The Cost of New York City’s Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project
ABSTRACT: Tax increment financing (TIF) has exploded in popularity on the municipal finance landscape as cities compete for scarce public resources to fund economic development. Previous studies evaluate TIF’s efficacy and ability to spark economic growth.
This research expands the evaluation of TIF by questioning the widespread understanding of TIF as a “self-financing” tool through an analysis of its risks and costs to taxpayers. We present a case study of the Hudson Yards redevelopment project in New York City, the country’s largest TIF-type project.
Read More
Criminal Customers: The Criminalization of Poverty and the Systemic Exploitation of the Working Class
Going to court is a stressful and frequently expensive ordeal. Most court appearances result in a monetary retribution, whether to an adversary or the state, and usually come with fine print. Financial obligation to another always comes with strings attached. For those unable to immediately meet their fiduciary duty, penalties can be severe. Inability to pay a fee often results in the tacking on of another fee, for being unable to pay the initial fine. With all these fines being imposed, one may feel as though being poor is a disadvantage in the justice system. The possibility of going to …
Read More
Disparities in Access to Prenatal Care: Perpetuation of Poverty and Inequality through the Healthcare System
This analysis addresses the disparity in prenatal health outcomes between the City of Paterson and Wayne Township in New Jersey. It guides the reader through the experiences of a hypothetical pregnant woman living in Paterson to examine the institutional and non-institutional factors that prevent this pregnant woman, and others like her, from accessing appropriate prenatal care. This paper also discusses the relationship between the inability to access proper prenatal care and the perpetuation …
Read More
As Other Districts Grapple With Segregation, This One Makes Integration Work
MORRISTOWN, N.J. — When the morning rush begins at Alexander Hamilton Elementary School here, students lugging oversize backpacks and fluorescent-colored lunchboxes emerge from the school buses that roll in, one after another, for 15 minutes. By the time it ends, children from some of this area’s most privileged enclaves, and from some of its poorest, file through the front doors to begin their day together.
The Morris School District was created in 1971, after a state court decision led to the merger of two Northern New Jersey communities — the mostly white suburbs of Morris Township, and the racially mixed urban hub of Morristown — into one school district for the purpose of maintaining racial and economic balance.
Read More
How Kids Learn Resilience
In 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country—51 percent, to be precise—fell below the federal government’s low-income cutoff, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment—an inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the central issue in American education.
The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn’t mean they’re impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the classroom. But two decades of national attention have done little or nothing to close the achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers.
Read More
Attitudes Toward Exploited Cities Helped Poison Flint
"Flint is one of the extreme examples of how our country has allowed geographic divisions by race and income to result in reverse–Robin Hood exploitation of those with the least power.
We’ve used free trade agreements, race-to-the-bottom economic development poaching, and inconsistent union rules to allow corporations to make a fortune off of cities like Flint and then pack up and leave for cheaper workers.
Read More
The Gap in Conceptualizing Achievement in America’s Public Schools: An Analysis of the Achievement Gap
The achievement gap is often defined as the difference in academic achievement of minority and/or low-income students and their White and/or more affluent peers. Its status is evaluated through state standardized assessments, mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Read More
Single Moms And Welfare Woes: A Higher-Education Dilemma
Out of the 12 million single-parent families in the United States, the vast majority—more than 80 percent—are headed by women. These households are more likely than any other demographic group to fall below the poverty line. In fact, census data shows that roughly 40 percent of single-mother-headed families are poor.
Why? Experts point to weak social-safety nets, inadequate child support, and low levels of education, among other factors.
Read More
Municipal Contradictions: How To Provide An Equitable Municipal Court Experience
Municipal court cases account for the bulk of all legal filings and are often the only interaction that many people have with the judicial system, yet there is a significant lack of research on the impact of municipal courts on our daily lives. Scholarly discourse on the provision of municipal services tends to focus on municipal services which play a key role in our day to day lives such as education, waste management, or park maintenance. While the role of municipal courts in our daily lives may not be as visible as other municipal services, they serve a key judicial and municipal …
Read More
Holding Schools Responsible for Addressing Childhood Trauma
It’s no secret that U.S. schools have a lot to work on when it comes to offering mental and emotional support for students. Whether due to budgetary constraints or ideological ones, it can be difficult establish an educational standard for how to treat psychological issues that occur outside of the classroom. Yet the supply of professionals equipped to alleviate those problems is diminishing: By 2020, the National Association of School Psychologists estimates there will be a shortage of nearly 15,000 school psychologists nationwide—a statistic that could spell a grim reality for the future of mental-health services in schools.
Read More
Unstable Schedules in Low Wage Work: A Hidden Employment Crisis
The low wage labor market today is characterized by the increased utilization of part-time and temporary workers with volatile work schedules. These practices shift business risk to workers, and place their lives in a constant state of instability. Unpredictable work schedules prevent workers from pursuing supplemental employment, training, or attending to caregiver responsibilities. This diminishes the future economic potential of workers, effectively creating a worker caste system, and establishing a structural barrier to income mobility.
Read More
Food Scarcity And Inequality Of Access: A Strategic Legal Approach To Community-Facing Services Addressing The Food Dessert Phenomenon
Recent studies estimate that 25-30 million Americans live in communities that lack basic access to healthy food retailers, such as supermarkets or grocery stores. The majority of these communities are in urban environments. Within these communities, the cost of the food that is available is typically 3%-37% more than comparable food available in a suburban supermarket. Food scarcity and lack of access is more likely to affect minority communities, even when accounting for differences in income, household wealth, and housing discrimination.
Read More
(Re)Development In New Jersey’s Suburbs: Homeownership, Local Development & The Perpetuation Of Inequality
Homeownership is one of the most esteemed values in American society. As such, homeownership is heavily promoted and subsidized by both federal and local governments in the form of tax credits, tax deductions, federally subsidized loans, and federal mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Authority. The rationale for these subsidies is that homeowners make better citizens, which has been substantiated by researchers using measures such as local voting and church attendance.
Read More
Socioeconomic Segregation and the Cost of Inequality: In Search of a New Paradigm for Education Reform in New Jersey
Since the early 1970s, finance reformers have argued that the unequal distribution of educational resources is primarily responsible for producing and perpetuating persistent inequalities in achievement and opportunity in New Jersey’s schools. Even though it is indisputable that in some sense “money matters,” the problem vexing education reformers continues to be the mutually reinforcing contingencies of race, class, and place. Textbooks, teachers, supplies, and facilities all cost money, and a community that lacks the funds to furnish its schools with these basic …
Read More
Measuring Regional Equity
The ultimate objective of regional equity activities is to reform those policies and practices that create and sustain social, racial, economic and environmental inequalities among cities, suburbs and rural areas -- and to bridge the gap between marginalized people and places and the region’s structures of social and economic opportunity. In my book Inside Game/Outside Game, I described three domains of work …
Read More
The Urban Foreclosure Crisis, Eminent Domain and Blight Designations Under N.J. Stat. Ann. § 40A:12A-5: An Analytic Memo
Faced with a growing crisis of homeowner residents whose properties are “underwater” or already in foreclosure, many cities around the United States have explored the possibility of expediting mortgage principal write-downs through the extraordinary exercise of eminent domain. As of this writing, no city has actually followed through, and one, Richmond, California, has already been sued. Several cities in New Jersey are contemplating the use of redevelopment law as the only available local power to stabilize their tax bases and bring relief to homeowners.
Read More
Equity Audit: Transit Connectivity And “Spatial Mismatch” In New Jersey: Are New Jersey’s Minority Populations Enabled To Use Transit In A Way That Promotes Access Outside Of Urban Areas?
Connectivity is the measurement of how easily one can travel in and out of a place. Connectivity is what makes a commute to work, or a simple trip to the grocery store, possible. A state can have one thousand fancy trains. But, if you have no car, none of those trains stop in your town, and there are no bus stops either, you’re not going anywhere. Conversely, your hometown could be the most well-connected and transit- friendly town on the planet. But, if the job you want is in a town where there is no transit, you cannot get to work.
Read More
Municipal Fragmentation in Essex County: Equity, Efficiency and the Evasion of the Social Contract
Newark’s story is one that has been told and retold. Once a bustling industrial power and an engine of the middle class, in recent decades the city has been wounded by racial strife, suburban flight, and industrial abandonment. From a high in 1948 of nearly half a million, Newark’s population today has plummeted to 277, 540. The intersection of Broad St. and Market St., once the busiest retail nexus in the country, is now a shadow of its former self. More than a quarter of Newark’s people are in poverty, and its black population is hypersegregated from its white population …
Read More
Equity Audit: The Perpetuation Of Racial Segregation In The United States And Its Negative Impact On Education And Crime - A New Jersey Case Study
Education attainment in the United States has a direct causal link with economic success. In 2012, the plurality of unemployed persons is represented by those with less than a high school diploma; higher level of education has an undeniable negative correlation with unemployment. Furthermore, those with little or no educational attainment who are employed find themselves making wages significantly less than those with a higher level. An individual’s level of educational attainment, therefore, has a direct correlation with his monetary earning, and distance away from …
Read More
The (In)Equities of Superstorm Recovery
Soon after the initial shock of largest hurricane to ever hit the Jersey Shore began to dissipate, scholars, reporters and advocates began to look deeper at the implications of the disaster. Like Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy exposed fundamental inequities in our society that resulted in frightening racial and economic disparities between those devastated by the storm, and those less affected. We learned from Hurricane Katrina that “outsiders who wonder why residents ‘chose’ housing susceptible to flooding disregard the legacy of laws and hostility that excluded …
Read More
