Urban Affairs Review

This article casts New York City's large, public-sector workfare program of the mid-1990s against political-economic, institutionalist, and culturalist explanations of welfare reform dynamics. It argues that the form and changes in welfare reform programs must increasingly be understood as intersecting with urban political dynamics. Synthesizing existing literatures on welfare and urban policy, the article urges explanations based on the intersection of urban labor-market and fiscal management, institutional rules, and analyses of multiscalar policy networks and urban regimes that (1) generate ideas about what constitutes policy success; (2) organize coalitions and disorganize potential opposition; and (3) import and export policy reform ideas to and from the local scale to larger scales of governance.

Labor unions in the United States were involved in producing and advocating for affordable housing in the period after World War II, when labor wielded legislative, electoral, and economic power both nationally and locally. That involvement now has ceased almost completely. This article uses historical analysis to explore how labor unions influenced national housing policies and programs in the postwar United States, and considers how the labor and housing movements do and could collaborate today to meet the current pressing need for affordable housing, through alliances between organized labor and community groups in support of better housing and more unionized construction jobs.

This article draws on primary and secondary data to provide insight into the processes and conflicts over efforts to brand New Orleans as an entertainment destination from the 1990s to the present. The author identifies the key actors and organized interests involved in branding New Orleans, the rationale and logic of branding, and marketing strategies used to enhance place distinctiveness. The second half of the article describes the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans's tourism sector and examines efforts to rebrand the city. The article points to the problems, contradictions, and unpredictabilities of urban branding. This analysis provides an important opportunity for theoretical development and offers a unique perspective for understanding urban branding as a contested and conflictual process of homogenization and diversification.

This paper explores the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles during the late 1990s. To date, few analyses have empirically examined the impact of people-based policies on the economies of poor neighborhoods. The paper first documents the magnitude of this individual wage subsidy in Los Angeles as an unrecognized investment in poor neighborhoods on par with place-based policies such as Enterprise Zones. The paper then uses IRS and Economic Census data by ZIP Code to test whether increased EITC income has an effect on the neighborhood retail job base. Findings suggest an independent correlation between EITC investments and retail job gain. The conclusion uses these results to suggest better policy coordination and recommend four productive areas for future research.

Political incorporation theory suggests that the incorporation of new groups into city electoral politics will precede any improvements in the way that local bureaucracies treat members of those groups. We argue, however, that the logic and sequencing of political incorporation and bureaucratic response do not apply when explaining police practices toward immigrant residents. Drawing on survey evidence and case studies of California cities, we find that police departments are ahead of city councils and other municipal agencies in providing language support and that local elected officials are largely unaware of key practices of their police departments regarding interactions with immigrants. Such findings support the perspective of bureaucratic incorporation of immigrants, in which local bureaucracies proactively develop their own practices, drawing on a professional ethos.