Rachel Garshick Kleit

The Ohio State University | OSU · College of Engineering

Decreasing federal resources since the 1980s, policy devolution to the local level, and expansion of market-based approaches for affordable housing delivery have resulted in public housing authorities (PHAs) evolving from public organizations to hybrid organizations that encompass public and private characteristics. Although federal rules guide the...

The social context of community encompasses varied geographies as well social relations embedded in a network of relationships. The context of social communities is not necessarily spatially bound, although the context may originate in particular localities; social networks, identity, and new technologies allow social communities to cross geographi...

A widely used practice in state and local economic and workforce development is to identify and explicitly invest in strategic industry clusters. Economic theory suggests that industry clusters, defined as geographically concentrated groups of firms and supporting institutions in related industries, enhance industry productivity and regional prospe...

This article conceptualizes the relationship between housing instability, residential mobility, and neighborhood quality. We summarize the existing literature about residential mobility and housing instability and examine their potential interactions along three dimensions: (a) the reasons for a move, including a variety of push and pull factors; (...

Inequality in both income and wealth has grown rapidly in the United States since the 1970s. Over the same period, homeownership rates increased in step with expansionist government policies and the development of subprime and other exotic loan products, and housing affordability challenges emerged as the most prevalent housing problem for owners a...

U.S. financial services are bifurcated into a traditional banking sector that serves wealthier individuals and a less regulated alternative financial services sector (payday lenders, check cashers, etc.) catering to lower income individuals. What determines the spatial distribution of fringe banks? First, at the county level, fringe banks do not fi...

As the great recession began, public housing authorities (PHAs) were just beginning to experience the full effects of neoliberal policy implementation and devolution. Using 13 case studies of the largest PHAs in the Pacific Northwest, this paper outlines activities that PHAs undertook to balance public mission with private-market means. PHAs made t...

In some US metropolitan areas, increasing diversity among assisted housing residents due to influxes of immigrants and refugees is commonplace and creates new challenges for implementing public housing redevelopment. However, US redevelopment policy does not recognize this diversity. Responding to this gap, this paper summarizes findings from focus...

Economic development scholars and practitioners increasingly recognise the importance of both industry and occupational composition as sources of regional strength and specialisation. At the same time, occupational cluster analysis has paid insufficient attention to a main potential constituency of economic development: people in or near poverty. T...

Because poverty in rural and urban areas of the US often has different causes, correlates and solutions, effective anti-poverty policies depend on a thorough understanding of the ruralness or urbanness of specific places. This paper compares several widely used classification schemes and the varying magnitudes of poverty that they reveal in the US....

Do mixed income housing programs increase the poor's social network diversity? Using unique, longitudinal, egocentric social network data, this research investigates changes in social network homophily for both Vietnamese and English-speaking original residents of a public housing redevelopment site. Changes in mixing occur for both those who retur...

 Since the early 1990s, federal housing policy in the U.S. has become increasingly concerned with the confluence of the neighborhood quality and location of assisted housing residents, and the HOPE VI program is one within this family of programs. Yet a lack of dispersal has characterized HOPE VI and other efforts to relocate public housing residen...

 Case studies in select large cities have found that fringe services, including payday lenders, check cashers, pawn brokers, and money transmittal companies are more geographically accessible to predominantly minority neighborhoods while traditional banks are more accessible to white neighborhoods. However, many analyses are bivariate rather than m...

Public housing redevelopment has the potential to disrupt resident social support social networks. In reaction to Curley’s (2009) finding that some relocated residents from the Maverick HOPE VI site were able to slough off non-reciprocal social support ties — ”draining ties” — this paper hypothesizes that relocation does not alter patterns of inter...

The HOPE VI programme in the US displaces tens of thousands of low-income households to disperse pockets of poverty and transform sites of `severely distressed' public housing into mixed-income housing. A complete evaluation of this programme's impacts on residents must examine the meanings and functions of these communities before they are dismant...

Problem: Local public housing authorities (PHAs) in the United States face a different set of mandates and opportunities today than they did before 1980; PHA financing and program authority are more flexible, while federal funding has shrunk, and new obligations have arisen. Taken together, these changes in federal policy have so diversified PHAs'...

As the HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) program redevelops public housing, residents must relocate. Little is known about how they make the choice to stay or to go, if they are given one. Survey interviews with 200 residents of Seattle's High Point HOPE VI project provide the data to address four questions about such moves. Fir...

To what extent are people of different incomes and housing tenures engaged in social relationships in new mixed-income, New Urbanist HOPE VI communities? In Seattle’s NewHolly Phase I, neighboring relationships are generally more frequent than in other mixed-income situations. Yet systematic differences among housing tenures by language, family com...

In the United States since the mid-1980s, self-sufficiency programs have sought to transform public housing developments from permanent housing into way stations for low-income people. This article presents exploratory research on the predictors of success in these programs. Statistical analysis of longitudinal survey data from participants in an e...

This article evaluates an experimental public housing self-sufficiency program that encourages home ownership among low-income families. A quasi-experimental design, in combination with focus groups, records review, and key informant interviews, provides data to focus on four questions: (a) Do these programs simply accelerate move-outs for those wh...

How does the level of dispersion of suburban public housing influence low-income residents' neighborhood relations? An in-person survey of 253 public housing residents in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, provides the data to address this question. Controlling for factors that predict neighborhood interactions as well as differences between sca...

How does poverty dispersal influence the job search tactics and networks of poor women? Using the results of interviews with 253 women living in dispersed and small clusters of public housing, this paper examines how job networks and search tactics may vary. The premise is that the mechanisms involved in connecting poor residents of more affluent a...

In theory, housing poor families in the suburbs among those who are not poor can provide better housing options and help families connect with economic and social opportunities. Social networks are vital links to larger social systems and the neighborhood networks of low‐income people may thus influence their access to opportunity. Does living in s...

How does the level of dispersion of suburban public housing influence low-income residents' neighborhood relations? An in-person survey of 253 public housing residents in suburban Montgomery County, Maryland, provides the data to address this question. Controlling for factors that predict neighborhood interactions as well as differences between sca...

Recently passed welfare reform legislation may have adverse impacts on the incomes of public and assisted housing residents and hence on the rental income of housing authorities. One way to dampen these impacts is to help welfare‐reliant tenants find jobs. The Family Self‐Sufficiency (FSS) programs sponsored by many housing authorities may be an im...

This article presents a longitudinal evaluation of the Gateway Transitional Families Program, an innovative self‐sufficiency program designed to help public housing residents leave public housing for their own homes. The evaluation followed participants and a comparison group over six years to isolate program impacts on employment and receipt of Ai...

This paper analyzes the influence of development restrictions on house price appreciation from 1982 to 1991 in 52 U.S. metropolitan areas. The geometric mean of Haurin, Hendershot, and Kim's (1991) housing price indices is used as an indicator of the rate of change in housing prices. A model of market determinants is compared to a model that includ...