Central City Governments Research Articles

How technological innovation impacts urban green economy efficiency in emerging economies: A case study of 278 Chinese cities

Clarifying the relationship and mechanism between technological innovation and the green economy efficiency (GEE) will improve the growth of the urban green economy for emerging economies. In the case of 278 Chinese prefecture cities, the data envelopment analysis game cross-efficiency model was used to measure the GEE between 2003 and 2017. In addition, the spatial econometric model was employed to explore the relationship and the transmission mechanism between technological innovation and the GEE from the perspectives of natural resources and urbanization. The heterogeneity of urban development was also brought into the analysis. The main results are as follows. (1) The GEE had positive spatial correlations. (2) Nationally, the intensive effect of technological innovation was significant and could considerably improve the GEE. (3) Due to the heterogeneity of urban development, there were large differences in the relationships and mechanisms between technological innovation and the GEE. Accordingly, that “unilateral” green economy construction efforts may not achieve ideal results. Therefore, neighboring cities should actively create green economy city cluster to achieve regionally common development. The eastern local governments could accelerate the transformation of the urban economy and promote the upgrading of green standards in industry through technological innovation. It is important for the central city governments to guide researchers to change the focus of their research, whereas the western region relies on attracting researchers to realize green economic development. Our results not only contribute to advancing the existing literature, but also are of considerable interest to policy makers and urban planners in emerging economies.

Review: The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980, by Aaron Shkuda, and The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, by Brian D. Goldstein

Aaron Shkuda The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 320 pp., 23 b/w illus. $45.00, ISBN 9780226334189 Brian D. Goldstein The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017, 400 pp., 40 b/w illus. $39.95, ISBN 9780674971509 Gentrification has been one of the most controversial and problematic urban developments of the past fifty years. It has benefited cash-strapped central-city governments in need of wealthier taxpayers and higher assessed property values but has proved a bane to lower-income residents who can no longer afford the rent in their gentrifying neighborhoods and feel increasingly out of place among the invading hordes of young professionals. Nowhere has this dilemma of gain and loss been more evident than in New York City. During the 1970s commentators bewailed New York's impending bankruptcy and rampant housing abandonment; the South Bronx was a burned-out ruin eliciting comparisons with Berlin at the close of World War II. Thirty years later, reporters told of the transformation of once-empty shells into upscale town houses, of hyperinflated housing values, and of an unabated influx of the rich and hip to Gotham's inner city. New York had seemingly quick-changed from a basket case to a treasure chest, with accompanying gains to city coffers and real estate moguls and losses to the displaced poor. In The Lofts of SoHo and The Roots of Urban Renaissance , Aaron Shkuda and Brian D. Goldstein explore the origins of this transformation in two famed New York neighborhoods. Shkuda addresses the early history of gentrification in Lower Manhattan's SoHo district, whereas Goldstein delves deeply into the recent history of Harlem. Although only seven miles apart on the small island of Manhattan, the two neighborhoods and their histories are quite different. Yet they are both part of the story of New York gentrification, and the authors ably describe their often difficult and complicated progress toward community revitalization. In the 1950s, as Shkuda relates, SoHo was a district of aging factory lofts that accommodated small manufacturing concerns employing many minority workers. Its multistory late nineteenth-century buildings …

America's Central Cities and the Location of Work: Can Cities Compete with Their Suburbs?

The 1990s were heralded as a comeback decade for America's central cities, but it is now clear that their experiences varied widely during this purported renaissance. In this article, we first examine the competitive position of central cities in the market for jobs by reviewing the current literature on cities and work. We then analyze correlations between city and suburban job growth rates and reexamine our previous research on cities in the 1990s using data from 1998 to 2001. We draw five practical lessons from this analysis. First, though central cities' recent achievements differ, economic distress persists. Second, employment growth in central cities depends on healthy regional employment growth. Third, economic development planning must reflect private companies' concern for profits. Fourth, economic success requires an educated workforce. Finally, central city governments should practice the habits of growth, without neglecting to plan for the long term. All municipalities, even historically dominant central cities, now have competitors.

Local Government Fiscal Structure and Metropolitan Consolidation

Local Government Fiscal Structure and Metropolitan Consolidation Stephen Calabrese, Glenn Cassidy, and Dennis Epple The United States has an enormous number of local governments. Even when the focus is limited to municipalities, as it is in this paper, the number is impressive. There were 19,372 municipalities in the United States in 1997.1 Most large metropolitan areas in the United States are divided into a hundred or more distinct municipalities. Even metropolitan areas of moderate size typically have fifty or more distinct municipalities. For much of the twentieth century, there appears to have been a relatively broad consensus reaching across disciplines that this multiplicity of local governments was undesirable—a manifestation of disorganization and a prescription for inefficiency in the provision of public services.2 This consensus spawned a metropolitan government movement that met with little success and much resistance. At about the same time the political movement for metropolitan government was beginning to run out of steam, the intellectual underpinnings also came under challenge—thanks largely to the work of Tiebout, and Ostrom, Tiebout, and Warren.3 The trade-offs between the benefits of decentralized choice and the potential gains from coordination have been the subject of debate ever since. The lack of popular support for consolidation of metropolitan governments is mirrored in data affirming the permanence of municipalities. Municipal [End Page 1] boundaries, once drawn, are highly resistant to change. Vigdor reports that in Massachusetts, no new cities or towns have been created since 1920 and none deleted since 1938.4 In Pennsylvania between 1980 and 1990, there were only eighteen annexations or mergers, involving less than one square mile and fewer than 500 persons.5 Using data from the decennial boundary and annexation surveys of the 1970 and 1980 Census, Epple and Romer find that 98 percent of boundary changes are those in which an existing municipality adds previously unincorporated land.6 Annexation of one municipality by another and mergers of municipalities have become increasingly rare. Nationwide there were an average of fewer than ten such consolidations per year in the decade of the 1970s. Strong advocates of metropolitan consolidation remain, but they acknowledge that success is unlikely.7 While efforts to promote metropolitan consolidation have largely disappeared, the outcomes that emerge under the current system of highly decentralized local government garner widespread criticism. Broadly, there are two issues. One centers on the distributional consequences of the tendency toward income stratification observed in U.S. metropolitan areas. One consequence is unequal quality of public services across municipalities, with quality inversely related to income. The other concern is that independently chosen tax and expenditures lead to large distortions at the metropolitan level, when central city governments engage in taxation for both redistribution and provision of public services. These issues are well articulated by Mieszkowski and Mills. They note the practical difficulties of maintaining a separation between the allocatable and distributive activities of governments. They point to the inefficiencies associated with redistributive taxation in the central city, and they offer the judgment that "tax and government service level considerations inhibit central city redevelopment."8 Recent years have witnessed growth of a body of research in political economy seeking to characterize equilibrium when both the populations of local jurisdictions and their policies are endogenous.9 In these models, policy outcomes within jurisdictions are determined by "democratic federalism," to use [End Page 2] the terminology coined by Inman and Rubinfeld; policies are chosen by simple majority rule.10 Because of the well-known difficulties with characterizing equilibrium with multidimensional policy choices, each of these papers focuses on a unidimensional policy space.11 Thus these models are unable to capture the tensions between public service provision and redistribution, and the associated impacts on housing markets, household location, and welfare that are at the center of the debate about the consequences of metropolitan fiscal decentralization. Our contribution is to analyze metropolitan equilibrium when localities have multiple tax instruments and can engage in both public service and redis-tributive expenditures. Moreover, when voting, households consider the impact that these public policy choices have on housing prices and the population of the jurisdiction in which they reside. We do this by considering a class...

Why Do The Poor Live In Cities?

More than 17 percent of households in American central cities live in poverty; in American suburbs, just 7.4 percent of households live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to be the result of wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap (the traditional urban economics explanation of urban poverty). Instead, the urbanization of poverty appears to be the result of better access to public transportation in central cities, and central city governments favoring the poor (relative to suburban governments).

Market power of large cities and policy differences in metropolitan areas

When a single city, the ‘central city’, has a large share of the metropolis population, it will influence housing prices in other, smaller cities, the ‘suburbs’. This market power leads to differences in government policy and property values between the central city and suburbs even when residents and amenities in the two regions are identical. When the central city's government is controlled by property-owning residents, its property tax rate exceeds the rate in the suburbs. The central city will also have lower property values than suburbs.

Rebudgeting: The Serial Nature of Municipal Budgetary Processes

What role do midyear budget adjustments play in municipal governments? In a survey of officials from central city governments, John P. Forrester and Daniel R. Mullins found to be common and signif cantfactors in the budgeting processes of many cities. While often regarded by officials as merely an extension of the normal budgetary process, Forrester and Mullins find the rebudgeting process to be less visible and more technically driven, giving a greater role to administrators than to either the public or the legislature. They also find that the process impacts differently on different services. authors discuss the political and policy making implications of rebudgeting and the needfor more analyses of the conditions under which it occurs. The term 'annual' is unfortunate. It has distracted attention from the real issue to a defense or criticism of the year as a specific unit of measure for budgetary purposes (Sundleson, 1935, p. 253).

Promoting Economic Development

The authors use survey and census data to compare the economic development policies of central cities, suburbs, and nonmetropolitan communities. Regional competition is strongly associated with the number of development programs adopted by all three types of communities, but several important differences exist among them. Central-city governments are most active in promoting development, with population size exerting a positive influence on development activities. For suburbs, the poverty rate is positively related to development effort. In nonmetropolitan communities, involvement by the city government in economic development exhibits a strong positive relationship with the number of development programs adopted.

COMMUTING AS AN ELEMENT OF LOCAL POPULATION MOBILITY

Commuting is defined as journeys to work or study that cross the administrative boundaries of minor civil divisions. This poses problems in the statistical analysis of some metropolitan areas, such as Baku, where large suburban territories are administratively under the jurisdiction of the central city government. Time series on commuting exist for trips from rural to urban areas, and help distinguish oblasts and major economic regions of varying levels of rural population mobility. This mobility is highest around large cities that exert a strong pull (Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Khar'kov, L'vov). Rural population mobility is low in Siberia and Kazakhstan, which have a sparse network of industrial centers and low rural population density, and in Central Asia, where the indigenous population is distinguished by low social mobility. Census data for commuting in 1970 yield a typology of cities in terms of the character of commuting. Commuting distances and means of transportation are analyzed for different city size classes.

The Impact of Suburban Population Growth on Central City Service Functions

The present study investigates the relationship between suburban population growth and service functions performed in central cities of 168 SMSAs. While most sociologists acknowledge that the suburban population influences the service structure of central cities, the degree of that influence appears to have been underestimated. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis demonstrate that the suburban population has a large impact on central city retail trade, wholesale trade, business and repair services, and public servicesprovided by central city governments. More detailed examination of the public sector shows that the suburban population, in general, and the commuting population, in particular, exerts strong effects on police, fire, highway, sanitation, recreation, and general administrative functions in the central cities. The impact of the suburban population on these central city public services remains strong when controls such as central city size and age, annexation, per capita income of cent...