Housing for Families but Not for People: Federal Policy and Normative Family Ideals in Midcentury California

Abstract

Scholars have documented the harmful effects of urban redevelopment in the middle of the twentieth century with a particular focus on “redlining” to achieve racial segregation. This article considers another way that the state influenced social geography. In the middle of the twentieth century, some city planners argued for housing for single people and childless couples, but federal guidelines and funding specified that new housing be for nuclear, heterosexual families with children. Two historical cases demonstrate how planners attempted to create housing for alternative households but were unsuccessful. These two cases show that in addition to the documented effects of shaping the economic and racial landscapes of cities, federal housing policy sent strong signals to people about acceptable family formations by limiting the type and quantity of housing stock available. By examining how planners attempted to move forward with housing for all types of households, this article shows that federal family-oriented policies were not uncontested even if they were usually implemented. These cases highlight the complicated relationship among federal policies, normative culture, and the built environment. This article proposes that we should further investigate the ways in which the built environment has served as a mediator between the state, as exemplified by housing policies, and culture—normative ideals about the family—in a recursive sense; while federal policies both reflected and projected dominant cultural ideology concerning the primacy and importance of nuclear families, urban redevelopment projects presented this relationship in built form when redevelopment took the form of housing for families but not for single people or childless couples.     

Money talks: The role of finance in social work education and practice

Finance is crucial to every aspect of social care, yet has traditionally been neglected in social work training and practice. Despite the overwhelming importance of budgetary issues for the provision of social services, few workers understand how the system works or how their work is financed. The result is that they continue in ignorance, operating without an awareness of the financial context in which they work, lacking the financial skills to move successfully into management positions and failing to challenge a chaotic and anachronistic system which undermines local democracy as a deliberate tool of central control. Against this background, this paper highlights the importance of a financial overview for social work educators and practitioners, exploring the factors which contribute to the widespread inability to engage with financial issues and calling for a greater emphasis on this topic in social work training. In the process, it builds on a recently published introduction to local government finance which is designed specifically to counter the anti-financial tendencies inherent in social work, providing a detailed but easily comprehensible handbook for managers, practitioners and members of the general public alike. To place these issues in context, the paper begins with a personal account of working in a department experiencing financial difficulties.     

Opportunity,Context, and Action: Understanding the Divergent Strategies of Two Mexican Social Movement Coalitions in a Time of Tremendous Change

Evidence suggests collective action success is aided by organizations working in conjunction. Recent scholarship has refocused attention on what factors foster or impede coalition work. This article builds on the literature to show how the context in which coalitions emerge and act may be multiple and contradictory. Using data from extended field research, we examine two Mexican NGO coalitions to analyze how the intersection of national and local opportunity structures influenced their emergence and strategic action. We find that the impact of such influences may be contradictory. Democratization posed both threats and opportunities for the coalitions, providing impetus for their emergence, but limiting strategic choices as co-optation and neoliberalism undermined the opportunities created by democratization. We argue that the coalition members' interpretation of the local political context explains the divergent paths the two coalitions took over time.     

Does International Economic Integration Lead to a Cleaner Production in China?

In contrast to the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, the Trade‐Up Hypothesis holds that international integration helps improve firms' environmental performance in developing countries. Using firm‐level data from Shanghai, this article examines how international linkages, in the form of foreign direct investment or international trade, affect firms' environmental compliance and performance. We find that firms with international linkage via ownership exhibit better compliance with environmental regulation and emit less pollution than firms with no international linkage. We also find that firms with international linkage via market exposure are more likely to exhibit better compliance with environmental regulation than firms with no international linkage, but find no evidence that the former emit less pollution than the latter. This provides a piece of empirical evidence for the Trade‐Up Hypothesis.     

Quality of life,intelligence and mood

We investigated the relationship between quality of life (QOL), general ability and current mood in a sample of young men (N=269, mean age 24.9 years). Intelligence (verbal, spatial and mathematical) and technical ability were uncorrelated with QOL. Current mood such as pleasure, anger, sadness, boredom correlated firmly with QOL. The paper concludes that intelligence seems to be a variable of minor interest for QOL-studies.     

Norway: relevance of the social development model for post-War welfare policy

This article examines the extent to which social policies in post-War Norway fit three key features of the social development model, namely productivism, social investment and universalism. The historical review shows that the pursuit of a social development model changes in line with economic development and the expansion of the welfare state. It reveals that policies to promote full employment have been central to the country's economic and welfare policies throughout the post-War period. Nevertheless, the extent to which the productivist objective has been emphasised and implemented has fluctuated over time. In contrast to the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s witnessed a strengthening of the work ethic but also a continued commitment to de-commodification. The extent to which the combination of productivism and social investment is pursued is examined with reference to services for the insured and uninsured. The article concludes that the ways in which the social development perspective understands and defends universalism and social investment only partially applies to the mature Norwegian welfare state.     

Studying children in armed conflict: data production,social indicators and analysis

The authors seek to give an overview of ways in which social indicators relevant to research on children affected by armed conflict can be developed, and how such research can be carried out. Technical and methodological challenges involved in this pursuit are discussed. It is argued that data production must consider issues of definition and delineation of the phenomenon of war-affected children more actively than it does currently. An analytical approach is proposed, in which children’s characteristics in different situations, or in different stages of conflict, may be used as intakes to understanding how the social processes pertaining to life histories of children in armed conflict are created and reproduced.

The ecology of race and socioeconomic distress: infant and working-age mortality in Chicago

We examine the effects of education, unemployment, and racial segregation on age-, sex-, and race-specific mortality rates in racially defined Chicago community areas from 1989 to 1991. Community socioeconomic factors account for large observed areal variations in infant and working-age mortality, but especially working-age mortality for the black population. For black men, the mortality consequences of living in economically distressed communities are quite severe. Segregation effects on mortality are more modest and largely operate through neighborhood socioeconomic conditions, although some direct effects of segregation on mortality for blacks are apparent.     

Treatment of Uncertainty in Performance Assessments for Complex Systems

When viewed at a high level, performance assessments (PAs) for complex systems involve two types of uncertainty: stochastic uncertainty, which arises because the system under study can behave in many different ways, and subjective uncertainty, which arises from a lack of knowledge about quantities required within the computational implementation of the PA. Stochastic uncertainty is typically incorporated into a PA with an experimental design based on importance sampling and leads to the final results of the PA being expressed as a complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF). Subjective uncertainty is usually treated with Monte Carlo techniques and leads to a distribution of CCDFs. This presentation discusses the use of the Kaplan/Garrick ordered triple representation for risk in maintaining a distinction between stochastic and subjective uncertainty in PAs for complex systems. The topics discussed include (1) the definition of scenarios and the calculation of scenario probabilities and consequences, (2) the separation of subjective and stochastic uncertainties, (3) the construction of CCDFs required in comparisons with regulatory standards (e.g., 40 CFR Part 191, Subpart B for the disposal of radioactive waste), and (4) the performance of uncertainty and sensitivity studies. Results obtained in a preliminary PA for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of the MACCS reactor accident consequence analysis model, and the NUREG-1150 probabilistic risk assessments are used for illustration.