Public understanding of violence against women, and appropriate solutions to tackling gender-based violence, have changed enormously over the past 50 years. In this paper, we study how violence against women is practically understood through organizational efforts to frame and combat it in the United States. We use topic modeling and dictionary-based content analysis to explore the missions and programming of 918 service and advocacy nonprofits directly involved in anti-violence work between 1998 and 2016. We find that, in contrast to earlier foci on direct crisis intervention, anti-violence organizations increasingly understand violence against women as a multifaceted problem that must be addressed by comprehensive programming. We also find that nonprofits increasingly use medicalized, criminal-legal, and bureaucratic language to describe their work, underscoring the tensions of institutionalization.

Coalitions of formal housing, civil rights and anti-poverty organisations play an important role in urban housing movements. However, the extent and dynamics of these 'housing movement coalitions' are not well understood. In this article, I document the geography of housing movement coalitions across 148 US cities using leadership networks among 11.8 million civic leaders. I show that cohesive coalitions of formal housing, civil rights and anti-poverty leaders exist in a wide range of US cities, including in conservative states. In terms of change, housing coalitions have only grown in a handful of politically liberal cities since the global financial crisis, and most housing coalitions have stagnated and some have declined. Finally, change score regression models indicate that economic insecurity is associated with housing coalition emergence, but municipal austerity and hostile political environments may weaken the opportunities for coalitions to expand. These findings suggest movement scholars should widen their focus to include housing coalitions in more diverse contexts, and more closely examine how municipal funding shapes housing coalitions and their relationship to grassroots activism.

Discrimination-health research has been critiqued for neglecting the endogeneity of reports of discrimination to negative affect and the multidimensionality of mental health. To address these challenges, we model discrimination’s relationship to multiple psychological variables without directional constraints. Using time-dense data to identify associational network structures allows for joint testing of the social stress hypothesis, prominent in discrimination-health literature, and the negativity bias hypothesis, an endogeneity critique rooted in social psychology. Our results show discrimination predicts negative emotions from day-to-day but not vice versa, indicating that racial discrimination is a risk factor and not symptom of negative emotion. Furthermore, we identify sadness, guilt, hostility, and fear as a locus of interrelated emotions sensitive to racism-related stressors that emerges over time. Thus, we find support for what race scholars have argued for 120+ years in a model without a priori directional restrictions and then build on this work by empirically identifying cascading mental health consequences of discrimination.

Are large and institutional landlords overtaking the rental market? Acquisitions by institutional landlords spark concern, but claims about the novelty of large owners are untested because no longitudinal studies of property ownership exist. This article undertakes the first complete, longitudinal study of rental ownership in any U.S. city, developing computational tools to track ownership in Austin, Texas since the Great Recession. I find that Austin landlords with more than 100 rental units have not increased their market share since 2010. Large landlords grew larger, but the number of amateur landlords owning only one rental property also increased by 41 percent, stabilizing small landlords' market share. In addition, rental ownership is rapidly "formalizing" in Austin, indicated by a rise in organizationally complex and publicly obscuring ownership strategies across landlords. Instead of a rise in institutional landlords, these trends indicate landlording is becoming an institution: an enduringly popular and now depersonalized means of extracting rents from one's neighbors. I propose that the institutionalization of landlording may best describe rental ownership dynamics in many cities.

Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for why. In this article I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organizations of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, though, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning 16 years estimate that an addition of 10 community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a 10 percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage.

Is an elite consolidating among the leadership of community-based organizations (CBOs) in U.S. cities? Ethnographers identify a privatized turn in urban governance, with some nonprofit civic leaders becoming a cohesive group with enormous influence in local affairs. However, while researchers propose elite consolidation has occurred and created a more hierarchical, technocratic, and unipolar civic field, these structural changes have not been directly assessed. In this paper, I reintroduce an interorganizational network perspective to elite consolidation and evaluate how interlocking directorates among CBOs in Cleveland, OH, and Austin, TX constitute relationships among civic leaders over twenty years. Results indicate boards of directors are constituting a new civic elite, and that hierarchical interlock tendencies doubled in both cities between 1998 and 2016. The core of the networks appear to be organizations traditionally important in urban governance, though, and community analysis reveals power sharing among elite groups in the cities rather than singular dominant communities, indicating as situation of "elitist pluralism." These findings offer a new perspective on the problem of elite consolidation in civil society, and offer a benchmark for future analysis of civic elites.

Service and advocacy organizations have long struggled to find the appropriate language to name traumatic experiences when working with vulnerable populations. Organizations have been pressed to adopt either “victim”-based language or “survivor”-based language, with both terms seen as having mutually exclusive meanings. However, despite academic and popular debates, no recent studies have documented trends in language used to describe traumatic experiences, whether of sexual and relationship violence, or of experiences of war, disaster, or major illness. In this research note, we use administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service to analyze how 3,756 service and advocacy organizations use trauma-related language between 1998 and 2016. Descriptive analysis shows that survivor language has been on the rise as victim language declined. Victim remains a common way to name trauma, however, and survivor tends to join, rather than displace, victim terminology. Further analysis also points to gendered use of both terms. Victim and survivor are used together most often in organizations that work with trauma experienced by women and in the field of sexual and relationship violence. We suggest these findings indicate a more complex story of how communities of language users emerge, which aligns with recent sociological treatments of discourse.

The United States has long relied on private organizations to provide public services to poor communities. However, while the federal government’s support of the civic sector through grants and contracts is well studied, little research investigates how it subsidizes voluntary organizations through national service programs, such as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). In this article, we assess whether nonprofits that receive VISTA members show higher levels of donations and volunteers than matched nonprofits that did not receive VISTA members in the years following the Great Recession. We find that nonprofits that participated in the VISTA program had higher numbers of volunteers 2 years after participation, suggesting that national service was effective at supporting local organizations and building local civic infrastructure during an economic recovery. We also follow VISTA receiving organizations from 2010 to 2016 in a longitudinal design, finding a robust relationship of VISTA service and volunteering. These findings suggest VISTA is a resource for organizations and invite further research on the relationship between national service and anti-poverty work.

The decline of employment-based health plans is commonly attributed to rising premium costs. Using restricted data and a matched sample from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component, the authors extend previous studies by testing the relationships among premium costs, employment relationships, and the provision of health benefits between 1999 and 2012. The authors report that both establishment- and state-level union densities are associated with a higher likelihood of employers' providing health plans, whereas right-to-work legislation is associated with lower provision. These factors combined rival rising premium cost in predicting offering. This finding indicates that the declining provision of health benefits could be in part driven by the transformation of the employment relationship in the United States and that labor unions may remain a critical force in sustaining employment-based coverage in the twenty-first century.