Research by Author & Topic

Publications by G. Thomas Kingsley on Neighborhoods/Community Building

This brief, a companion to the Housing in the Nation's Capital 2009 report, describes the impact of the foreclosure crisis on the Washington metropolitan region, examining the level and trends of foreclosures, outlining potential secondary effects for families and neighborhoods, and looking towards the future of the region's housing market. It concludes with policy implications in four areas: foreclosure prevention, neighborhood stabilization, recovery assistance for displaced households, and services for children in foreclosed homes.

This is the seventh in a series of annual reports about housing in the Washington metropolitan region. It assembles and analyzes the most current data on housing conditions in the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs. This year's report focuses on the impact of the foreclosure crisis on the region, examining the level and trends of foreclosures, outlining potential secondary effects for families and neighborhoods, and looking towards the future of the region's housing market. It concludes with policy implications in four areas: foreclosure prevention, neighborhood stabilization, recovery assistance for displaced households, and services for children in foreclosed homes.

Baltimore participated in a 2004 National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) pilot project to enhance local capacity to manage land markets through innovative use of parcel-level information. The city already had a program in place to acquire and re-market abandoned properties. The NNIP project focused on helping officials use the program-generated property information for more effective land management. New information systems were created to manage the complex business rules, to store the property data, and to provide staff with desktop access to information. An integrated disposition system reduced staff time, improved performance, and enhanced the city's service to its business partners.

Neighborhoods with high concentrations of foreclosures and increasing vacancy rates are likely to generate substantial unanticipated costs for resident families and jurisdictions. Any formula distributing resources to help cover those costs must be carefully constructed if it is to be equitable. In this testimony, Kingsley makes six points related to that goal.

During the 1990s, numerous public policy changes occurred that could have improved the health of mothers and infants in low-income neighborhoods. This paper examines trends in key maternal and child health indicators, using neighborhood level vital statistics and census data. Trends in four key indicators (births to teenagers; late prenatal care; low birthweight; and infant mortality) over the l990s are contrasted between high poverty and other neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Marion County, Indiana; and Oakland, California. In all four metropolitan areas, trends in high poverty neighborhoods were more favorable than in other neighborhoods. Still, great disparities between high poverty and other neighborhoods remain. Experience from the l990s suggests that a combination of several intensive interventions can be effective at reducing disparities. (Howell, Embry, Pettit, Kathryn and Kingsley, Thomas. July/August 2005. "Trends in Maternal and Infant Health in Poor Urban Neighborhoods: Good News from the 1990s but Challenges Remain." Public Health Reports 120(4):409-417.)

The Urban Institute's Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities has just released two major reviews of research on the HOPE VI experience to date that offer five fundamental lessons for the next generation of public housing revitalization. The research record strongly supports continuing a flexible investment initiative like HOPE VI. But HOPE VI (or a successor) can and should be substantially strengthened based on lessons learned to date. In addition, the HOPE VI experience has broader applicability to the public housing program as a whole.

The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a collaborative effort to use local information in community building and policymaking. The task of building local data systems is given to a local intermediary in each of the 19 NNIP partnership cities. The partners obtain data from a variety of agencies, geocode it to the neighborhood level, and make it available to users. In the first seven years of the NNIP, the partners have learned several important lessons. First, data at the local (neighborhood) level are essential for developing public policy. Second, advances in technology over the past decade have made it possible to maintain these detailed local databases at relatively low cost. Third, there are a variety of types of local organizations that can effectively serve as the local partner, from academia to government, community foundations, or other community-based nonprofits. Fourth, as with most endeavors, good leadership is critical to successfully building the bridges across multiple agencies. Finally, a major lesson from the NNIP experience is that providing data is only the first step. Data must be used in ways that are visible, useful, and responsive to the community if the project is to retain local support and enthusiasm. (Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 9(3), 2003.)

The Urban Institute has pilot tested "community scorecards" consisting of a standard set of key indicators, ranging from economics to education to accessibility, that can be used for virtually any U.S. city. For the pilot studies described in this report, Fannie Mae Partnership Offices used the scorecards to evaluate 124 indicators in three pilot cities. This report explains the scorecard concept, discusses how the idea was extended and applied for pilot testing, and draws conclusions about how Fannie Mae might best follow up on what has been learned.

In the 1990s, a number of local institutions built self-sustaining information systems with integrated and recurrently updated data on neighborhood conditions in their cities. With the theme of “democratizing information,” they facilitate the direct practical use of the data by city and community leaders and use information to strengthen groups in distressed urban neighborhoods. Twelve of them have joined with the Urban Institute to form the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) to spread relevant knowledge and capabilities in this field. This monograph tells the stories of the founding partners in NNIP— philosophy, system building methods, application, costs—as a guide to institutions seeking to develop similar capacities in other cities.