Urban Studies Commons^™

Shortage Of Affordable Rental Homes In The Mountain West, Joshua Padilla, Kelliann Beavers, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet examines data from the 2022 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes” for the Mountain West region. The original report includes data from 2016- 2020 American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) to help “determine the availability of rental homes affordable to extremely low-income households.”

A Commentary On The Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project: Implications For Retailers, Policy, And Future Research, Samantha M. Sundermeir, Megan R. Winkler, Sara John, Uriyoán Colón-Ramos, Ravneet Kuar, Ashley Hickson, Rachael D. Dombrowski, Alex B. Hill, Bree Bode, Julia Deangelo, Joel Gittelsohn

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

In the United States, low-income, underserved rural and urban settings experience poor access to healthy, affordable food. Introducing new food outlets in these locations has shown mixed results for improving healthy food consumption. The Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project (HCSCSP) explored an alternative strategy: supporting mission-driven, locally owned, healthy community food stores to improve healthy food access. The HCSCSP used a multiple case study approach, and conducted a cross-case analysis of seven urban healthy food stores across the United States. The main purpose of this commentary paper is to summarize the main practice strategies for stores as well as …

Wildfire Risk In Mountain West States, 2017-2021, Olivia K. Cheche, Corryn Richardson, Zachary Billot, Miguel Soriano Ralston, Vanessa Booth, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Environment

This fact sheet examines data on wildfire destruction in the Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The original report from the Insurance Information Institute presents findings on percent of properties at risk of wildfire destruction, the number of wildfires by state, and numbers of acres burned per state.

Public History Is Now, Sarah E. Dougher

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

A walking tour of downtown Portland in August 2021 raises questions for the writer about the purpose of “memory activism,” its relation to writing-as-activism. Drawing on critiques of urbanist Jane Jacobs and interrogating the concept of “reckoning,” the essay explores ways in which the streetscape and people there can deliver meaning and pose questions about systemic racism and unsheltered existence.

Balancing Mission And Margins: What Makes Healthy Community Food Stores Successful, Sara John, Megan R. Winkler, Ravneet Kuar, Julia Deangelo, Alex B. Hill, Samantha M. Sundermeir, Uriyoán Colón-Ramos, Lucia A. Leone, Rachael D. Dombrowski, Emma C. Lewis, Joel Gittelsohn

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Mission-driven, independently-owned community food stores have been identified as a potential solution to improve access to healthy foods, yet to date there is limited information on what factors contribute to these stores’ success and failure. Using a multiple case study approach, this study examined what makes a healthy community food store successful and identified strategies for success in seven community stores in urban areas across the United States. We used Stake’s multiple case study analysis approach to identify the following key aims that contributed to community store success across all cases: (1) making healthy food available, (2) offering healthy foods …

Gis Training In Transportation And Environmental Justice For Promoting Student Success In Steam Education, Joowon Im, Alan Klein, Amruta Sakalker

TREC Final Reports

Transportation land uses have a significant impact on vulnerable ecologies, especially in a rapidly urbanizing region like Dallas-Fort Worth. To study this relationship, the research team will develop a pilot ArcGIS lab course to expose high school students to critical regional tools and technology. This course will demonstrate the connections between transportation planning and design and environmental justice. The College of Architecture Planning and Public Affairs at UT Arlington will partner with CityLab high school in the Dallas Independent School District to develop a four-week lab course curriculum in ArcGIS and other emerging regional mapping technologies.

High school students will …

An Introduction To Gis For Dallas, Texas High Schoolers, Joowon Im, Alan Klein, Amruta Sakalker

TREC Project Briefs

A summary of TREC research project NITC-RR-1468,GIS Training in Transportation And Environmental Justice for Promoting Student Success in STEAM Education.

Exploring The Empirical Relationship Between Inner-City Blight And Urban Sprawl In The United States, Eric Fesselmeyer, Kiat Ying Seah

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Urban blight has been found to cause a variety of problems, including negatively affecting the value of surrounding properties and increasing neighborhood crime rates. If the same externalities that give rise to urban sprawl also contribute to urban blight, as is suggested by Brueckner and Helsley (2011), city center vacancy rates-an indication of blight-would increase with the extent of urban sprawl. This study adds to the sparse literature on the empirical relationship between urban sprawl and blight by finding that the city-center census tract vacancy rate is higher in more sprawling cities. The results of this article, therefore, provide support …

Mobility For The People: Evaluating Equity Requirements In Shared Micromobility Programs, Anne Brown, Amanda Howell, Hana Creger

TREC Final Reports

Technology-enabled shared micromobility services have expanded mobility for some travelers, but significant barriers to use limit their uptake among certain groups. To address these barriers, cities and professional transportation organizations have undertaken two distinct efforts to operationalize equity in shared micromobility services: 1) drafted equity frameworks in an attempt to clearly define equity within the transportation context and to provide guidelines for what cities should consider when designing equity-based mobility programs; and 2) some cities have attempted to ameliorate access disparities by establishing new requirements for shared micromobility programs. Both equity frameworks and program requirements mark important steps to operationalizing …

Nevada Job Gains/Losses, January 2020 - January 2022, Hira Ahmed, Joshua Padilla, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet displays county-level job gains and losses for 17 counties in Nevada, as reported in the March 2022 The Daily Yonder article “Most Recent Jobs Data Shows Rural Employment Is Nearly Back to Pre-Pandemic Level.”

Best Cities For Affordable Homeownership In The Mountain West, Kelliann Beavers, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet highlights data on the best cities for affordable homeownership in the Mountain West, based on the SmartAsset report, “Best Cities to Buy an Affordable Family Home – 2021 Edition.” The report is SmartAsset’s second annual study, following the 2020 report, and includes data on 100 of the largest cities in the United States. This fact sheet highlights the rank, index, down payment-to-income ratio, housing costs as a percent of income, and four-year change in homeownership rate within each of the 15 Mountain West cities included in the original report.

The Public’S Case Against Dte Energy: Extracting Profits, Inducing Health Harms, And Damaging Democracy, Alex B. Hill, Bridget Vial, Aly Shaw, Gin Armstrong, Robert Galbraith

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Together with our partners, MEJC and LittleSis, We The People Michigan finds that DTE has extracted profit from its customers through hundreds of thousands of shutoffs, the second highest amount of rate hikes in the country, and unnecessary power outages that leave customers without power. They have invested heavily in new fossil fuel power plants that place significant health burdens on customers while blocking renewable energy initiatives. Finally, this report digs into the campaign donations of DTE executives, board members, and PAC to reveal how they utilize dark money to advance their profit-driven agenda.

Forms Of Community Engagement In Neighborhood Food Retail: Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project, Ravneet Kuar, Megan R. Winkler, Sara John, Julia Deangelo, Rachael D. Dombrowski, Ashley Hickson, Samantha M. Sundermeir, Christina Kasprzak, Bree Bode, Alex B. Hill, Emma C. Lewis, Uriyoán Colón-Ramos, Jake Munch, Lillian L. Witting, Angela Odoms-Young, Joel Gittelsohn, Lucia A. Leone

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Community engagement is well established as a key to improving public health. Prior food environment research has largely studied community engagement as an intervention component, leaving much unknown about how food retailers may already engage in this work. The purpose of this study was to explore the community engagement activities employed by neighborhood food retailers located in lower-income communities with explicit health missions to understand the ways stores involve and work with their communities. A multiple case study methodology was utilized among seven retailers in urban U.S. settings, which collected multiple sources of data at each retailer, including in-depth interviews, …

Webinar: Scooting To Healthy And Safe Mode Choices, Kristina M. Currans, Nicole Iroz-Elardo, John Macarthur

TREC Webinar Series

Shared electric scooters (e-scooters) are fast becoming a mobility option in cities across the United States. This new micromobility mode has the potential to replace car usage for certain trips, which stands to have a positive impact on public health and sustainability goals. However, many aspects of this emerging mode are not well understood.This webinar explores the findings of three NITC studies examining transportation mode choices, safety, and public health outcomes of electric scooters.

Housing Affordability For Top Occupations In Nevada Metros, 2022, Kristian Thymianos, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Ally M. Beckwith, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet combines housing and employment data from the National Housing Conference (NHC) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to examine housing affordability for the 10 most common occupations in the Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV and the Reno-Sparks, NV metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in Quarter 1 of 2022.

Arts Vibrancy In The Mountain West, 2020, Joshua Padilla, Ally M. Beckwith, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Cities & Metros

This fact sheet highlights data on various arts vibrant communities in the United States from the 2020 Arts Vibrancy Index Report. The growth of arts communities across the country contributes to the increased intensity of the United States’ cultural sector. Using the original data prepared by Southern Methodist University (SMU) Data Arts, this fact sheet focuses on the arts vibrancy of communities in the Mountain West.

A Walk In The Park: A Spatial Analysis Of Crime And Portland Parks, Cheyenne Pamela Hodgen

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis presents two individual research papers that examine the relationship between greenspaces and crime in Portland, Oregon. The two papers use an adapted street network buffer to better measure crime concentration around discrete locations. This methodological development allows for an improved measure of crime concentration around discrete locations.

The first contribution, explores the relationship between different greenspace types and crime, breaking down different crime types into discrete categories. The results of this study suggest that overall, Portland greenspaces do not experience a concentration of crime, however, different patterns emerge as greenspace and crime types are disaggregated. Only one greenspace …

Regional Decision-Making In Oregon’S Area Commissions On Transportation, Cole P. Grisham

Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs

Long after other areas of Oregon had already done so, the local agencies in the Portland region served by the Oregon Department of Transportation decided to form a regional Area Commission on Transportation. Why they decided to do so and what caused local agencies to delay forming one until long after other regions was not immediately clear. In this article, I examine the policy documents around the formation of the Region 1 ACT and how its policy history represents wider historical trends on regional transportation decision making nationally. To do so, I describe Oregon’s regional policy making structure followed by …

Safety Interventions For Houseless Pedestrians, Peter Domine, Sean Doyle, Asif Haque, Angie Martinez Sulvaran, Nick Meusch, Meisha Whyte

PSU Transportation Seminars

Cities across the U.S. are facing alarming increases in traffic fatalities, especially among the number of pedestrians who are struck and killed by drivers. Last year, 70 percent of all pedestrian fatalities in Portland were of people experiencing houselessness. As the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is updating the city's Vision Zero Plan, a team of PSU urban and regional planning masters students have been investigating how to reduce the risk of being hit and killed specifically for unhoused people. During this presentation, the Street Perspective team will explain the situation, review their approach, and then share the recommendations they'll …

E-Scooters In Tucson, Az: Modeling Placement, Charging, And Rebalancing, Jianqiang Cheng

TREC Project Briefs

Are e-scooters just the first sign of a shared-mobility revolution? If they are, then researchers at the University of Arizona intend to make sure that the emerging transportation system has functional models on par with other modes of transportation. In 2018, approximately 100 U.S. cities had already launched shared e-scooter programs, accounting for 38.5 million trips. However, the models to manage e-scooter sharing are only recently being developed. In a project funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) and led by Dr. Jianqiang Cheng, the research team set out to develop data-driven, decisionmaking models for shared-mobility system …