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Housing scholars have debated over the effectiveness of top-down political mandates to improve local affordable housing production. Whereas existing studies focussed on local fiscal and political constraints, how local compliance is shaped by vertical and horizontal dynamics of inter-governmental relationships is less known. This study investigates city government compliance with a top-down mandate of affordable housing construction during 2011–2015 in the context of the multi-tiered governmental hierarchy of China. Using a unique city-level panel dataset of the committed target of affordable housing construction, the analysis reveals substantially uneven compliance across cities and regions. Findings indicate that such variation in local goal setting can be attributed to both a divergence in local capacity of resource mobilization as well as political bargaining and competition within provinces. This research expands the scholarly knowledge of local strategic compliance with a top-down housing mandate, as well as local government behaviour in affordable housing policy from the lens of policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residential segregation by income has become an emerging concern in Chinese cities. Existing literature on residential segregation has mostly focused on the informal rental market, and little is known about the formal private rentals. Nevertheless, with the continued removal of informal settlements, formal private rentals are likely to play a more pivotal role in the provision of affordable housing in the upcoming years. Using data from online rental listings, this article examines changes in the spatial distribution of affordable formal private rentals in Beijing between 2015 and 2018. Our study finds that the availability of affordable formal private rentals decreased drastically in the central city area in the 3-year period, whereas the remaining affordable units in the central-city subdistricts became increasingly segregated from other higher priced rentals. When compared across rentals of different price ranges, the affordable rentals ended up being the most segregated in both 2015 and 2018, with a city-level index of dissimilarity of 0.71 and 0.75, respectively. The research findings necessitate policies that promote affordable rental provision in central locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.2010.00509.x Byline: RYAN ALLEN (1), EDWARD G. GOETZ (1) Abstract: ABSTRACT: This article focuses on how the experiences of refugee public housing residents differ from those of other public housing residents when they participate in housing dispersal programs. An analysis of the spatial resettlement patterns and survey responses of Hmong and African-American public housing residents who were involuntarily relocated from public housing in Minneapolis, MN indicates the extent to which residents resettled in ethnically concentrated neighborhoods and their satisfaction with their new housing arrangements and neighborhoods. Research results suggest that Hmong did not settle in ethnically concentrated neighborhoods to the same extent as African Americans after relocation, and experienced lower levels of satisfaction in their new housing arrangements and neighborhoods. These findings indicate that the outcomes for residents involved in housing dispersal programs may depend in part on nativity status. Author Affiliation: (1)University of Minnesota Article note: Direct correspondence to: Ryan Allen, University of Minnesota, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, 295D Humphrey Center, 301 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455. E-mail: allen650@umn.edu.

This article examines the impact of a state lead policy on the availability of rental housing in Minnesota's Twin Cities. Findings indicate that Minneapolis implemented stricter lead orders to building owners than St. Paul and experienced an increase in housing costs and greater building losses due to condemnation and abandonment.

Using a policy subsystem approach, the authors examine the politics of community development in Minneapolis. A cohesive and stable community development subsystem evolved during the 1970s and early 1980s, dominated by community development corporations and the city's multifamily housing development bureaucracy. Recent changes in community development policy reflect changes in the subsystem dynamics, including a challenge to the dominant coalition by neighborhood groups and external factors such as the redefinition of policy objectives, Subsystem analysis helps to explain policy change at the local level; explicit consideration of the social construction of issues and of the impact of issue redefinition will enrich subsystem analysis., In this article, we use policy subsystems analysis as a means of explaining local public policy change. The concept of a policy subsystem is that public policy issues attract small [...]

In the mid-1980s, the US federal government initiated a war on drugs in which they were aided and abetted by municipal police forces in large cities across the nation. The scale of the war was unprecedented. The number of police officers in the United States doubled between 1980 and 1990 (Chambliss, 1994), and the number of people in US prisons quadrupled between 1970 and 1990. In 1989, the US had the highest rate of incarceration in the world, far ahead of second place South Africa (Beckett, 1994). Roughly 1.5 million Americans were in federal or state prisons, or in local jails in 1995; nearly half of whom were there for drug related offenses. The spatial impact of the war on drugs has been a concentration of criminal justice activity in lower-income, inner city neighborhoods. Increasingly in the US, urban policy is less about revitalizing cities and neighborhoods, and combating the disinvestment of capital, and it is more and more about controlling the dangerous classes (Gordon, 1994).

The author uses an interrupted time series analysis to evaluate the housing market effects of moderate rent control in San Francisco. Using data on multifamily-housing construction and rent levels from 1960 to 1991, the analysis shows that rent control did not inhibit the development of new multifamily housing. In fact, the rate of multifamily-housing production has increased more rapidly after the program's initiation. Additionally, the analysis shows that rents for advertised units in San Francisco have significantly risen after the implementation of rent control.