Overview of Activities - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

POVERTY, RACE, AND INEQUALITY
IPR 2009
P. Reese
the group will use will use both quantitative and
qualitative methods to investigate how housing and
the surrounding social, institutional, and family
environment can affect children’s health, education,
behavior, and life outcomes. Cook is Joan and Sarepta
Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice.
< Economic Strategies of Women
with HIV/AIDS
With support from the
Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation, along with
the National Science
Foundation CAREER
award she received
in 2009, sociologist
and African American
studies researcher
Celeste Watkins-Hayes meets with
Celeste Watkinsmembers
of her HIV/AIDS research team.
Hayes is beginning
a new project on Health, Hardship, and Renewal: A
Research Study of the Economic Strategies of Women
with HIV/AIDS (www.hhrstrategies.org). Over two
years, she and her team of researchers will follow 100
Chicago-area women from a variety of racial, ethnic,
and socioeconomic backgrounds to gain a better
understanding of how these women adjust their lifestyles
and cope with the personal and financial challenges of
living with the disease. The project was designed to fill
some of the major holes in previous AIDS research,
which focused mostly on white gay men or on preventing
the spread of infection. Her new study will specifically
address the experiences of low-income women of color—
who represent one of the fastest-growing population
groups affected by the virus—and the ways in which they
cope with the disease personally, socially, and financially.
< Residential Mobility and Outcomes
Rosenbaum and Stefanie DeLuca of Johns Hopkins
University are investigating the conditions under
which residential mobility leads to better outcomes
for families. They are looking at findings from two
housing mobility programs: Gautreaux and Moving to
Opportunity (MTO), which have generated somewhat
conflicting conclusions for child and adult outcomes.
Gautreaux found more positive outcomes for those who
moved into more advantaged neighborhoods while the
randomized MTO experiment had more mixed ones.
The two researchers find large differences between the
kinds of moves created by the two programs. They
speculate that bigger moves by Gautreaux families, 25
miles on average versus less than 10 for the MTO families,
might account for some of the discordance in results,
especially since the MTO families did not radically
change their social environment (i.e., most children in
the MTO study continued to attend the same school or
an equally bad school). While more information might
be gleaned on housing mobility and improved outcomes
from a new study in Baltimore, the Gautreaux study
finds that the vast majority of low-income black families
remain in suburbs 15 years after placement, suggesting
they made permanent escapes from low-poverty, highcrime
neighborhoods, which might have contributed to
significant gains in education, employment, and racially
integrated friendships, particularly for the children.
< Gentrification and Mixed-Income
Communities
Sociologist and African American studies professor
Mary Pattillo has spent a year abroad in Colombia.
She continues to study racial stratification and gave
talks around the country based on her research on
issues of race, class, and urban and housing policies,
including the mixed-income community—currently
the centerpiece of American housing policy. In an
increasingly global world, Pattillo notes, U.S. cities
are competing internationally for investments. By
demolishing public housing, where a city’s poorest
residents live, and replacing it with mixed-income
housing, geared to the middle class and above, planners
and bureaucrats hope to attract more affluent residents,
drive down crime rates, and widen their tax base. To
justify the displacement of public housing residents,
most of whom are black or Latino, city officials engage
in what Pattillo has termed the “criminalization” of
public housing and its residents in public discourse.
In the midst of an affordable housing crisis, Pattillo
says, such efforts are leading to increased racial and
class gentrification, in which poor residents are being
systematically “erased” from the urban landscape under
the guise of making cities “safe” for international
investment, tourism, and elite residence.
< Mixed-Income Housing Group
Several IPR faculty—including Pattillo, sociologist
Lincoln Quillian, and economist Greg Duncan—
have been part of a diverse, interdisciplinary group of
nationally recognized scholars charged with identifying
research needs and potential strategies to deepen
knowledge about the costs and benefits of building
mixed-income housing developments in American
cities. This strategy has been the major thrust of housing
policy in the United States since the mid-1990s. In
addition to reviewing past housing studies, the group
met with a range of relevant parties—including
developers, community activists, and representatives
of tenant organizations—to determine the most
pressing issues surrounding mixed-income housing
and its various effects. The researchers came to the
conclusion that no one study could adequately address
the wide-ranging questions that remain. Thus, in their
final report, released in 2009, they outline five areas
of study that together would provide a much more
comprehensive picture
of how mixed-income
housing plans play out
in the real world: effects
on individuals and
households; governance
and community;
citywide structure and
consequences of mixedincome
redevelopment;
housing choices, searches,
Lincoln Quillian will use
and trajectories; and
the MacArthur group’s population movement
recommendations to study and the stability of
mixed-income housing. neighborhoods.
P. Reese
The Social Science Research Council, which organized
the group with funding from the MacArthur Foundation,
will use the report to guide future research on mixedincome
housing. Quillian is a core researcher on one such
project. With sociologists Robert Sampson of Harvard
and Robert Mare of the University of California, Los
Angeles, he will help conduct a longitudinal study of
families and neighborhoods that seeks to place mixedincome
housing in its broader context.
< Segregation, Vouchers, and Neoliberals
Historian Nancy MacLean is working on a
book manuscript titled “‘Marketplace Solutions’:
Segregationists and the Surprising Career of School
Vouchers.” The story begins with the closing of the public
schools in Prince Edward County, Va., from 1959–64,
an outgrowth of segregationists’ policy of “massive
resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education that included
the first modern tuition grants (i.e., school vouchers).
Scholars of civil rights have depicted the school closures
as the twilight of massive resistance, yet a fresh look
reveals it was also the dawn of the era of privatization,
often described as neoliberalism. The research follows
the Southerners’ discovery of allies in the nascent
national conservative movement, their alliance building
with proponents of libertarian economics—above all,
the founders of public-choice economics—and their
contributions to the “original intent” constitutionalism
that later flowed into the Federalist Society and related
efforts. The book will also chart their involvement with
new institutional partners, such as conservative think
tanks and the Republican Party, and examine their
efforts to cultivate ties between evangelical Protestants
and Catholics for voucher advocacy. How privatization
is chipping away at social citizenship—and ultimately,
democratic governance—is at the core of her study.
< Financial Intermediation and Policies
Sergio Urzúa and Robert Townsend of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology are analyzing
the impact of financial intermediation on occupational
choices and income. The two economists are studying
a variety of structural-choice models to see if financial
intermediation has an impact on productivity by easing
credit constraints in occupational choice and/or an
improved allocation of risk. They then interweave the
analysis of these models with econometric information
from natural experiments to assess how varying policies
and financial institutions affect incomes, occupations,
risk sharing, and other variables. In bringing these two
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