Detroit is the urban question America has been asking itself for decades. Over the past century, the city has symbolized American prosperity and the power of unions; the stark gap between Black and white urban experience; the fiscal and economic failure of the postindustrial city; and now the dystopia of large-scale urban abandonment. The Detroit…
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State Policy Strategies for Narrowing the Gender Wage Gap
#MeToo and #TimesUp protests about the treatment of women in the workplace have brought renewed attention to gender pay equity. This brief looks at three legislative solutions that aim to close the gap by increasing pay transparency and pushing employers to set salaries to the position, not the history of the person doing the job….
Austerity as the New Normal: The Fiscal Politics of Retrenchment in San Jose, California
Across the world’s most industrialized economies, the financial crisis of 2007 caused a contraction of state budgets and stimulated attempts to reform debt-burdened governments. In the United States, a system of fiscal federalism meant this turn towards austerity took a uniquely fragmented and geographically diverse form. Drawing on case studies of recent urban restructuring, Cities under…
Structurally adjusting: Narratives of fiscal crisis in four US cities
The Great Recession unleashed a wave of fiscal stress in the USA, with austerity measures such as spending cuts, service reductions and privatisation predictably taking centre stage. Decades of federal withdrawal from urban policy and funding, combined with state retrenchment, have contributed to a landscape of urban fiscal stress exacerbated by the prolonged effects of…
Participatory Budgeting: not just for regular budgets
The Participatory Budgeting Project has a guide for communities that want to participate in decisions about the use of funds from Tax Increment Financing districts. The governance structure associated with Tax Increment Financing varies by state (and not all states have TIF), but there are potentially significant amounts of funding at stake. TIF districts capture the…