Detroit is the urban question America has been asking itself for decades. Over the past century, the city has symbolized American prosperity and the power of unions; the stark gap between Black and white urban experience; the fiscal and economic failure of the postindustrial city; and now the dystopia of large-scale urban abandonment. The Detroit…
Category: Publications
State Policy Strategies for Narrowing the Gender Wage Gap
#MeToo and #TimesUp protests about the treatment of women in the workplace have brought renewed attention to gender pay equity. This brief looks at three legislative solutions that aim to close the gap by increasing pay transparency and pushing employers to set salaries to the position, not the history of the person doing the job….
Austerity as the New Normal: The Fiscal Politics of Retrenchment in San Jose, California
Across the world’s most industrialized economies, the financial crisis of 2007 caused a contraction of state budgets and stimulated attempts to reform debt-burdened governments. In the United States, a system of fiscal federalism meant this turn towards austerity took a uniquely fragmented and geographically diverse form. Drawing on case studies of recent urban restructuring, Cities under…
Structurally adjusting: Narratives of fiscal crisis in four US cities
The Great Recession unleashed a wave of fiscal stress in the USA, with austerity measures such as spending cuts, service reductions and privatisation predictably taking centre stage. Decades of federal withdrawal from urban policy and funding, combined with state retrenchment, have contributed to a landscape of urban fiscal stress exacerbated by the prolonged effects of…
Post-recession urban politics aren’t helping cities to become financially stable
The Great Recession officially ended in the United States in 2009, but the implications for city governments continue to unfold. Austerity measures implemented by cities well into 2013 left a legacy of service reductions and a backlog of infrastructure needs, a lurking national liability that has drawn attention to cities’ precarious fiscal situation. The long-term effects of the recession on city…