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The amount of residential development in cities has been much greater than the media coverage of suburban sprawl suggests. Unfortunately, there is also some evidence that cities with higher levels of infill development have more expensive new housing construction than their suburbs. The average price differential is not substantial, but it does suggest that tensions between achieving the two goals of greater infill development and more affordable city housing do exist. Keywords: infill; affordable housing; city-suburb relationships

Granting location incentives is a common city policy to attract new businesses, despite the frequent belief that the benefits are too generous. Can cities do a better job determining when to agree to these concessions and when to refuse? I argue that analyzing the concession decision with a simple bargaining game illustrates: (1) that the negotiation strategy a city uses should be based on the characteristics of the firm in each case and (2) that even poor cities with few attractive location features can avoid making large concessions. Development experiences in Miami-Dade are used to illustrate the model., With the revolution in social welfare policy at the federal level, responsibilities for more services have been moved back to state and local governments. This growing service burden and the [...]

Earlier research on the impact of national economic restructuring on central-city economies suffered from several problems, including excessive aggregation of the data and reliance on absolute change in economic activity to measure growth. When these factors are corrected, one sees that central cities frequently attracted more new firms than other locations (absolute growth), but their growth rate was below that in suburbs and nonmetropolitan areas (relative growth) as well as the national rate. These below-average rates occurred in many of the 13 economic sectors studied, including low-skill and high-skill services, in which central cities were expected to perform well. The few bright spots--central cities in the South and West, which initially outperformed all other locations in those regions--have faded as well., The impact of deindustrialization and economic restructuring on American cities over the past two decades has been a major concern for city officials. As businesses closed and city residents left [...]

Circumstances surrounding the 1997 city dissolution vote in Miami were ideal for establishing a metropolitan government, based on arguments from the traditional urban politics literature. Yet it did not happen. How did the issue make it onto the public agenda but fail to be adopted? The author argues that changes in metropolitan governance need to be understood as the outcomes of an agenda-setting process and not solely based on the distribution of winners and losers, as suggested by the public-choice/metropolitan reform literature. The Miami case clearly illustrates the importance of focusing events, a skilled policy entrepreneur, and timing of events as interest fades and the window of opportunity closes. It also illustrates the power of a policy image to trigger emotional attachments that can mobilize inattentive publics.