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This article demonstrates how the university back office can enable ambitious implementation partnerships between institutions of higher education and community-based organizations. It examines the Individual Development Account Collaborative of Louisiana, a $4 million asset-building program operated by the National Center for the Urban Community at Tulane and Xavier Universities, which produced more than six hundred graduates in less than two years, most of them first-time home owners. The bookkeeping and administrative requirements imposed by governmental granting agencies often tax the capacity of even the largest nonprofits, which lack the sponsored research infrastructure that the Cold War university has developed in consequence of processing hundreds of grants and contracts annually. Small nonprofits are best at delivering services to local communities; Research-1 universities are practiced at managing large grants and contracts. The article concludes that the administrative side of such university-community partnerships deserves as much attention as their programmatic side.

We empirically estimate the effects of windstorm loss mitigation features on the value of coastal homes using fixed‐effects and spatial regression hedonic models. We use housing data from the "Fortified Home" program, which prescribes and certifies windstorm resilience features for residential property. We test the extent to which Fortified construction and the location of a house relative to the coast act as mitigation complements or substitutes. We find that on average homebuyers located at median distance to the coast pay a 6%–7% premium for Fortified homes, which exceeds the typical cost of building or retrofitting houses to the Fortified standard. Fortified construction and distance of the house from the coast are mitigation substitutes. The premium is highest for homes nearest the coast. Our findings are robust under various specifications of spatial hedonic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though many vital signs remain weak, a feeling of quasi-normality is starting to return to New Orleans. Meter maids armed with Wi-Fi contraptions are writing almost as many parking [...]

Building on Murray Edelman's (1988) analysis of the socially constructed nature of postmodern mass-mediated 'political spectacles,' this research utilizes a Gamsonian framing analysis approach to examine the rhetorical themes and symbolic images employed by political proponents and opponents of the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas during the 1991 televised 'sexual harassment' hearings. Because this dramatic national spectacle centered around the relative credibility of two opposed personalities in the public mind, the research focuses on the content of media images of the 'real' Clarence Thomas and the 'real' Anita Hill that were constructed for public consumption by the two opposed political camps in their attempts to sway mass opinion. Rhetorical motifs used by the 'Hill' and 'Thomas' political camps to frame the public debate are identified and classified based on newspaper and network television coverage of the events and on congressional transcripts. The impact of these symbolic messages in framing the context within which Americans ultimately gauged the 'reality' status of Hill's and Thomas's respective truth claims is discussed, with particular emphasis on the intense symbolic contest that occurred between gender-based and race-based frames and on the implications for emerging styles of political discourse in postmodern society.

Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783. By Matthew Mulcahy. Early America: History, Context, Culture. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c. 2006. Pp. xii, 257. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-8223-0.) [...]