Although zoning changes are a common policy tool for addressing housing affordability concerns, the political struggles they spark are underexplored. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival research, and observations of virtual public hearings, this article fills this gap by comparing the participatory rezoning process in two New York City (NYC) neighborhoods between 2014 and 2021. City officials, community advocates, and residents from these communities, with different class and racial compositions, engaged in framing struggles over the motivations and expected effects of these rezonings in the context of a citywide housing crisis and rampant gentrification. By advancing the concept of Situated Policy Narrative Frames (SPNFs), I argue that place-based policies, such as rezonings, present three tensions that engaged actors must make sense of: spatial, social, and temporal. I demonstrate that, to resolve these tensions, proponents and supporters used a technocratic frame, while opponents used a populist frame. Engaged actors also used justice and neighborhood change frames in both cases, although with striking differences based on each neighborhood’s socio-spatial characteristics.
The historically unprecedented rise in U.S. incarceration towards the end of the twentieth century was made possible through the construction of over 1,000 state and federal prisons. Both scholars and conventional wisdom characterize prisons as a predominantly rural institution. Often overlooked, however, is that the U.S. prison boom coincided with a period of rapid suburbanization. Integrating scholarship on prison proliferation and metropolitan reclassification, this paper asks: To what extent are prisons an urban phenomenon, and how has this changed over time? How has U.S. carceral geography evolved in the context of suburbanization? Drawing on spatial and administrative data, I show that the 1990s were distinct in rural prison siting patterns and that most U.S. prisons are now in metropolitan areas. Suburbanization further altered the metropolitan-rural distribution of prisons: 38 percent of metropolitan prisons are in formerly rural counties. Ultimately, I argue that prisons are important metropolitan institutions that warrant more attention from urban and suburban scholars. The U.S. prison boom is not only a rural economic development story but also a spatial process shaped by, and possibly reshaping, suburbanization.
This article uses the unique case of low-income renters who have participated in tenant rights education to understand how an increased understanding of their rights and responsibilities shaped tenant strategies for addressing destabilizing housing conditions. We find that tenants varied in their responses with some demanding repairs or rent reductions and others resigning themselves to their housing situations. This variation was not random: the strategies tenants adopted after rights education reflect social vulnerabilities, particularly the formality of rental arrangements and legal status to live in the United States. Tenants incorporated what they learned into their plans for next steps which helped some avoid, or at least delay, displacement in the short term and improved their capacity to advocate for repairs. However, tenants with multiple social vulnerabilities or whose situations fall in legal gray areas were resigned to their situations. They avoided displacement but that avoidance came at the cost of requesting repairs or contesting unfair rent increases. A subset of tenants felt no need to alter how they approached housing issues but planned to use the information in the future, either for themselves or others in their community. Tenant rights education influences strategizing for low-income renters in positive ways, but to truly disrupt housing precarity, rights education must be combined with ongoing legal support and policies that reduce rent burdens.
Research on group threat has identified the racial composition of neighborhoods as significant for understanding spatial variation in racial bias and discrimination. A distinct but related strand of research has found disproportionate rates of arrests of non-Whites in predominantly White neighborhoods. This past work has generally operationalized racial composition in residential terms. Here, I explore the role of the racial composition of everyday mobility patterns in predicting racial threat. I propose that just as White neighborhoods experiencing growing non-White residential populations exhibit patterns of group threat, the same dynamic may occur in White neighborhoods experiencing large influxes of non-White everyday visitors. Drawing on arrests and cell phone mobility data from New York City, I find that in predominantly White neighborhoods, Black arrest rates are 150 percent higher when the share of Black visitors exceeds the share of Black residents by 10 percentage points. Similar but smaller patterns also appear for Hispanic visitors and Hispanic arrests. These heightened inflows of non-White visitors into these predominantly White “threatened” neighborhoods help explain why predominantly White neighborhoods sometimes exhibit especially elevated non-White arrest rates. Overall, this study offers a novel perspective on how policing practices intersect with the racialized control of space in urban environments.
