Credit and Savings Associations (ROSCAs), whose members are frequently related to each other through ties of kinship, especially in Hispanic circles. In a pioneering study documenting ROSCAs, they were defined as associations where members agree to make regular contributions of money to a fund that is given to each contributor in rotation. Because of their presence in various cultures and geographies, researchers from various disciplines have studied them, mostly in developing countries and immigrant communities within the United States. It is argued that such mechanisms substitute or complement formal financial services that do not fulfill their needs and play a key role in the infrastructures of immigrant communities to be resilient in the face of adverse circumstances. Findings from the present study's fieldwork, conducted in one neighborhood in New York City's South Bronx, show that these kinds of groups address the members' short-term safety and resilience needs. However, given their low returns and unclear procedures to address wrongdoings, they entail higher risks for long term planning and social mobility. Nevertheless, given their persistent and organic nature across cultures and borders, they provide important insights to address those gaps and shed light on the contributions of family dynamics to the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why New York City's municipal government, together with private benefactors, poured an unprecedented amount of money into the arts during the 1980s, a time of broader austerity. While other public expenditures saw dramatic cuts, the arts were considered essential to the city's future as a center for global capital—as a way to lure financial elites and young professionals to the city, create new forms of revenue-raising consumption, and cement New York's reputation as the ultimate global city. New York had always had a vital arts scene. But in the 1980s, the arts were monetized in new ways to serve capital—and capitalists. Arts and culture were central to the new urban lifestyle that helped produce the explosion of global finance. But as arts and culture increasingly came to be associated with a luxury lifestyle, the arts themselves became a luxury, inaccessible to most New Yorkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before 2017, no jurisdiction had a home renters' right-to-counsel law. Yet, a mere five years later, three states and fifteen cities afforded renters facing eviction the right to legal representation. This policy intervention, which began in New York, has quickly and decisively swept across America. This article explores the explosion of home renters' right-to-counsel laws to propose a path forward for the larger Civil Gideon movement. Current Supreme Court jurisprudence largely forecloses litigation-based efforts to create a new Constitutional "right" to an attorney in a civil case. Yet local legislative programs, as modeled by the home renters' right-to-counsel movement, may offer a viable path for expanding the right to civil counsel. To that end, it is important to critically examine the success of this movement to understand its lessons. This article attempts just that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]