Search results for ""Urban Institute Press,U.S.""

The rising poverty and unemployment rates triggered by the recession are stark reminders of the need for a secure social safety net. Such programs should provide economic security, protect vulnerable families, and promote equality—but the United States falls behind other countries in accomplishing these goals. In Repairing the U.S. Social Safety Net, Martha R. Burt and Demetra Smith Nightingale encourage strengthening the safety net and making a national commitment to end poverty.

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The Housing Policy Revolution illuminates how our networked approach to housing policy developed and fundamentally transformed governmental response to public welfare. Through historical political analysis and detailed case studies, the book imparts policy lessons on delivering funding for urban change. David J. Erickson traces the history of our current policy era, where decentralized federal subsidies (block grants and tax credits) fund a network of for-profit and nonprofit affordable home builders. In addition to government reports and legislative history, he draws upon interviews, industry journals, policy conference proceedings, and mainstream media coverage to incorporate viewpoints from both practitioners and policymakers.

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Low-income families have scant savings to cushion a job loss or illness, and can find economic mobility impossible without funds to invest in education, homes, or businesses. And though a lack of resources leaves such families vulnerable, income-support programs are often closed to those with a bit of savings or even a car. Considering welfare-to-work reforms, the increasingly advanced skill demands of the American workforce, and our stretched Social Security system, such an approach is inadequate to lift families out of poverty. Asset-based policies—allowing or even helping low-income families build wealth—are an increasingly popular strategy to facilitate financial stability.

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From 1980 to 2000, half the new housing in the United States was built in a development project governed by a neighborhood association. More than 50 million Americans now live in these associations. In Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government, Robert Nelson reviews the history of neighborhood associations, explains their recent explosive growth, and speculates on their future role in American society. Unlike many previous studies, Nelson takes on the whole a positive view. Neighborhood associations are providing the neighborhood environment controls desired by the residents, high quality common services, and a stronger sense of neighborhood community. Identifying significant operating problems, Nelson proposes new options for improving the future governance of neighborhood associations.

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Seldom do the needs of children with disabilities divide neatly along program lines. Instead, children and their families navigate a large, complex, and fragmented array of programs with inconsistent eligibility standards, application procedures, and program goals. "Meeting the Needs of Children with Disabilities" examines these programs, focusing on the three largest—special education, Medicaid, and Supplemental Security Income—and suggests ways to unify them into one system that will provide continuous care and support. Efforts at early intervention and prevention and difficulties caused by programs' funding structures are given particular attention.

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The question of whether to tax income from wealth has sparked debate since our country’s inception. Does taxing capital income ensure the progressivity of our system or merely discourage saving? Would switching our tax code to one that taxes only consumption be more efficient or only burden middle- and low-income people? And if we were to radically reform the way America taxes its citizens, how could we ensure that vital revenue would not be lost? Some analysts would even argue that, under our present byzantine tax system, we don’t really tax capital income at all. In this volume, eminent economists analyze the problems associated with taxing capital income and propose policy solutions, which are then challenged by their peers in informed commentary. It may not settle the debate, but policymakers, scholars, and the public will find a wealth of information and ideas to consider.

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Over the past three decades, the concentration of poverty in America’s inner cities has exacerbated a wide range of social problems. School delinquency, school dropout, teenage pregnancy, out-of-wedlock childbirth, violent crime, and drug abuse are magnified in neighborhoods where the majority of residents are poor. In response, policymakers have embarked on a large and coordinated effort to “deconcentrate” the urban poor by dispersing the residents of subsidized housing. Despite the clean logic of these policies, however, deconcentration is not a clean process. In Clearing the Way, Edward Goetz goes beyond the narrow analysis that has informed the debate so far, using the experience of Minneapolis-Saint Paul to explore the fierce political debate and complicated issues that arise when public housing residents are dispersed, sometimes against their will. Along the way, he explores the cases for and against deconcentrating the poor, the programs used to pursue this goal, and the research used to evaluate their success. Clearing the Way offers important lessons for policymakers, activists, and anyone interested in poverty in America.

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Urban Sprawl is not simply a development that undercuts the quality of life for suburbanites. It has raised alarms across the nation, as fair housing advocates, environmentalists, land use planners, and even many suburban employers who cannot find the workers they need, have recognized that the costs go far beyond aesthetics. Despite the agreement that something needs to be done, there is no consensus on what works. Urban Sprawl: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses assembles leading scholars who analyze the major causes and consequences of urban sprawl and the policy initiatives that are being explored in response to these developments.

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Criminal justice programs, to be adopted in today's climate, need demonstrate not only efficacy but return on tax dollars invested. Cost-benefit analysis, the economist's tool for determining the price of outcomes, yields a single metric that allows different interventions to be compared directly. Yet CBA is difficult, even controversial, to apply to crime control, as it involves placing monetary value on intangibles such as pain, suffering, well-being, and human life. Cost-Benefit Analysis and Crime Control guides researchers through cost collection, design of bias-free studies, measurement of effects, approaches to estimating program benefits, and methods for combining the elements into a unified analysis

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Every year Americans spend over 182 billion public and private dollars on services and supports for chronically disabled elders. This is projected to nearly double by 2030 to $341 billion and to grow to $684 billion once the last baby boomers have turned 85. And these estimates don't include the $375 billion in unpaid care family and friends provide-including foregone wages that would have helped support Medicare and Medicaid.

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As the director of the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Services Agency, Olivia Golden led reform of a system in federal receivership. Now, in Reforming Child Welfare, she uses her expertise as an administrator, an academic, and an advocate to pinpoint the factors that lead to success. “Writing from the inside,” she maintains, “makes it possible to analyze, in retrospect, what we thought we were doing, what it felt like, and what led us to good or bad choices.” By sharing her personal story, along with her analysis of the research literature and two other case studies in Alabama and Utah, Golden finds fresh insight on improving outcomes for imperiled children and families.

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When youth in the child welfare system face problems such as juvenile delinquency, the agencies charged with their care often find that they do not have the capacity to act without the cooperation of other government departments. The trap gets tighter when parents have lost custody or are in the criminal justice system themselves. Such scenarios frustrate staff in government agencies and cause vulnerable youth to lose confidence in the system just when they need it the most. Child Welfare: The Challenges of Collaboration highlights several scenarios requiring interagency collaboration and also includes an evaluation of Project Confirm, a cross-agency effort to help foster children in juvenile detention. Though the challenges of collaboration will be difficult to solve, this book offers practical examples to guide child welfare service agencies.

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For the past two decades the United States has been transforming distressed public housing communities, with three ambitious goals: replace distressed developments with healthy mixed-income communities; help residents relocate to affordable housing, often in the private market; and empower former public housing families toward economic self-sufficiency. The transformation has focused on deconcentrating poverty, but not on the underlying role of racial segregation in creating these distressed communities. In Public Housing and the Legacy of Segregation, scholars and public housing officials assess whether—and how—public housing policies can simultaneously address the problems of poverty and race.

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Immigration is changing the face of rural America, from Florida to Washington and from Maine to California. Migrants arrive, many from Mexico, to fill jobs on farms and in farm-related industries, usually at earnings below the poverty. Leaders of rural industries are adamant that a steady influx of foreign workers is necessary for economic survival. But the integration of these newcomers is uneven: many immigrants achieve some measure of the American dream, but others find persistent poverty, overcrowded housing, and crime. The New Rural Poverty examines the effect of rural immigration on inland agricultural areas in California, farm areas in coastal California, and meat and poultry processing centers in Delaware and Iowa. The authors examine the interdependencies between immigrants and agriculture in the United States, explore the policy challenges and options, and assess how current proposals for immigration reform will affect rural America.

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The balance between state and federal health care financing for low-income people has been a matter of considerable debate for the last 40 years. Some argue for a greater federal role, others for more devolution of responsibility to the states. Medicaid, the backbone of the system, has been plagued by an array of problems that have made it unpopular and difficult to use to extend health care coverage. In recent years, waivers have given the states the flexibility to change many features of their Medicaid programs; moreover, the states have considerable flexibility to in establishing State Children’s Health Insurance Programs. This book examines the record on the changing health safety net. How well have states done in providing acute and long-term care services to low-income populations? How have they responded to financial incentives and federal regulatory requirements? How innovative have they been? Contributing authors include Donald J. Boyd, Randall R. Bovbjerg, Teresa A. Coughlin, Ian Hill, Michael Housman, Robert E. Hurley, Marilyn Moon, Mary Beth Pohl, Jane Tilly, and Stephen Zuckerman.

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The United States has a long record of ambivalence toward recent immigrants. Nowhere is this love-hate relationship more evident than in the public school systems of high-immigration states like California, where pro- and anti-immigration advocates have waged a long-running battle over “bilingual” education versus “English immersion” programs. Unfortunately, this fierce political debate does not always acknowledge day-to-day reality in the schools, and the policies that result may ultimately hinder the schools and students they intend to help. Beyond Bilingual Education cuts through the politics, offering a statistical portrait of English language learners in five large California school districts and highlighting the results of more than 120 interviews conducted with teachers, school administrators, and community service providers about the challenges facing recent immigrants and the schools that serve them. This combined approach yields essential intelligence for policymakers, advocates, and administrators seeking to escape the trap of immigration politics. It is a vital perspective, because how our schools receive, treat, and educate these future workers will directly affect our country’s economic and social health and progress.

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Despite the overall economic gains in the 1990s, many young black men continue to have the poorest life chances of anyone in our society. Joblessness and low earnings among these less-educated young adults are contributing to reductions in marriage, increases in nonmarital childbearing, and a host of other social problems. In Black Males Left Behind, Ronald Mincy has assembled a distinguished group of experts who examine how less-educated black men fared relative to other less-educated young people during the economic expansion of the 1990s and why. Chapters explore the roles of the macroeconomy, the deconcentration of blue-collar employment, criminal justice policy, and the employment aspirations of young less-educated black men and consider their implications for the design of employment services, welfare-to-work policies, workforce development policy, and child support enforcement. Two chapters comprehensively review policy opportunities to assist less-educated young black fathers and discuss how to overcome political resistance to initiatives serving less-educated black men. This book makes a compelling case for greater public attention to a serious domestic problem.

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The sweeping changes of 1996's welfare reform legislation are more than just new policies. They represent a profound transformation of the character and structure of social policy institutions in the United States, a shift from a bureaucratic, centralized mode for income transfer, to a "professional" mode aimed at complex behavioral change. The evaluation community has responded with a shift from traditional impact analyses to implementation studies that get inside the skin of this new, more flexible structure. Implementation research explores the translation of concepts into working policies and programs, and evaluates how well the administrative and management dimensions of these policies work, and how the programs are experienced by all involved. Policy into Action offers state-of-the-art thinking on implementation research from leading policy researchers and evaluation practitioners.

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If "all politics is local," then no tax issue is more political than the property tax. This explains the battles that are being fought countrywide over the exemption enjoyed by nonprofit organizations. Property taxes fall on local populations, while the benefits of a charity's activities can be spread more broadly. And as property-owning charities such as hospitals, universities, and cultural institutions have transformed themselves into big businesses, the exemption has come to be viewed as a subsidy granted by government. Recently, opposition from revenue-starved local governments has mounted, in the form of frontal attacks on the charity exemption and demands for payments in lieu of taxes. This collection of essays seeks to put the debate in larger context. The editors have brought together authors from a range of disciplines to explore what we know about the property tax exemption. They offer a variety of perspectives--legal, economic, political, historical, and municipal-administration--on this very contentious issue.

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Because nonprofit and voluntary organizations are primary vehicles of citizen action and participation, they serve as important mechanisms to understand how the needs of children can be heard in the policymaking process and how the quality of children’s lives can be improved. In Who Speaks for America’s Children, leading experts in children’s health policy, education policy, community organizing, and sociology focus on the ways nonprofit organizations and community groups influence policymaking on children’s issues. Seven chapters frame the issues, raise critical questions, and explore opportunities for further study.

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The Nonprofit Almanac 2012 features the most recent data on the philanthropic sector, presented in more than 50 charts and 100 tables. Topics include the nonprofit sector's place in the national economy, wages and employment, private giving and volunteering,revenue and outlays, and the size, scope, and finances of public charities.

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Dramatic changes in the American family have transformed the way we care for its oldest and youngest members. Nuclear families have become smaller as childbearing has declined, but extended families have become larger as life expectancy grows. Divorce, extramarital childbearing, cohabitation, and remarriage, have increased our number of kin but often complicate relationships and diffuse responsibility for care. In Intergenerational Caregiving, an interdisciplinary group of scholars considers our changing family relationships and their effect on social policies. Caregiving and its effects on families’ relationships and resources are examined from economic, sociological, anthropological and psychological perspectives, and chapters on both elders and children with disabilities are included.

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Teen childbearing in the United States has been declining since 1991, yet we consistently have the highest teen birth rates in the industrialized world. In 1997, Kids Having Kids was the first comprehensive effort to identify the consequences of teen childbearing for the mothers, the fathers, the children, and our society. Rather than simply comparing teen mothers with their childless counterparts, the assembled researchers achieved a new methodological sophistication, seeking to isolate the birth itself from the mother’s circumstances and thus discover its true costs. This updated second edition features a new chapter evaluating teen pregnancy interventions, along with revised and updated versions of most first edition chapters.

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Good Schools in Poor Neighborhoods contrasts highly effective schools serving urban, low-income, minority youth with their more typical, struggling counterparts. Highlighted are two disparate schools: one serving predominately African American students in a large northeastern city and one serving Latino students in a southwestern urban area. Through solid data from original research, as well as lively vignettes and vivid quotes from principals, teachers, parents, and students, a picture of exceptional schools emerges to guide policymakers and practitioners.

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Since the early 1980s, states child welfare agencies’ use of relatives as foster parents has grown rapidly, yet little information is available on this practice. This lack of information has made it difficult to evaluate how well kinship care ensures children’s safety, promotes permanency in their living situation, and enhances their well-being—three basic goals of the child welfare system. Kinship Care: Making the Most of a Valuable Resource sheds light on this changing issue. Using a study involving focus groups of child welfare workers and kinship caregivers, in addition to interviews with local administrators, advocates, and service providers, the authors describe frontline kinship care practices in today’s system. They also examine how and when child welfare agencies use kin as foster parents, how their approach to kinship care differs from traditional foster care, and how kinship care practices vary across states. The book also features the experiences of actual kinship foster parents, their challenges, and their interaction with agencies and the courts. Finally, the book provides recommendations for policy development, worker and caregiver training, and issues for further research.

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"The corporate tax could soon be headed in new directions," Dan Shaviro writes in Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax, wherein he assesses the threats to America’s corporate tax code and challenges conventional wisdom on the best avenues for reform. Shaviro dissects the vagaries of the law, lays out the fundamental policy issues, and considers the road ahead. As rising globalization, capital mobility, financial innovation, and political polarization combine to destabilize tax policy and government revenue, Shaviro maps the path to fair, revenue-generating reform.

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Our educational system is in a continuous state of reform, yet outcomes are nowhere near what we can accept. Though the search for answers is perpetual, many efforts over the past decade have homed in on one feature of high schools—their size. If we simply reduce school size, the argument goes, students will gain a safer environment that can address their individual needs. It seems like common sense, but such changes alone have not proven a magic bullet. Saving America's High Schools offers quantitative research drawn from large-scale reform studies along with recommendations for federal, state, and district reform.

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Workplace policies that provide flexible scheduling, leave for caregiving, and assistance with child care likely benefit employers in recruitment, retention, productivity, and health care costs. Their benefits to employees seem obvious. Researchers, however, are just beginning to move beyond correlational, descriptive studies into rigorous intervention research. These new investigations examine not only the effects of formal policies-whether federal law or company HR initiatives-but also changes in workplace culture. Work-Life Policies assembles a diverse group of commentators-industrial psychologists, labor organizers, policy analysts, management scholars, organizational psychologists, and others-to offer fresh ideas and new insight.

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America's nonprofit sector continues to grow faster than its business sector or its government. The Nonprofit Almanac 2008 presents data on nonprofits' place in the national economy and trends in wages, employment, private giving, volunteering and finances. The tables and graphics will give scholars, practitioners, and policymakers the data they need at a glance, while the textual analysis will help them plan for the future.

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As the centerpiece of policymakers’ efforts to “deconcentrate” poverty in urban America, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project gave roughly 4,600 volunteer families the chance to move out of public housing projects in deeply impoverished neighborhoods in five cities—Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Researchers wanted to find out to what extent moving out of a poor neighborhood into a better-off area would improve the lives of public housing families. Choosing a Better Life? is the first distillation of years of research on the MTO project, the largest rigorously designed social experiment to investigate the consequences of moving low-income public housing residents to low-poverty neighborhoods. In this book, leading social scientists and policy experts examine the legislative and political foundations of the project, analyze the effects of MTO on lives of the families involved, and explore lessons learned from this important piece of U.S. social policy. “I recommend the book to all scholars of housing and antipoverty policy.” --Henry Cisneros, former Secretary of Housing and Development

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Comparative Performance Measurement is a step-by-step guide to using comparative performance measurement (CPM) to improve management, operations, budgeting, and policymaking of an agency or function, and to communicate an agency's successes and remaining challenges.

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In Holding Police Accountable, nine of todays leading scholars on police work examine seminal research on the use of force and how it can inform today's research. The volume celebrates the late James J. Fyfe, the preeminent scholar on police use of force. In 1978 Fyfe found that administrative controls—training, guidelines, and regulation—reduced deadly shootings by officers without adversely affecting law enforcement or crime rates. The finding not only had profound impact on firearms policy, but compelled police departments to cooperate with independent researchers. Here, the scholars pick up the torch to work toward effective yet fair policing that will better protect all Americans.

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For the nearly 2 million children in the United States whose parents are in prison, caretaking necessary for optimal development is disrupted. These vulnerable youth—a population that has shot up 80 percent in the last 20 years—are more likely to experience learning difficulties, poor health, and substance abuse, and eventually be incarcerated themselves. Addressing the needs of children with imprisoned parents is urgent from corrections, child welfare, health care, and education perspectives. Children of Incarcerated Parents integrates a diverse literature, pulling together rigorous scholarship from criminology, sociology, law, psychiatry, social work, nursing, psychology, human development, and family studies. Researchers, practitioners, and policymakers will find in this volume here new directions for research and policies that will improve these children's life chances.

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A new Urban Institute Press book offers a slate of reform opportunities for the ailing subprime mortgage market and provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of this still-evolving segment of the mortgage industry.

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Social experiments use random assignment to measure the market or fiscal outcomes of policy interventions. Since the 1960s, they have become the major method for evaluating proposed changes in social programs. To judge the social gains of these experiments, policymakers, funders of experiments, the public, and those who conduct social experiments need realistic standards and expectations for judging.Social Experimentation and Public Policymaking advances that effort with a history of social experimentation and a theoretical framework for study of its techniques. The authors analyze five of the most prominent social experiments ever conducted, to explore their origins, the use of the resulting findings, and factors that influenced the use of the findings. The result is a comprehensive examination of the effectiveness of social experimentation and important insights into how this powerful tool can be used to improve public policy.

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Hispanics are the largest immigrant group in the United States and the largest ethnic minority group in the nation. One in five children in the U.S. has immigrant parents. These children face a range of challenges, often caught in their communities’ changing social, political, and economic forces.

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Considering that having a quality teacher is the foremost in-school predictor of students' success, ensuring teacher excellence is vital to the nation's educational system. In Creating a New Teaching Profession, diverse scholars assess the state of human capital development in the teaching profession today and how to progress.

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International Perspectives on Social Security Reform looks at public pension revision in six countries that, like the United States, are members of the OECD and have a long tradition of social security threatened by population aging. Canada, Sweden, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy have much to teach the United States about what works well—and what works badly. A substantive analysis of each country's reforms is augmented in commentary by distinguished economists, who offer their own opinions. Ideas examined include private accounts, notional accounts, incentives to delay retirement, and automatic systems of pension adjustment.

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In this age of high-profile corporate foundations and socially responsible companies, the barrier between the nonprofit and business worlds is more permeable than ever. Nonprofits and Business assembles diverse researchers to examine nonprofits from commercial, economic, operational, and legal perspectives. As the government and the public have demanded greater efficiency from nonprofits, nonprofits have looked to corporations to find creative ways to raise money and demonstrate effectiveness. Nonprofits and Business is a unique resource on this emerging trend.

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By several recent counts, the United States is home to 2 to 3 million youth age 16 through 24 who are out of school and out of work Much has been written on disadvantaged youth, and government policy has gone through many incarnations, yet questions remain unanswered. Why are so many young people “disconnected,” and what can public policy do about it? And why has disconnection become more common for young men—particularly African-American men and low-income men—than for young women? In Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, Edelman, Holzer, and Offner offer analysis and policy prescriptions to solve this growing crisis. They carefully examine field programs and research studies and recommend specific strategies to enhance education, training, and employment opportunities for disadvantaged youth; to improve the incentives of less-skilled young workers to accept employment; and to address the severe barriers and disincentives faced by some youth, such as ex-offenders and noncustodial fathers. The result is a clear guidebook for policymakers, and an important distillation for anyone interested in the plight of today’s disconnected youth. With a foreword by Hugh Price, former President and CEO, National Urban League

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While the words "we are everywhere" can be frequently heard at gay and lesbian political events, The Gay and Lesbian Atlas provides the first empirical confirmation of this rallying cry. Drawing on the most recent data from the U.S. Census, this groundbreaking work offers a detailed geographic and demographic portrait of gay and lesbian families in all 50 states plus the top 25 U.S. metropolitan areas. These results, presented in more than 250 full-color maps and charts, will both confirm and challenge anecdotal information about the spatial distribution and demographic characteristics of this community. It is probably no surprise that San Francisco, Key West, and western Massachusetts all host large gay and lesbian populations, but it might surprise some that Houston, Texas, contains one of the ten "gayest" neighborhoods in the country, or that Alaska and New Mexico have high concentrations of gay and lesbian couples in their senior populations. The Atlas is a unique and important resource for the political and public policy communities, public health officials, social scientists, and anyone interested in gay and lesbian issues

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The United States is unique in the industrialized world in the number of people without health insurance. In 2002, nearly 44 million Americans did not have health insurance coverage. Despite long-running study of this problem, the political debate on health insurance is often based on conventional wisdom and studies that haven’t been integrated into a careful theoretical framework. In Health Policy and the Uninsured, leading experts in health policy survey the literature on this subject, synthesizing a wide range of health insurance studies into a comprehensive overview of the uninsured. They consider the methodological hurdles involved in the research, explore the complex interaction between health insurance and labor supply, and highlight the special issues facing children, racial or ethnic minorities and immigrants, the near-elderly, and people with psychiatric or substance abuse disorders. This coordinated critique serves several purposes: First, it summarizes for policy makers what we do not know about the uninsured. Second, it provides a framework for the health policy research needed to fill the remaining gaps in our knowledge. And finally, it serves as a useful primer for economists and other policy analysts.

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As the baby boom generation gets closer to retirement, the debate over Social Security reform becomes more urgent. Unfortunately, policymakers remain fixated on individual accounts and other ways for the system to accumulate more savings. This narrow focus ignores an equally important, if not more important, challenge--how to address the needs of those who have been left out as demographics and work habits have changed the structure of the American family. In this book, budget experts and social scientists examine the history of family benefits in Social Security and show how changes in the retired population have affected the nature of these benefits and their ability to serve the elderly. They examine the current structure of spousal and survivors benefits and evaluate a variety of reform proposals--including individual accounts--that could improve the living standards of the neediest Social Security beneficiaries. It is essential analysis for anyone concerned about the future of America's most successful social program.

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Since 1994, welfare roles have dropped by more than 50 percent nationwide. More than half of these people—about 800,000—have moved into unsubsidized paid employment, yet the very success of welfare reform has brought another problem into stark relief: for many people, getting into work doesn't mean getting out of poverty. In this collection of essays edited by Jobs for the Future's Richard Kazis and Marc Miller, an impressive line-up of experts explores how our nation can help these and all working Americans pull themselves out of poverty through work.

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Social experiments provide the most reliable guide to potential impacts of policy change because their methodology allows analysts to isolate the effect of the policy change from other, potentially distorting factors. This revised and updated edition of the Digest of Social Experiments documents 240 completed and 21 ongoing social experiments. In addition to the findings, each summary details target populations, policies tested, experimental designs and related issues, sites, key staff, sources of further information, and public access to the data. The authors also discuss the theory and practice of social experimentation, the reasons for conducting social experiments, the ethical issues, and non-experimental methodologies that have been proposed as substitutes. They examine the uses of social experiments in the policy process, and offer a brief history of social experimentation.

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