Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Recovery For All? A Snapshot Of Women’S Economic Status In New England, Ann Bookman, Christa Kelleher, Kristin Smith

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

This November 2016 report, based on pre-recession and post-recession earnings data from the American Community Survey, demonstrates that while women’s overall earnings are now higher than pre-recession levels, other key indicators demonstrate a growing wage gap for many women—especially minorities and low-wage workers.

Minority women in New England who are employed full-time, year-round earned 62 percent as much as white men, both before and after the recession. While the gap between minority women’s and white women’s earnings decreased in Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island after the recession, it stayed the same in Massachusetts and widened in Connecticut and Vermont. …

The Politics Of Race, Class, And Gentrification In The Atl, Keith Jennings

Trotter Review

Methodologically, the essay uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine gentrification from a race, class, and gender perspective. Within the essay a number of the dynamics directly associated with Atlanta’s political economy and the impact those dynamics are having on issues such as affordable housing, poverty, and Black employment and underemployment are analyzed. While not a central focus of the essay, the changes taking place outside of Atlanta in several counties, as a result of the push and pull effect in the metropolitan region, are briefly discussed.

From Disinvestment To Displacement: Gentrification And Jamaica Plain’S Hyde-Jackson Squares, Jen Douglas

Trotter Review

In this essay, I offer a place-based history of socioeconomic and demographic change in Hyde Square and nearby Jackson Square (henceforth “Hyde-Jackson Squares”). I document the area’s ongoing gentrification and describe the distribution of gentrification pressures. I situate this contemporary process against the socio-spatial patterns carved out by the area’s historical rise as an industrial suburb, its struggle amid decades of disinvestment, and the community efforts that ultimately stabilized the neighborhood. In these sequential transformations is the story of how Latinos and Blacks entered, departed, and have strived to remain in the neighborhood.

“Separatist City”: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement And The Politics Of Incorporation, Self-Determination, And Community Control, 1986–1988, Zebulon V. Miletsky, Tomás González

Trotter Review

November 4, 2016, marks 30 years since the historic referendum in which close to 50,000 citizens of Boston living in or near the predominantly Black area of “Greater Roxbury” voted on whether the area should leave Boston and incorporate as a separate municipality to be named in honor of former South African president Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or remain a part of Boston. The new community, what planners called “Greater Roxbury,” would have included wards in much or all of the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, the Fenway, the South End, and what was then known as Columbia …

Community Land Trusts: A Powerful Vehicle For Development Without Displacement, May Louie

Trotter Review

In the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Boston’s communities of color were hit hard. A 2009 map of foreclosures looked like a map of the communities of color—Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The one island of stability was a section of Roxbury called the Dudley Triangle—home to the community land trust of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI).

Originally established to respond to the community’s vision of “development without displacement,” the land trust model was adopted to help residents gain control of land and to use that control to prevent families from being priced out as they organized to improve their neighborhood. …

Introduction: The Gentrification Game, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

In real estate talk, there are only three things that matter, and they are location, location, location. The same is true in dispossession, which translates into the freeing up of location so that it can be possessed by others. Another term that has cropped up fairly recently, much in use in the crossover between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is gentrification, which has a benign face as well as one that is not so kindly, like the paired tragic and comic masks of classic drama.

In this issue of the Trotter Review, we explore gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, …

Communities Of Opportunity: Pursuing A Housing Policy Agenda To Achieve Equity And Opportunity In The Face Of Post-Recession Challenges, Kalima Rose, Teddy Kỳ-Nam Miller

Trotter Review

Where we live directly impacts our ability to achieve our full potential. Access to good schools, quality jobs, reliable transportation, and healthy food is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity. Unfortunately, communities of color, and urban black communities in particular, are disproportionately residing in neighborhoods locked out of opportunity, or disproportionately burdened by housing costs —spending over half of their income on housing. In 2015, PolicyLink undertook a research project to understand the changing post-recession housing landscape, to characterize the forces that were undermining housing security for communities of color, and to characterize the policy opportunities that could address the …

Uncovering The Buried Truth In Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Tries To Memorialize Its Shameful History Of Slavery, Howard Manly

Trotter Review

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones had the noblest of intentions.

With Virginia’s capital having a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent, no one blamed Jones, a child of the sixties and preacher by calling, for trying to develop prime riverfront property to generate revenue to create more jobs, better schools, and housing.

But when Jones unveiled a proposal in 2013 that included building a new baseball stadium near one of the city’s historic slave burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom, it was, by all accounts, troubling to historic preservationists and Black community activists. “Shameful” was one of the words most often …

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Gentrification As Anti-Local Economic Development: The Case Of Boston, Massachusetts, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Activists and political leaders across the city of Boston are concerned that gentrification in the form of rapidly rising rents in low-income and the poorest areas are contributing to displacement of families and children. Rising home sale prices and an increasing number of development projects are feeding into this concern. There is also a growing wariness about the impact that this scenario can have on small and neighborhood-based businesses and microenterprises whose markets are represented by the kinds of households facing potential displacement. This potential side-effect suggests that gentrification could actually emerge as anti-local economic development in Boston. It can …

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: A Closer Look At Cliff Effects In Massachusetts, Randy Albelda, Michael Carr

Center for Social Policy Publications

This report shows that universal free education and child care would substantially increase family net resources and alleviate cliff effects.

Envisioning An Age-Friendly Belmont, Jan Mutchler, Ceara Somerville

Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging Publications

The Belmont Council on Aging is a municipal office charged with “advocating on behalf of the seniors of Belmont and ensuring that their social, financial and healthcare needs are met." Services provided to seniors living in the community range from transportation support to nutrition services and social services, along with a range of programs and activities meant to enhance well-being and quality of life. Similar to many Councils on Aging, the Belmont COA also provides leadership in the community, as the community as a whole addresses the growing number and changing needs of senior residents.

As a means of learning …

It’S About Time: Costs And Coverage Of Paid Family And Medical Leave In Massachusetts, Randy Albelda, Alan Clayton-Matthews

Publications from the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy

In the United States, some, but far from all, employers offer certain forms of wage replacement when workers take a leave for medical or family reasons. In 2015, only 12% of all workers had access to paid family leave from their employers, 38% had access to short-term disability leave, and 65% had paid sick leave. Extending paid family and medical leave to all employees through a statewide program would share the costs and expand access, level the employment playing field, and reduce inequality among workers. One often-cited obstacle to providing paid family and medical leave in the United States is …

Boston Children Thrive In 5: Connecting Families, Building Community (Presentation Slides), Donna Haig Friedman, Mary Coonan, Anne Douglass, Alice Carter

Center for Social Policy Publications

Presentation about the Boston Thrive in 5 program.

Age-Friendly Yarmouth Needs Assessment Report, Jan Mutchler, Ceara Somerville, Maryam Khaniyan, Molly Evans, Mai See Yang, Lindsey A. Baker, Hayley Gleason

Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging Publications

Communities throughout the nation are pursuing new strategies to promote health and quality of life among their residents. In 2014, the Town of Yarmouth joined the Age-Friendly Network through the World Health Organization and embarked on a five-year process to evaluate the community’s age-friendly features, plan for improvements, and implement change. The primary purpose of this report is to describe findings developed as part of the initial needs assessment phase of Yarmouth’s age-friendly initiative.

Boston Children Thrive In 5: Connecting Families, Building Community, Year 4 - Summative Evaluation Brief, Prepared For Thrive In 5, Donna Haig Friedman, Mary Coonan, Anne Douglass, Alice Carter

Center for Social Policy Publications

Boston is a diverse vibrant community that has become a 'majority minority' city; 64% of Boston households with young children are people of color. However, economic and racial disparities hinder the realization of children's potential: over 38,000 children five and younger live in the city and 24% of these children live below the federal poverty line.

In 2008, cognizant of persistent academic achievement gaps, especially for low income children and children of color in the city, the late Mayor, Thomas M. Menino, and United Way of Massachusetts Bay issued a school readiness call for action. Sixty-five community leaders, representing all …

Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership’S Family Self-Sufficiency Program Evaluation, July 1, 2010 – June 30, 2015, Brandynn Holgate, Julia Tripp, Sylvia Singleton, Priyanka Kabir, Wendel Mirbel, Donna Haig Friedman

Center for Social Policy Publications

The final report on Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership's (MBHP) Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program evaluation aims to improve our collective understanding of how the FSS program works, who benefits from the program and how they benefit, and the circumstances that are associated with success. The research findings are divided into five sections:

• A comparison of MBHP’s FSS program outcomes to the national average
• A description of how FSS graduates spend their escrow savings
• A comparison of FSS graduates with those who terminate from the program
• Mini-case examples on MBHP partnerships
• An assessment of goals and outcomes for MBHP under the TBF …

Assessment Of Impacts Of The Biomedical Careers Program – Just-A-Start Corporation Of Cambridge, Ma, Brandynn Holgate, Françoise Carré, Michael Mccormack, Wendel Mirbel

Center for Social Policy Publications

In 2015, Just-a-Start Corporation (JAS) of Cambridge, MA asked the UMass Boston Center for Social Policy to conduct an assessment of the impacts of the Biomedical Careers Program on the region and state, examining individual impacts for graduates as well as the economic contributions of program graduates to the biomedical industry.

The Biomedical Careers Program (hereafter “BioMed”) is described by JAS as an eight month program designed to enable local residents to complete “a Certificate in Biomedical Sciences to prepare them for entry level jobs at local biotechnology companies, universities, research institutions, clinical laboratories and hospitals. The program includes a …