A compact but complete handbook of zoning covering the story of the spread of this movement, the reasons for zoning, the experiences of various zoned cities, the correct principles and best practice, the legal pitfalls and a selected list of reference.
EDWARD M. BASSETT was chairman of the Zoning Committee of New York.
The term “deaths of despair” was coined in 2015 by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe the increasing mortality rate for White Americans without college degrees due to drug over-doses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. These deaths were attributed to the despondency experienced by the White working class, who were left behind by changes in the American economy. However, the mortality picture has changed since then. Mortality rates are now rising among both Black and White Americans without a college degree. Nearly all major causes of death are increasing more, or decreasing less, for people without college degrees. The educational gap in mortality has become so severe that, in 2021, adult life expectancy was more than eight years higher among college graduates. In this double issue of RSF, Case, Deaton, sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors move beyond the concept of “deaths of despair” to explore the widening educational gap in mortality.
Issue 5 provides new perspectives on the education gap in mortality as well as new viewpoints on the non-college population. Christopher L. Foote and colleagues show that much of the educational gap in mortality may be due to smoking. One of the most popular explanations for the growing mortality gap is that college unlocks better job opportunities. However, Sam Arenberg and Sam Stripling find that what may matter for longer life expectancy is not so much having a “good” job as having a job at all, as high school dropouts with jobs have lower mortality rates than college graduates without them. Victor Tan Chen and colleagues reveal that people with opioid use disorders experience “precarity chains”: overlapping, connected hazards that combine to put people at increased risk of substance abuse.
Issue 6 also gives new viewpoints on the non-college population and examines geographic and international variation in mortality. Grace Landrum-Hall and colleagues discover that men with health issues repeatedly enter and exit the formal labor force—referred to as “churning”—owing to inflexible employer policies and insufficient income support program policies. Jennifer Karas Montez and col-leagues show that rural areas and small cities have seen increases in mortality, while large urban areas have seen decreases. Iliya Gutin and colleagues find that the educational gap in health and well-being is typically larger in the US than in Britain. This may be because education in the US—and the resulting higher salaries—allows for more access to health-promoting resources.
This double issue of RSF provides fascinating insights into the stark and alarming mortality gap between those with and without a college degree in the US.
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As climate change intensifies, weather becomes more extreme and climate hazards like wildfires and hurricanes become more frequent and more destructive. While climate change affects the entire global population, the risk and consequences of experiencing climate hazards are not shared equally. In the US, lower socioeconomic status groups and people of color are disproportionately more at risk for experiencing climate hazards and face more difficulty recovering from them. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Max Besbris, Manuel Pastor, and Anna Rhodes, economist Wolfram Schlenker, political scientist Pamela Winston, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine the impact of climate change on inequality in the US.
The eleven articles in this issue investigate the consequences of climate hazards for inequality, examining impacts on housing, neighborhoods, and employment; the ways inequality emerges in recovery from climate-related disasters; and how politicians and other actors respond to climate change. As flood risk increases in communities across the US, local authorities are partnering with federal agencies to implement buyout programs as a tool for managed retreat. James R. Elliott and colleagues find that in majority-White communities, where most buyouts take place, homeowners more commonly opt to sell their homes on the private market instead, which creates a revolving door of risk rather than eliminating it. Property insurance is essential for mediating losses and facilitating hurricane recovery, yet timely and fair claims are not guaranteed. Bad faith claims handling can put residents’ housing stability and financial well-being at risk, leading many to file lawsuits to dispute the outcome of their claims. Hannah K. Friedrich and col-leagues find that litigation against insurers is more likely in areas that have a higher percentage of Black residents and that case duration is longer for residents in these areas, reflecting that systemic procedural inequalities can amplify disparities in disaster recovery. Cadence Willse finds that in the wake of major climate-related disasters, Democrats are more likely to increase their support for environmental policies, while Republicans are less likely to vote in favor of them. Megan Mullin investigates whether support for managed retreat programs by local governments differs if residents are viewed as wealthy or low-income. She finds that local elected officials are more likely to support buyout programs for low-income homeowners.
This timely issue of RSF expertly enhances our understanding of the intersection of climate disasters and inequality.
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Stereotyped as “model minorities” who excel in the classroom, Asian Americans are more highly educated than all other US groups. Once in the labor market, they outearn White Americans. Some believe this is evidence that White privilege, racial bias, and gender discrimination are fictitious narratives of a liberal “woke” agenda. Others use it as proof that confirms their stereotypes that Asian Americans are inherently smarter and harder working than other groups. While much attention has focused on Asian Americans’ academic achievement, far less research considers whether their later careers mirror their early success. In this issue of RSF, sociologists Jennifer Lee, Kimberly Goyette, Xi Song, and Yu Xie, management scholar Jackson G. Lu, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how Asian Americans fare in the workplace.
The ten articles in this issue examine the ways in which Asian Americans, because of geographic clustering, are advantaged at a national level but disadvantaged at the regional level; how gender, family, and marriage impact Asian Americans in the workplace; and the different ways Asian Americans strategically adapt to the labor market. Robert Manduca and Jane Furey reveal that while on aver-age Asian Americans outearn White Americans at a national level, when compared to Whites living in the same metropolitan area, Asians earn only 88 percent as much. Sharon Sassler and Gabrielle Sorresso find that among computer science professionals, Indian women have a larger gender wage gap than White and Chinese women and experience larger marriage and parenthood penalties in earnings. Sojung Lim and Wonjeong Jeong show that Asian women are more likely to live with extended family than White women, leading to higher rates of employment among Asian women with children. Angelina Grigoryeva finds that Asian Americans are more likely to receive stock-based compensation than White Americans because they are more likely to work in jobs where stock options are provided. Asians and Whites working in the same types of jobs are equally likely to receive stock-based compensation and in similar amounts. Shih-Chun “Steven” Chien and colleagues find that despite being the fastest-growing racial minority group entering the legal profession, Asian Americans are underrepresented in leadership positions. They attribute this pattern in part to employers’ pervasive stereotypes that Asian Americans lack traits typically associated with leadership, such as creativity and assertiveness.
This issue of RSF reveals that the perception of the Asian American advantage in the workplace is illusory, and the contributors shed light on the lived experiences of the “model minority” when it goes to work.
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In their seminal 1997 book Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein laid bare the strategies and challenges of low-income single mothers who were struggling to provide for their families. Even in an era when cash welfare was a federal entitlement, these women struggled to get by. In the thirty years since the book’s publication, many single parents wrestle with income volatility, precarious work schedules, and formal and informal economic support. In this double issue of RSF, economist Elizabeth O. Ananat, political scientist and public policy scholar Carolyn Y. Barnes, sociologists Sandra K. Danziger and Kathryn Edin, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how the policy landscape has changed since welfare reform and how it impacts low-income single mothers’ ability to make ends meet today.
Issue 1 has eight articles that examine how the traditional safety net has evolved and new supports that have been developed since Making Ends Meet. Sarah K. Bruch and colleagues assess changes to the social safety net since the 1990s and find that benefits have become more exclusive, have more constraints, and are less generous. Kelley Fong and Nora McCarthy reveal that, in an attempt to decrease child maltreatment, the child welfare system increasingly provides material resources to system-involved parents, including in-kind donations and assistance accessing childcare. However, parents often avoid obtaining resources through the system because it opens them up to increased state surveillance. Heather D. Hill and colleagues show that access to paid family and medical leave (PFML) varies greatly for single mothers, with two-thirds of single mothers living in states without PMFL.
Issue 2 looks at lessons that can be learned from COVID-era policies, how single mothers currently try to make ends meet, and men’s contributions to families. Natasha V. Pilkauskas and Kevin Bruey find that low-income single mothers, with and without employment, utilize a variety of public and private resources to make ends meet. Despite this, both groups face high levels of material hardship, including food and housing insecurity. Allison Dwyer Emory and colleagues show that nonresident fathers often have trouble making ends meet them-selves and are unable to make up for the loss of cash support post-welfare reform.
This double issue of RSF showcases the persistence of precarity that low-income families face since Making Ends Meet.
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Widening inequality has received much attention recently, but most of the focus has been on the top one percent or the middle class. The problems of those at the very bottom of society remain largely invisible. Along with the Great Recession, factors such as rising housing costs, welfare reform, mass incarceration, suppressed wages, and pervasive joblessness have contributed to deepening poverty in America. In this inaugural double issue of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, a distinguished roster of poverty scholars from multiple disciplines focuses on families experiencing “severe deprivation”: acute, compounded, and persistent economic hardship.
Over 20 million families in America live in deep poverty, on incomes below half the federal poverty threshold, yet Liana Fox and colleagues find that government taxes and transfers lift millions of families out of deep poverty each year. Searching even further below the poverty line, Luke Shaefer, Kathryn Edin, and Elizabeth Talbert find that the number of children in households experiencing chronic extreme poverty—living on $2 or less per day—increased by over 240 percent between 1996 and 2012. Focusing on the elderly, Helen Levy shows that failing health exacerbates low-income seniors’ hardship by driving up their out-of-pocket medical spending.
Other contributors examine the relationship between violence and severe deprivation. Through longitudinal interviews with former prisoners in Boston, Bruce Western reveals the ubiquity of violence in the life course of disadvantaged young men. And Laurence Ralph draws on years of ethnography in Chicago to document how families and communities cope with the trauma of gun violence. Other studies in this issue show that mass incarceration has changed the nature of poverty in recent decades, with consequences ranging from increased levels of deprivation among children of incarcerated parents to housing insecurity among parolees, which increases their risk for recidivism.
Finally, several papers devise novel methods and concepts relevant to the study of severe deprivation. Kristin Perkin and Robert Sampson develop an innovative measure of “compounded disadvantage” that groups individual and ecological hardship, while Megan Comfort and colleagues pioneer a new approach to ethnographic fieldwork that combines embedded social work with participant observation.
This issue provides in-depth analyses of the causes and human costs of extreme disadvantage in one of the richest countries in the world and offers a new paradigm for understanding the changing face of poverty in America. In an age of economic extremes, understanding how and why severe deprivation persists will be vital for policymakers and practitioners attempting to deliver relief to the nation’s most marginalized families.
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, a key component of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, was designed to aid low-income students and to combat racial school segregation. Over the last several decades, the ESEA has become the federal government’s main source of leverage on states and school districts to enact its preferred reforms, including controversial measures such as standardized testing. In this issue of RSF, edited by David Gamson, Kathryn A. McDermott, and Douglas Reed, an esteemed group of education scholars examine the historical evolution of the ESEA, its successes and pitfalls and what they portend for the future of education policies.
The ESEA has historically enabled the federal government to address educational inequality at the local level. Among the nine articles in the issue, Erica Frankenberg and Kendra Taylor discuss how the ESEA in conjunction with the Civil Rights Act accelerated desegregation in the South in the 1960s by withholding federal funding from school districts that failed to integrate. Rucker C. Johnson shows that higher ESEA spending in school districts between 1965 and 1980 led to increased likelihood of high school graduation for students, and low-income students in particular. Students in districts with higher spending were also less likely to repeat grades or to be suspended from school. Yet, as Patrick McGuinn shows, the institutional and administrative capacity of the U.S. Department of Education has never been sufficient to force instructional changes at the school level. This was particularly true with the 2001 renewal of the ESEA, the No Child Left Behind Act, which linked federal funding to schools’ test-score outcomes rather than to programs designed to combat social inequalities.
The issue also investigates the unintended consequences of the ESEA and offers solutions for offsetting them. As Patricia Gándara and Gloria Ladson-Billings demonstrate, ESEA reforms have, in some circumstances, led to the neglect of the needs of minority students and second-language learners. Gándara shows that No Child Left Behind requires “bilingual” education programs to focus on rapid acquisition of English, often to the detriment of those learning English as a second language. Similarly, Ladson-Billings shows that the ESEA’s standardized testing mandates may suppress innovative teaching methods, and argues for reforms that use multidisciplinary approaches to craft new curricula.
Bringing together research on the successes and shortcomings of the ESEA, this issue of RSF offers new insights into federal education policy and demonstrates that this landmark legislation remains a powerful force in the lives of educators and students fifty years after its initial implementation.
The American system of higher education includes over 5,000 degree granting institutions, ranging from small for-profit technical training schools up to the nation’s elite liberal arts colleges and research universities. Over 20 million students are enrolled, with federal, state, and local governments spending almost 3 percent of GDP on higher education. Yet how can we evaluate the effectiveness of such a large, fragmented system? Are students being adequately prepared for today’s labor market? Is the system accessible to all? Are new business methods contributing to greater efficiency and better student outcomes? In this issue of RSF, editors Steven Brint and Charles Clotfelter and a group of higher education experts address these questions with new evidence and insights regarding the effectiveness of U.S. higher education.
Beginning with the editors’ authoritative introduction, the contributors assess the effectiveness of U.S. higher education at the national, state, campus, and classroom levels. Several focus on the effects of the steep decline in state funding in recent years, which has contributed to rising tuition at most state universities. Steven Hemelt and David Marcotte find that the financial burdens of attendance, even at public institutions, is a significant and growing impediment for students from low-income families. John Witte, Barbara Wolfe, and Sara Dahill-Brown analyze 36 years of enrollment trends at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and find increased enrollment of upper-income students, suggesting widening inequality of access.
James Rosenbaum and his coauthors examine the effectiveness of “college for all” policies and find that on a wide range of economic and job satisfaction measures, holders of sub-baccalaureate credentials outperform those who start but do not complete four-year colleges. Two papers—by Kevin Dougherty and coauthors and Michael Kurlaender and coauthors – find that the use of new regulatory mechanisms such as performance funding and rating systems are plagued by unintended consequences that can provide misleading measures of institutional effectiveness. Lynn Reimer and co-authors examine the effectiveness of the “promising practices” in STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) promoted by the National Academy of Sciences, and find that they can increase completion rates among low-income, first-generation, and under-represented students.
Expanding college access and effectiveness is a key way to pro-mote economic mobility. The important findings in this issue illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. system of higher education and suggest new avenues for improving student outcomes.
