Rental Housing (rental + housing)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2008
David Thacher
This article investigates the recent rise of criminal background screening in rental housing as a case study of the diffusion of actuarial social control. That case study suggests that actuarial techniques have spread more widely through the crime prevention field than sociolegal scholars have recognized, replacing disciplinary efforts to diagnose and alter the behavior of individuals with actuarial efforts to identify and isolate high-risk groups. This actuarial strategy has proliferated not only because new discourses encouraged it but also because new institutional structures facilitated it. That conclusion illustrates the importance of structural (rather than cultural) factors in shaping society's response to crime,particularly the growing availability of the collective institutional capacity that actuarial social control requires. [source]


Housing Allowances and Economic Efficiency

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2006
MARIETTA E.A. HAFFNER
Housing allowances aim to make rental housing affordable for the recipients. Whether affordability for tenants is achieved in an economically efficient way is the question that is discussed in this essay. Three aspects of efficiency are focused on: disincentives to work, over-consumption of housing and horizontal inefficiency. These topics are tackled through a discussion that focuses mainly on the principles, but also on some of the outcomes, of the means-tested housing allowance systems in six Western countries: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Sweden. Conclusions concern the apparent unimportance of the poverty trap or the unemployment trap specifically for rental housing, the concept of notional rent used to tackle over-consumption, and the frequent existence of some form of horizontal inefficiency. [source]


The question of rent: the emerging urban housing crisis in the new century

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2004
Michael Turk
The emergence of a new housing crisis in the United States for low-income renter households at the outset of the twenty-first century can be traced to an increasing lack of affordability, where the average cost of housing as a portion of income has risen steadily over the last half-century. In turn, this rise in housing costs can be attributed to a growing and dramatic shortage of low-cost rental housing. Ultimately, the evocation of homeownership as the embodiment of the ,American Dream' has made renting the ,stepchild' of housing options, and this has had hidden, but nonetheless deleterious effects upon US cities, which remain major concentrations of rental housing and financially-strapped tenants. Aux Etats-Unis, on peut imputer la nouvelle crise du logement du début du vingt-et-unième siècle touchant les ménages locataires à faibles revenus à une impossibilité croissante d'accessibilité financière, la part du coût moyen d'un logement dans le revenu ayant progressé constamment au cours du demi-siècle précédent. Par ailleurs, cette élévation des coûts du logement peut être attribuée à une pénurie accrue et dramatique de l'habitat à loyer modéré. Enfin, évoquer l'accession à la propriété comme incarnation du ,Rêve américain' a fait de la location le ,parent pauvre' des possibilités de logement, ce qui a eu des effets latents, quoique néfastes, sur les grandes villes américaines, lesquelles restent des concentrations dominantes de logements locatifs et d'occupants désargentés. [source]


Obstacles to desegregating public housing: Lessons learned from implementing eight consent decrees

JOURNAL OF POLICY ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 2 2003
Susan J. Popkin
Between 1992 and 1996 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) settled a number of legal cases involving housing authorities and agreed to take remedial action as part of court-enforced consent decrees entered into with plaintiffs. These housing authorities faced significant obstacles that impaired their ability to comply swiftly and fully with all of the elements in the desegregation consent decrees. The obstacles fell into two broad categories: contextual obstacles (racial composition of waiting lists and resident populations, lack of affordable rental housing, and inadequate public transportation), and capacity and coordination obstacles (conflict among implementing agencies and ineffective monitoring by HUD). Findings presented here highlight the sizable potential delay between the time a legal remedy is imposed and when plaintiffs in public housing segregation disputes realize any benefits. They also reinforce the argument that implementation problems will be legion when policies impose a significant scope of required changes on a large number of actors who must collaborate, yet are not uniformly capable or sympathetic to the goals being promoted. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. [source]


Can Public Housing Authorities Attract and Hold Upwardly Mobile Households?: A Report from Cincinnati

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 3-4 2001
David P. Varady
Logistic regression analysis is applied to a pooled, cross sectional data set containing results from approximately 1,300 interviews with Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) residents, carried out between 1995 and 1998 to determine overall levels of residential attachment, and to test whether socially mobile householders had especially weak attachments to their locations. The results highlighted a strong propensity to move among CMHA residents generally. Although most residents stated that they were satisfied with their home, nearly three-fifths said that they expected to move within five years. Multivariate results suggested that socially mobile residents (college educated householders, workers, moderate-income households) were using the CMHA stock as a stepping-stone to better rental housing or homeownership. Public housing officials need to decide whether to make a special effort to hold these upwardly mobile households. A more realistic goal would be to minimize residential turnover caused by environmental problems (e.g., crime), regardless of income level. Policies to achieve this goal are discussed. [source]


The Rise of Criminal Background Screening in Rental Housing

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 1 2008
David Thacher
This article investigates the recent rise of criminal background screening in rental housing as a case study of the diffusion of actuarial social control. That case study suggests that actuarial techniques have spread more widely through the crime prevention field than sociolegal scholars have recognized, replacing disciplinary efforts to diagnose and alter the behavior of individuals with actuarial efforts to identify and isolate high-risk groups. This actuarial strategy has proliferated not only because new discourses encouraged it but also because new institutional structures facilitated it. That conclusion illustrates the importance of structural (rather than cultural) factors in shaping society's response to crime,particularly the growing availability of the collective institutional capacity that actuarial social control requires. [source]