Housing America's Older Adults— Meeting the Needs of an Aging Population

From the Press Release:

According to Housing America’s Older Adults—Meeting the Needs of An Aging Population, the number of adults in the U.S. aged 50 and over is expected to grow to 133 million by 2030, an increase of more than 70 percent since 2000 (see interactive map). But housing that is affordable, physically accessible, well-located, and coordinated with supports and services is in too short supply.

Source: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and AARP Foundation

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Poor Black Women Are Evicted at Alarming Rates, Setting Off a Chain of Hardship

Description:
Low-income women are evicted at much higher rates than men. The reasons are varied, including lower wages and children, but one rarely discussed reason is the gender dynamics between largely male landlords and female tenants. This brief, based on an in-depth look at evictions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, finds that women’s non-confrontational approach with landlords and their tendency to dodge the issue are two reasons why women from black neighborhoods in Milwaukee represented only 9.6 percent of the population, but 30 percent of the evictions.

Source: Harvard University [via MacArthur Foundation]

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How Neighborhoods Affect Health, Well-being, and Young People’s Futures

Description:

Among the many potential factors reviewed in this brief, the evidence most consistently points to neighborhood social cohesion, informal social control, spatial mismatch, and exposure to environmental hazards, including violence, as important factors in how neighborhood affects personal outcomes.

Source: Wayne State University [via MacArthur Foundation]

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Housing Adequacy Gap for Minorities and Immigrants in the U.S.

Abstract:

Home adequacy for different groups in the U.S. has not been adequately studied. Using the data from the national level American Housing Survey for the year 2009 and logit model, this paper finds that there is a significant adequacy difference for Blacks and Hispanics when compared to whites in the U.S. However, that is not the case for immigrants relative to the natives. We also find that then naturalization improves housing adequacy among immigrant homeowners, whereas, the female headed households have a significantly higher home adequacy than that of the male headed households. Similar to the homeownership findings, this paper highlights that the public policies should aim to narrow the home adequacy gap between whites and minorities and encourage naturalization to improve adequacy among immigrant homeowners.

Source: Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA)

View abstract at IZA
Download full pdf at: Housing Adequacy Gap for Minorities and Immigrants in the U.S.

The danger of high home ownership: greater unemployment

Description:

On the basis of evidence from the United States and Europe, the authors maintain that high home ownership is a major reason for the high unemployment rates of the industrialized nations in the post-war era. They argue that governments should encourage more renting, as the Swiss and Germans do, and they should not give financial incentives for ownership.

Source: Chatman House / Competitive advange in the global economy

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The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community.

Abstract:

Community psychologists are interested in creating contexts that promote both respect for diversity and sense of community. However, recent theoretical and empirical work has uncovered a community-diversity dialectic wherein the contextual conditions that foster respect for diversity often run in opposition to those that foster sense of community. More specifically, within neighborhoods, residential integration provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community. Using agent-based modeling to simulate neighborhoods and neighborhood social network formation, we explore whether the community-diversity dialectic emerges from two principles of relationship formation: homophily and proximity. The model suggests that when people form relationships with similar and nearby others, the contexts that offer opportunities to develop a respect for diversity are different from the contexts that foster a sense of community. Based on these results, we conclude with a discussion of whether it is possible to create neighborhoods that simultaneously foster respect for diversity and sense of community.

Source: Am J Community Psychol. 2013 Nov 6. [Epub ahead of print]- via PUBMed

Download pdf:  The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community.

Policies for Inclusive Urbanisation in China

Abstract:

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased further thanks to agglomeration effects. In the process, the rural-urban income differential has narrowed. Urbanisation also entails costs, however, notably in the form of congestion, all the more so as public transport provision has not kept up. Demand for living space is set to continue to increase as living standards improve, putting pressure on land prices. This can be offset by relaxing the very stringent restrictions on the use of agricultural land for building. For migrants to better integrate in the cities where they work, their access and that of their families to education, health and other social services must continue to improve, in particular via further changes to the registration system, coupled with more market-based rules on land ownership and use.

Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

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