Zoning, accessory dwelling units, and family caregiving: issues, trends, and recommendations

This article explores the relationship between zoning regulations and co-residential family caregiving in the United States. It first provides an overview of U.S. housing policies, especially zoning. We then describe major changes in family structure and composition in the United States with their implications for caregiving and discuss how multigenerational housing options, particularly accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single-family homes, can help support family caregiving. After an overview of zoning policies and actions that inhibit ADU production, we document current trends, incorporating information from a small non-random study of ADU activity we conducted in 2004. Finally, we present recommendations for promoting more multigenerational housing as a supplement to other family support programs (e.g., dependent care assistance, family caregiver payments) and as a source of affordable, supportive housing for those families choosing co-residence as their eldercare solution.     

Changes in chemical and physical propertiesof stream water across an urban-rural gradient in western Georgia

The Middle Chattahoochee River Watershed in western Georgia is undergoing rapid urban development. Consequently, Georgia’s water quality is threatened by extensive development as well as other land uses such as grazing. Maintenance of stream water quality, as land development occurs, is critical for the protection of drinking water, biotic integrity, and stream morphology. A two-phase, watershed-scale study was established to develop relationships among land use and water quality within western Georgia. During phase 1 (year one), physio-chemical, biological and morphological measurements were taken within 16 sub-watersheds, ranging in size from 500–2500 ha. Nutrient and fecal coliform concentrations within watersheds with impervious surface > 5% often exceeded those in other watersheds during both baseflow and storm flow. Also, fecal coliform bacteria in more urbanized areas often exceeded the US EPA’s standard for recreational waters. During the second phase of the study, models will be tested and calibrated based on newly chosen watersheds.     

Survey design for detecting patches

In this paper, we are concerned with designing surveys for detecting patches of some exploitable resource, such as a shellfish stock. We take as our objective that, if there is one or more circular patches above some specified size, then the probability of detecting at least one patch should be high. We show how the required sampling intensity can be modified in the light of information about the likely number and size of patches. The results are applied to two surveys for detecting exploitable patches of cockles ( Cerastoderma edule ).     

Distinguishing the geographic levels and social dimensions of U.S. metropolitan segregation, 1960–2000

In this article, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, and life cycle and present a method for attributing segregation to nested geographic levels. We measured segregation for metropolitan America using the Theil index, which is additively decomposed into contributions of regional, metropolitan, center city-suburban, place, and tract segregation. This procedure distinguishes whether groups live apart because members cluster in different neighborhoods, communities, metropolitan areas, or regions. Substantively, we found that the segregation of blacks decreased considerably after 1960 largely because neighborhoods became more integrated, but the foreign born became more segregated largely because they concentrated in particular metropolitan areas. Class segregation increased between 1970 and 1990 mainly because the affluent increasingly clustered in specific metropolitan areas and in specific municipalities within metropolitan areas. The unmarried increasingly congregated in center cities. The main purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate this multilevel approach to studying segregation.     

"Nothing about me without me": leading the way to collaborative relationships with families

This article discusses the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse's CASA Safe Haven, an evidence-based, community-driven intervention program for children and families in child welfare whose lives have been adversely affected by substance abuse, and for staff in the agencies that work with them. CASA Safe Haven builds collaborative relationships that feature a blend of multidisciplinary teams that share responsibility for helping families; family group conferencing, in which families are equal and welcome participants in designing and driving a service plan; and the influence of family court to hold families and service providers accountable for progress. CASA Safe Haven is a framework for collaboration.     

Playing the Race Card in the Post-Willie Horton Era: The Impact of Racialized Code Words on Support for Punitive Crime Policy

To date, little is known about the precise impact of raciallycoded words and phrases. Instead, most of what we know aboutracialized messages comes from studies that focus on pictorialracial cues (for example, the infamous "Willie Horton" ad) oron messages with an extensive textual narrative that is lacedwith implicit racial cues. Because in a "post-Horton" era strategicuse of racially coded words will often be far more subtle thanthose explored in past studies, we investigate the power ofa single phrase believed by many to carry strong racial connotations:"inner city." We do so by embedding an experiment in a nationalsurvey of whites, where a random half of respondents was askedwhether they support spending money for prisons (versus antipovertyprograms) to lock up "violent criminals," while the other halfwas asked about "violent inner city criminals." Consistent withthe literature on issue framing, we find that whites’racial attitudes (for example, racial stereotypes) were muchmore important in shaping preferences for punitive policieswhen they receive the racially coded, "inner city" question.Our results demonstrate how easy it is to continue "playingthe race card" in the post–Willie Horton era, as wellas some of the limits of such framing effects among whites withmore positive racial attitudes.     

Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysisof voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election.Twenty-two percent of voters picked "moral values" from a listof "issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, morethan selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpretedthis single data point to conclude that moral values are anascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christiangroups with turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeatin 2000 into his three million–vote margin of victoryin 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values arecritical in informing political judgments, they represent personalcharacteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far morethan any discrete political issue. First by conflating moralsand values and then by further conflating characteristics andissues, the exit poll’s "issues" list distorted our understandingof the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flawsin the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s "most importantissue" question and explore the presumed rising electoral importanceof moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelminglyselected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moralvalues item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed asa discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that itsimportance to voters has not grown over time; and that whencontrolled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues listin predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll dataalso show that the voting behavior of conservative Christiansis relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarilyresponsible for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.     

Reply to comments

Conclusion The comments can be ordered on a linear scale according to the amount of disagreement with my position. Roemer has virtually no quarrels with my position, which is why I have virtually nothing to say on his comment. Van Parijs is also fairly close to my view, even if we disagree about the nature and importance of the non-intentional mechanisms that can sustain functional explanations. With Cohen the disagreement goes deeper, because he argues that we can dispense with knowledge of the mechanism altogether, though I accept his criticism of my analysis of exploitation. Next on the scale, still further come Berger and Offe. We share an interest in the same problems, such as the nature of the capitalist state and the problem of collective action, but we use quite different conceptual tools to handle them. I feel very far from Giddens's position, to the extent that it is at all intelligible to me. Social theory in his hand becomes extremely abstract, without acquiring the precision for which one is sometimes prepared to pay a high price in terms of level of abstraction. Though, at the most general level, I symphatize with his objections to the dualism of choice versus structure, my agreement gives way to puzzlement when I try to understand how his views could make a difference for the working social scientist.