Yana Kucheva’s research while affiliated with City College of New York and other places

Gas leaks in cities with older infrastructure are relatively common. The unburned methane which they release is a potent greenhouse gas with harmful health effects. Using administrative municipal data on gas leak reports, we provide a systematic analysis of residential gas leaks in New York City and their association with socioeconomic inequality. We find that both the reporting of gas leaks and the prevalence of resulting residential gas shutoffs is strongly structured by already existing inequalities across neighborhoods. Therefore, we argue that the gas infrastructure in urban areas is an important environmental justice issue as those communities who experience the brunt of failing gas infrastructure are the same communities who have faced decades of disinvestment and environmental racism.

Patterns of household mobility across neighborhoods reproduce patterns of racial segregation at the metropolitan level. Substantial literature across the social sciences has explored the scale and predictors of household mobility as well as changes in metropolitan residential segregation over time. This study unifies these two strands of inquiry by connecting the sorting of households across neighborhoods to aggregate changes in segregation levels. Using discrete choice models of intrametropolitan mobility and restricted decennial census and American Community Survey data for 1960–2014, I model the correlates of household mobility and identify the counterfactual scenarios under which lower segregation levels can be achieved. The results show that even though the mobility flows of the White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations across census tracts have become more similar over time, U.S. metropolitan areas are far from experiencing large drops in segregation.

Despite recognized positive congestion and environmental impacts, cordon pricing has sometimes been criticized from a social equity perspective. This paper examines the impact of cordon pricing on three key equity indicators in New York City: traffic, public transportation access, and environmental concerns. The share of congested links, accessibility to the subway, and the population-weighted mean exposure to PM2.5 emissions are among the metrics used to measure equity indices. We show that implementing cordon pricing in Manhattan’s Central Business District (CBD) would considerably improve traffic, and environmental metrics for the population inside the cordon area with no significant changes in other boroughs. The CBD will experience a reduction of congested links between 2.1% and 3.6% and a reduction of PM2.5 concentration of 18%. In terms of accessibility to the subway, cordon pricing would mostly affect the non-Hispanic population as well as residents of Queens. The rates of reduction in the average emissions exposure to PM2.5 will vary across racial groups. The pricing strategies will disproportionately help to reduce the negative health outcomes of exposure to traffic related air pollution of residents of Manhattan’s CBD.

Despite abundant evidence about the effect of children’s socioeconomic circumstances on their transition to adulthood, we know much less about the effect of social policy programs aimed at poor families with children in facilitating how and when children become adults. This issue is particularly important for the U.S. federal subsidized housing program given its long history of placing subsidized units in some of the poorest and most racially segregated neighborhoods. Using counterfactual causal methods that adjust for the length of receipt of subsidized housing, I estimate the effect of subsidized housing on teenage parenthood, household formation, and educational attainment. I find that the subsidized housing program has either null or positive effects on the transition to adulthood and that these effects vary by both race and gender. These results underscore the importance of considering whether social programs have differential effects on the life chances of individuals based on both race and gender. Non-paywalled link: http://rdcu.be/I5kg

Racial residential segregation is still very high in many American cities. Some portion of segregation is attributable to socioeconomic differences across racial lines (what we call structural factors); some portion is caused by purely racial factors, such as housing market discrimination and preferences for the race of one’s neighbors. Past attempts to measure the structural component of segregation have generally focused on only 1 socioeconomic status (SES) variable and have produced results that are high in potential measurement error. In this article, we use an innovative method and uniquely suitable data (geocoded microdata obtained through the U.S. Census Bureau’s Research Data Center [RDC] program) to disaggregate segregation into a “structural” and a residual component. Our measure shows the amount of segregation that would remain if we could randomly assign households to housing units based only on nonracial socioeconomic characteristics. This inquiry provides valuable building blocks for understanding and remedying housing segregation.

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) is one of the most celebrated decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Nevertheless, some have argued that it was largely superfluous, because blacks lacked the capacity to enforce their rights and white neighborhoods and institutions had other methods available to stop black entry. Oddly enough, despite continuing strong scholarly interest in restrictive covenants, there has been very little empirical analysis of how Shelley changed housing opportunities of African Americans. In this paper, we attempt such an evaluation, and we find strong support for the proposition that Shelley had a dramatic impact upon the housing opportunities available to blacks. Just as important, we find that this shift in opportunities changed the dynamics of black ghettos in ways that have important implications for basic debates about urban policy and the black underclass.