Working Papers
A Tale of Two Cities: Race and Housing Equity in de Blasio’s New York
Upon entering office, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to take on pervasive economic and social inequality. Along with efforts towards expanding healthcare access, establishing universal pre-K, and addressing police-community relations, de Blasio pledged to solve New York City’s staggering housing crisis. To that end, the administration has put forth a two-pronged approach to address the City’s housing inequity. To that end, the de Blasio administration launched HousingNY, committing to initially contribute 15,000 units of new, affordable housing to the City’s subsidized housing stock. New York City residents normatively commend the City’s commitment to increase its affordable housing stock. However, communities of color have argued that the majority of HousingNY units are developed in neighborhoods of color, specifically those composed predominantly of Black and Latinx New Yorkers; the mayoralty states that development is targeted towards high poverty neighborhoods, which are often high proportion minority. This paper explores the spatial distribution of housing development in New York City, in an attempt to elucidate how policy implementation reflects the City’s stated overarching goals vis-à-vis housing inequality.
Confederate Monument Removals Predict Exacerbated White Racial Attitudes (with Colin Cepuran)
Efforts to remove Confederate Monuments have gained national attention in the U.S. Removal of the monuments compromise the status afforded to white supremacist separatism in the U.S. Research into white racial attitudes and contextual political behavior suggests: (1) Monument Removals will inflame whites’ anti-Black affect (which we measure via the FIRE scale), (2) that such effects will be contextually specific, and (3) that those effects will be short-lived. We match the 2016 and 2017 Cooperate Congressional Election Studies to a dataset of Confederate Monuments, identifying their presence and removal in a respondent’s ZIP code. While removal timing is not random, we argue that the relationship between removal dates and CCES interview dates is. This design yields three findings about the relationship between the timing of Monument Removals and white racial attitudes. First, the effect of Removals is small—being interviewed chronologically near monument removal coincides with around a 10% increase in whites’ FIRE scores. Second, the effect dissipates within two years of Monument Removals. Finally, these effects might depend on a campaign environment that makes white supremacy.