Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

What We Should Have Known About The Black Vote: A Comprehensive Analysis Of Voter Turnout In Presidential Elections, Zulema T. Blair Phd

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

A historic increase in African American voter turnout in the 2008 presidential elections has also contributed to the overall increase in voter turnout in presidential elections, which steadily declined from 1960 through 2000. Using a logistic regression analysis for presidential years 1980 through 2000, this article re-examines why voter turnout in presidential election years take place. The traditional and well-established explanations of socioeconomic status (SES), demographics, group consciousness, mobilization, psychological orientations, and economic displacement, were regressed onto voter turnout where race is deemed insignificant. However, in a closer analysis where income was used to separate the voting age population by …

About Face: A Perspective On Civilian Military Relations Through The Lens Of The Principal-Agent Theory, Randall Swain

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

- 55 - About Face: A Perspective of Civil-Military Relations through the Lens of Principal-Agent Theory Randall D. Swain Eastern Kentucky University This essay uses the principal-agent theory to offer a framework for explaining shirking tendencies by the U.S. military in civil-military relations. Through the lens of the framework presented here, the principal-agent theory explains why shirking tendencies by the U.S. military is more likely to occur when a Republican occupies the White House, than when it is occupied by a Democrat. Besides providing a framework for conceptualizing civil-military relations, the importance of this work lies in the manner in …

What Happened To The 9/11 Commission? What A Century Of Riot Commissions Teaches Us About America’S Dependence On Independent Commissions, Lindsey Lupo

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

In August of 2004, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission released its report to much media buzz. However, when all ten commissioners reconvened in late 2005 to issue a report card on progress made on the recommendations of the Commission, they issued five Fs, twelve Ds, nine Cs, and one A minus. This article looks at independent commissions in the United States and the role they play as flak-catchers—stopgaps that assuage public fears while giving the appearance of decisive government action. It uses historical and comparative case-study analysis to portray how the 9/11 Commission operated in a manner similar to U.S. race …

The Impact Of Politicized Churches And Party Contact On African American Voter Turnout, Randolph Burnside, Stephanie A. Pink-Harper

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

- 3 - The Impact of Politicized Churches and Party Contact on African American Voter Turnout Randolph Burnside Southern Illinois University Carbondale Stephanie A. Pink-Harper Southern Illinois University Carbondale The African American community has faced a myriad of challenges regarding their quest for social equity and social justice in America. Among the challenges is the fight for their right to vote. Researchers document numerous factors that have impacted the voting behavior of African Americans. Underexplored, however, is the historical role and impact that the African American church has had on this process. This article examines the impact of politicized churches …

Issues On Voter Participation Among African Americans And Bureaucratic Behavior, Andrew I. E. Ewoh, Maruice Mangum

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

No abstract provided.

Continuous Data Integration For Land Use And Transportation Planning And Modeling, Liming Wang, Kihong Kim

TREC Final Reports

There is an urgent need for improved models that address the interdependencies between land use and transportation, and considerable new work is underway to develop such models in Oregon and elsewhere. These models and planning practices to integrate land use into the process, however, require the integration of massive amounts of land use data that is messy and incomplete. There have been considerable advances in the treatment of such data problems in other domains, drawing on data mining and machine-learning techniques to address issues in various domains. To date, however, little systematic effort has applied these technological advances to the …

Tigard Walks (A Plan For Walkable Neighborhoods In Tigard), Chase Ballew, Mark Bernard, Jeremy Dalton, Laura Goodrich, Szilvia Hosser-Cox, Steven Mcatee

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The Walkable Neighborhoods Plan for Tigard outlines a set of strategies to help Tigard’s residents, businesses, and leaders build their city into a more walkable place. These five strategies are based on three core values gleaned from StepUP Studio’s outreach efforts to the people living and working in and for the city of Tigard.

This project was conducted under the supervision of Sy Adler, Marisa A. Zapata and Gil Kelley

Downtown Portland Waterfront Activation Strategy, Rachel Cotton, Janai Kessi, Eve Nilenders, Lauren Russell, Andrew Yaden, Jeremy Young

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Despite longstanding ambitions and multiple planning efforts, Portland’s goal of embracing and enhancing the Willamette River as the heart of the central city has only been partially fulfilled. The removal of an expressway and the creation of Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park in the 1970s and the river’s recently improved environmental quality represent major successes. However, few opportunities exist for park visitors to use the river for recreation, and Portland’s downtown waterfront lacks vibrancy, largely as the result of difficult or unclear connections to the downtown business district, surrounding neighborhoods, and the eastside. Additionally, public use of the park, a …

Allen Boulevard Corridor Plan, Anna Wendt, Samantha Petty, Jp Mcneil, Taren Evans, August Benzow, Art Graves

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The Allen Boulevard corridor, home to diverse populations and a vibrant commercial district, is a community in transition and a community with potential. While Allen Boulevard possesses unique assets in its present state, it has seen little in the way of localized planning or City programs tailored to the area’s needs. As such, the City of Beaverton partnered with the Portland State University Master of Urban and Regional Planning program to produce a detailed corridor study and planning guide for the area. From that partnership, six graduate students formed a consulting group, InSite Planning, to produce this plan.

This project …

Gresham Opportunity Framework Plan, Belinda Judelman, Carlos Gonzalez, Hayley Pickus, Lori Parks, Mike Simpson, Pamela N. Phan

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The Map Gresham project was a five-month long planning process led by Camassia Community Planning (CCP) to create “opportunity maps” and an Opportunity Framework Plan for the City of Gresham, OR. Opportunity mapping is a relatively new planning method for analyzing the spatial distribution of indicators linked to opportunity and determining which populations have access to these factors.

The overarching objective of the Framework Plan is to improve equitable access to opportunities for Gresham’s neighborhoods and diverse populations. We created the plan by putting community at the center and collaborating with local organizations, technical advisors, and City staff. It includes …

Washougal Waterfront (A Community Connected), Shannon Jamison, Sravya Garladenne, Michael Armstrong, Irene Kim, Julia Metz, Victor Caesar

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

The purpose of the Waterfront Vision Plan is to develop a community vision for the Waterfront that connects and complements the Downtown, supporting the creation of a local and regional identity for the City of Washougal.

Building on past outreach and planning by the Port of Camas-Washougal (Port) and City of Washougal (City), a team of Portland State University graduate students worked with the Port, City, and the community to craft the Waterfront
Vision Plan.

This project was conducted under the supervision of Sy Adler, Marisa A. Zapata, Gil Kelley, Matthew Gebhardt and Gregory Schrock.

Salem-Keizer Transit Flexible Service Plan, Darwin Moosavi, Brenda Martin, Cj Doxsee, Mike Sellinger, Lauren Wirtis, Matt Berggren

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Workshop Projects

Capturing the Ride is an exploration of flexible transportation options for low-density communities in Salem and Keizer. The current transit system does not serve Keizer, South Salem, and West Salem well; each of these communities has areas with limited or no access to current bus routes. The project intends to provide a service that will better meet the communities’ transit needs than the current system. Over a five-month planning process, Paradigm Planning conducted extensive research and reached out to the public in Keizer, South Salem, and West Salem (herein referred to as the study areas) to determine what kind of …

Street Portals: Urban User Interface 'Test Bed' Prototype For Bike Shares, Jason Germany, Philip Speranza

TREC Final Reports

The objective of this research project is to develop a user interface “test bed” to measure the role of touchscreen kiosks with community connectivity. This interface test bed will apply the knowledge of interface design to the domain of public transit kiosks, with a particular focus on bike share stations. The value of this research is the ability to generate user feedback between community members using urban experiences. Safety, effectiveness and community connectivity of public transit is enhanced with this information interface.

This report explains the test bed kiosk’s design, physical build, and hardware and software testing. User interaction studies …

The Development Of Low-/No-Emission Electric Vehicle Infrastructure In The Portland Metro Region: A Roadmap, John Macarthur, Peter Murchie, George Beard

TREC Final Reports

The shift from combustion engines to low- and no-emission electric vehicles is underway and gaining momentum. During the last year, Oregon has become an active player in the electric vehicle arena, with a number of promising relationships and activities in the early stages of formalization. With additional thought, effort and strategy Oregon can seize the opportunity to become the national leader in the adoption and incorporation of new vehicle platforms and mobility strategies into the fabric of urban life and the built environment. Oregon is currently actively engaged in relationships with international automotive companies and local businesses and utilities interested …

Cultivating Portlandia: A Mixed-Method Study Of Residential Urban Agriculture In Portland, Oregon, Nathan Mcclintock, Mike Simpson, Dillon Mahmoudi, Jacinto Pereira Santos

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Research Question:

• What is the scale and scope of residential urban agriculture (UA) in metro Portland?
• How does the practice of UA vary spatially?
• How do gardeners' motivations and practices vary along socioeconomic lines?

The “Community Entertainment District” Designation As A Tool For Urban Redevelopment In Cincinnati, Ohio, Whitney Mcintyre Miller, Julie Cencula Olberding

Education Faculty Articles and Research

Many urban neighborhoods in the United States have experienced an exodus of businesses. Their Main Streets—once consisting of bustling restaurants and stores—are now marked by “for rent” signs and boarded windows. Some community leaders have given up, but others are actively trying to bring businesses back. In Cincinnati, Ohio, several neighborhoods are starting to use the community entertainment district (CED) designation to attract entertainment and arts establishments. This paper presents an evaluation of the implementation and early impacts of the CED in one neighborhood, which may be insightful to leaders in other urban areas in Ohio and beyond.

Feasibility Study Of Consolidating Public Safety Answering Points In Highland Heights, Lyndhurst, Mayfield Heights, Mayfield Village And Richmond Heights, Ohio, Daila Shimek, Kyle Johnson, Eugene Kramer, Charles Post

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This study found that – based on certain configurations of communities and cost considerations – it is economically viable to consolidate public safety answering points (PSAPs) in Highland Heights, Lyndhurst, Mayfield Heights, Mayfield Village and Richmond Heights, Ohio. When comparing 2012 staffing and noncapital costs to estimated staffing and noncapital costs for a consolidated PSAP, the consolidated PSAP would provide an estimated collective reduction in staffing and noncapital costs of ranging from $775,400 to $1.19 million. When comparing 2012 staffing and noncapital costs to estimated staffing and noncapital costs for a consolidated PSAP – plus costs for additional staff to …

Connecting People And Place Prosperity: Workforce Development And Urban Planning In Scholarship And Practice, Greg Schrock

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

In recent years, the field of workforce development has emerged as a distinct area of policy and practice. While planning scholars have begun to engage with the workforce development field, its relevance and points of connection to planning scholarship remain underexplored. This article attempts to define the workforce development field by articulating its core concerns as well as its domains of practice and scholarship outside the planning field. The article locates workforce development within three stands of planning scholarship, concluding that workforce development represents an important bridge for planners between “place” and “people” prosperity within communities.

Urban Livestock Ownership, Management, And Regulation In The United States: An Exploratory Survey And Research Agenda, Nathan Mcclintock, Esperanza Pallana, Heather Wooten

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

As interest in urban agriculture sweeps the country, municipalities are struggling to update, code to meet public demands. The proliferation of urban livestock—especially chickens, rabbits, bees, and goats—has posed particular regulatory challenges. Scant planning scholarship on urban livestock focuses mostly on how cities regulate animals, but few studies attempt to characterize urban livestock, ownership and management practices in the US in relation to these regulations. Our study addresses this gap. Using a web-based survey distributed via a snowball technique, we received responses from 134 livestock owners in 48 US cities, revealing the following: why they keep livestock; what kind of, …

Exploring The Neighborhood Preferences Of A Segment Of Millennials In Omaha, Nebraska, Aaron Kloke

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

In 2010, Millennials, or those between 18 and 34, surpassed the Baby Boomers in population size. Today, Millennials, also known as Generation Y, make up over 25 percent of the United States’ population. In Omaha, they make up 26.9 percent of the population. The next largest generation in Omaha, the Baby Boomers, make for 19.2 percent of the population. Clearly, this emerging demographic has the ability to change the way we create and design our built environment if it so chooses.

To review how this generation may choose to change the way we design our future neighborhoods, national trends were …

Assessing Impacts Of Time Use On Children's Physical Fitness In Relation To Risk For Obesity And Diabetes, Jessica Guo

PSU Transportation Seminars

Researchers from the transportation, planning and health fields share the common goal of promoting physically active lifestyle. One challenge that researchers often face is the measurement of physical activity, particularly among children. This is because the sporadic nature of children’s physical activity patterns makes it difficult to recall and quantify such activities. Additionally, children’s lower cognitive functioning compared to adults prevents them from accurately recalling their activities. This presentation will describe the design and application of a novel self-report instrument - the Graphs for Recalling Activity Time (GReAT) - for measuring children’s activity time use patterns. The instrument was applied …

Transit Planning Practice In The Age Of Transit-Oriented Development, Ian Carlton

PSU Transportation Seminars

Transit serves as backbone infrastructure for many regional and local visions for sustainable urban development. Also, many modern policies predicate transit funding on the potential for transit-oriented development (TOD) near proposed infrastructure investments. However, little research has examined how TOD considerations have informed transit planning. This presentation discusses the results of recent dissertation research that fills this gap. Through multiple transit project case studies and interviews with nearly 100 transit planning professionals, this research categorized how transit projects across 19 U.S. regions were designed to foster TOD and how transit planning professionals identified TOD opportunities as projects were planned. During …

An Introduction To The Nacto Urban Street Design: Changing The Dna Of City Streets, Peter Koonce

PSU Transportation Seminars

In this seminar Peter will summarize his contributions to the NACTO Urban Street Design Guide, a guidebook focused on a paradigm shift in transportation, pulling away from the traditional bias toward highway designs that do not always meet the complex needs of streets in cities.

Home Foreclosures And Neighborhood Crime Dynamics, Sonya Williams, George Galster, Nandita Verma

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We advance scholarship related to home foreclosures and neighborhood crime by employing Granger causality tests and multilevel growth modeling with annual data from Chicago neighborhoods over the 1998-2009 period. We find that completed foreclosures temporally lead property crime and not vice versa. More completed foreclosures during a year both increase the level of property crime and slow its decline subsequently. This relationship is strongest in higher-income, predominantly renter-occupied neighborhoods, contrary to the conventional wisdom. We did not find unambiguous, uni-directional causation in the case of violent crime and when filed foreclosures were analyzed.

Zero-Sum Politics As A Trust Dilemma? How Race And Gender Affect Trust In Obama’S And Clinton’S Representation Of Group Interests, Shayla Nunnally

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

- 103 - Zero-Sum Politics as a Trust Dilemma? How Race and Gender Affect Trust in Obama’s and Clinton’s Representation of Group Interests Shayla C. Nunnally University of Connecticut This analysis deploys multiple regression Models and uses embedded survey experiments from a 2007 national web-based survey to determine African American, Latino, and Caucasian Democrats’ trust in Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to represent racial, gender, and intersectional interests. Three hypotheses are tested to discern whether respondents’ trust varies based on their: 1) race trumping gender, 2) gender trumping race, and/or 3) intersectionality enhancing trust, when their race and gender mirror …

Feasibility Study Of Consolidating Public Safety Answering Points In Highland Heights, Lyndhurst, Mayfield Heights, Mayfield Village And Richmond Heights, Ohio, Daila Shimek

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

This study found that – based on certain configurations of communities and cost considerations – it is economically viable to consolidate public safety answering points (PSAPs) in Highland Heights, Lyndhurst, Mayfield Heights, Mayfield Village and Richmond Heights, Ohio. When comparing 2012 staffing and noncapital costs to estimated staffing and noncapital costs for a consolidated PSAP, the consolidated PSAP would provide an estimated collective reduction in staffing and noncapital costs of ranging from $775,400 to $1.19 million. When comparing 2012 staffing and noncapital costs to estimated staffing and noncapital costs for a consolidated PSAP – plus costs for additional staff to …

Federal Transit Administration's Impact On Public Transportation In The United States, Amy Changchien

PSU Transportation Seminars

The Federal Transit Administration invests in building the capacity and improving the quality of public transportation throughout the United States of America. Under FTA's leadership, public rail, bus, trolley, ferry, and other transit services have reached greater levels of safety, reliability, availability, and accessibility. Come hear the highlights of FTA's impacts and participate in an interactive question/answer session and discussion on career options in public transportation.

Oregon Property Tax Capitalization: Evidence From Portland, Jenny H. Liu, Jeff Renfro

Northwest Economic Research Center Publications and Reports

The passage of Measures 5 and 50 drastically changed the way property taxes were assessed in Oregon. The measures were intended to limit the ability of government to raise property taxes, while achieving other goals such as equalizing school funding across the state. The property tax system that resulted is complex and has introduced inequities into the system based on differing rates of changes between assessed value (AV) and real market value (RMV). The League of Oregon Cities (LOC) asked the Northwest Economic Research Center (NERC) to investigate the effect of the tax structure on residential sale prices as part …

Radical, Reformist, And Garden-Variety Neoliberal: Coming To Terms With Urban Agriculture’S Contradictions, Nathan Mcclintock

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the "rolling back" of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, CA, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organisation of contemporary urban political economies through …

Acknowledgements: Richmond, Race And Regionalism, Richmond Peace Education Center

Richmond, Race and Regionalism

Acknowledgements of contributors to Richmond, Race and Regionalism video project, sponsored by the Richmond Peace Education Center and funded by Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Educational Leadership.