Urban Affairs Review

The authors argue that anti-density zoning increases Black residential segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas by reducing the quantity of affordable housing in White jurisdictions. Drawing on census data and local regulatory indicators compiled by Pendall, the authors estimate a series of regression models to measure the effect of maximum density zoning on Black segregation. Results estimated using ordinary least squares indicate a strong and significant cross-sectional relationship between low-density zoning and racial segregation, even after controlling for other zoning policies and a variety of metropolitan characteristics, a relationship that persists under two-stage least squares estimation. Both estimation strategies also suggest that anti-density zoning inhibits desegregation over time.

Principal—agent models in public administration concentrate upon policy drift—when agencies allow policy to drift away from the bliss point of executive politicians. We distinguish two types of policy drift: policy shifting and agent shirking. The first occurs when agents' political bliss points are located differently from those of their principals. The second occurs when agents do not competently carry out their principals' wishes. One response to policy shift is to appoint agents who share the bliss point of the principal, allowing the reduction of costly monitoring. Through 10 cases in three Israeli cities where political appointments were made to push through structural changes to contract out services, we show that political appointees are less effective than career bureaucrats, so that solving shifting often increases shirking, especially when monitoring is reduced. The agency problems thus created were only solved by increasing monitoring and returning to career civil servants.

In a context of globalization, municipalities and metropolitan regions are involved in international competition to support economic growth. This leads to new forms of collaboration between public authorities and businesses, giving birth to new forms of urban and metropolitan governances. Moreover, many old neighborhoods of the central city and some districts of the old suburbs face growth in unemployment and poverty. In these local territories, community organizations put forward local development practices that aim to improve living conditions. These organizations cooperate with other community organizations, public institutions and private agencies. Thus, they are embedded in a kind of governance: a local governance. This article, based on the case of the metropolitan region of Montreal, highlights the conception of local development of these community organizations, the local governance in which they participate, and the link between this local governance with the urban and metropolitan ones.

Much of the research on police—citizen relations has focused on adults, not youth. Given that adolescents and particularly young males are more likely than adults to have involuntary and adversarial contacts with police officers, it is especially important to investigate their experiences with and perceptions of the police. This article examines the accounts of young Black and White males who reside in one of three disadvantaged St. Louis, Missouri, neighborhoods— one predominantly Black, one predominantly White, and the other racially mixed. In-depth interviews were conducted with the youths, and the authors' analysis centers on the ways in which both race and neighborhood context influence young males' orientations toward the police.

Research that tries to explain the decisions of local government in the contracting out of certain services frequently disregards the temporal dimension. In this article, the authors take time into account in the analysis, proposing a duration model as an alternative to discrete choice models. The objective is to analyze the explanatory factors in the contracting out of municipal services. This methodology is applied to the water services of 744 municipalities in southern Spain during the period from 1985 to 2006. From the results, the authors conclude that complexity in the environment, economies of scale, financial restrictions, and stability of the local government are determinants in the decision.