Contradictions of the Climate-Friendly City: New Perspectives on Eco-Gentrification and Housing Justice

As local governments and corporations promote ‘climate friendliness’, and a low-carbon lifestyle becomes increasingly desirable, more middle- and upper-income urban residents are choosing to live near public transit, on bike- and pedestrian-friendly streets, and in higher-density mixed-use areas. This rejection of classical forms of suburbanization has, in part, increased property values in neighborhoods offering these amenities, displacing lower-income, often non-white, residents. Increased prevalence of creative and technology workers appears to accelerate this trend. We argue that a significant and understudied socio-environmental contradiction also occurs where the actual environmental outcomes of neighborhood transformation may not be what we expect. New research on greenhouse gas emissions shows that more affluent residents have much larger carbon footprints because of their consumption, even when reductions in transportation or building energy emissions are included. We describe an area in Seattle, Washington, the location of Amazon's headquarters, experiencing this contradiction and show a distinct convergence of city investments in low-carbon infrastructure, significant rises in housing prices and decreases in lower-income and non-white residents. We conclude with a discussion of a range of issues that require more attention by scholars interested in housing justice and/or urban sustainability.     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.     

Markov analysis of land use change: Continuous time and stationary processes

In an earlier paper one of the authors has used actual land use maps to establish the validity of the Markov process for describing and projecting land use changes. In a subsequent paper the same data was used to calibrate a non-homogeneous, birth and death process in which the land uses were dichotomized into either of two states: developed or undeveloped. The present paper pursues two aspects raised by the earlier ones: whether the process of land use changes can be considered a stationary process and, if so, whether it can be fit by a continuous-time, rather than discrete-time, model. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a feasible fit are indicated.     

Licensing,Popular Practices and Public Spaces: An Inquiry via the Geographies of Street Food Vending

The socio‐legal technology of licensing is one of the primary tools governments use to manage spaces and practices deemed risky or threatening to public order. Licensing requirements thus play a crucial role in shaping routine experiences in public space as well as the trajectories of emerging forms of public life. Yet licensing laws have largely been ignored in critical urban scholarship: too often concerned with the interpretation and critique of popular practices and public spaces, the mundane operations of urban governance are often left to practitioners and policy researchers. This article demonstrates how paying closer attention to licensure can provide valuable and unexpected insights into matters of social equality, urban amenity and economic opportunity. It does so through a comparative inquiry into practices of street food vending in New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Drawing on ethnographic study and interviews, the article demonstrates how licensing can be involved in the production of quite peculiar and unjust geographies of practice, but also how shifts in popular culture can force a reconsideration of taken‐for‐ granted laws. In conclusion, it is argued that a focus on licensing offers a productive pathway for new forms of critical urban research and provides a potential point of leverage in efforts to configure better and more democratic forms of urban public life.     

Valuation and firm investment and financing policies with personal tax biases

In this paper we examine firm financial policies in the presence of personal tax biases (e.g., favoring capital gains relative to interest and dividends). A form of the value additivity principle (VAP) for the tax bias case is established and applied to the firm's merger, investment, financial structure, and dividend decisions. As with the neutral tax VAP, the revised VAP requires transaction costless capital markets but does not require capital market completeness or competitiveness. Share value maximization is found not to be the proper goal for a firm that seeks to maximize the shareholders' current expected utility; however, it is found that share value maximization is generally a good approximate objective. Firm investment policy with financial structure irrelevance (owing to offsetting personal and corporate taxes) is examined assuming that the revised VAP holds.