Cities Of Similar Size Research Articles

Housing for Blacks: A Challenge for Kansas City

City planners, neighborhood groups and financial institutions, and other business partners need to develop a comprehensive plan to increase affordable housing for minorities and to integrate neighborhoods. Kansas City, Missouri is a city with a high potential for good housing for all of its citizens, but adequate housing continues to elude many of its black residents. Compared to other U.S. cities of similar size, Kansas City has good housing stock, but a large number of black people are suffering from a shortage of low rent housing. In addition, among Kansas Citians, blacks have the lowest quality housing stock. Two reasons for the deficit in housing for black Americans in Kansas City are demolitions among the low-rent housing stock and discrimination in housing rentals.

The quality of services in company towns: sanitation in coal towns during the 1920s.

Coal company towns were infamous, being described as exploitive, and charged with providing low-quality services, like sanitation. Yet, the quality of sanitation in coal towns in 1922 appears similar to that in cities of similar size, although lagging behind that in major cities. Within the coal region, company and independent towns provided similar levels of sanitation. The quality of sanitation in company towns varied in response to cost-related factors, including town age, population, and natural location. Meanwhile, workers were mobile and demanded compensating increases in wage rates in towns with lower-quality sanitation and higher rents.

Conflict, Cooperation, and Separation of Powers in City Government

: The conflict that typifies urban politics has been considered a central characteristic of the relationship among city government officials as well. This need not be the case. If a distinction is made between the total political process in cities and the governmental process in cities, conflict does not necessarily dominate the latter. Interactions among officials may be characterized not simply by the absence of conflict but by the presence of positive relations based on cooperation. Although forms of government have been differentiated in their capacity to handle conflict, they also differ in the generation of conflict or cooperation. Cities with separation of powers engender conflict among officials, whereas cities without separation of powers possess the conditions under which cooperation is possible. Differences in the nature of interactions among officials cannot be explained entirely by the characteristics of cities, which tend to use one form of government or the other. Observations from selected pairs of moderately large cities of similar size and demographic features, but with different forms of government, support this contention. The cooperative pattern, common in council-manager cities, is a second model of the governmental process that may be used along with the conflictual pattern.

Criteria for Evaluating School Desegregation in Milwaukee

Since 1976, the Milwaukee School District has been under a court order to desegregate its schools. The original ruling,1 handed down on January 19, 1976, by U. S. District Judge John Reynolds, required the school district to desegregate one-third of its schools for each of the school years 1977-78, 1978-79, 1979-80. The Milwaukee Public School Board appealed this court order all the way to the United States Supreme Court. A final out-of-court settlement to this appeal was reached on May 4, 1979. The settlement required that by September 1979 all teaching staffs in the city's schools be desegregated and that 75 percent of the pupils be enrolled in desegregated schools. (The court stipulated that a school is desegregated with a student population 25 percent to 60 percent black, and a faculty that is 16.6 percent minority plus-or-minus 10 percent.) For the school years 1979-80 and 1980-81, 80 percent of Milwaukee's school children were attending schools that met the desegregation guidelines. all obvious indications, the Milwaukee plan has been considered a success. A 1981 Newsweek article reported, By presenting students with a choice, not just a court order, Milwaukee has managed to achieve what bigger cities no longer even dream of. It has desegregated most of its schools through largely voluntary means, and avoided the white flight that usually follows on the heels of forced busing.2 School officials in Milwaukee have claimed that the city is one of the few large northern industrial cities that has desegregated its schools without the type of violence that characterized desegregation in cities of similar size where desegregation efforts created turmoil that made national headlines. While

Congressional Parochialism: Another Data Point

Critics of Congress continue to decry the institution's parochialism; legislators are town boys, isolated or insulated from national concerns. Rieselbach's previous paper tested two assumptions that underlie these criticisms: (1) that rural America is overrepresented in Congress, and (2) that representatives of such communities are more provincial in their outlook. Data on the 90th House of Representatives (1967-1968) disconfirmed the first assumption but sustained the second: House members born in rural areas were, in fact, underrepresented, but those who won seats were more parochial (as measured by support for the conservative coalition) in their legislative voting. Here we retest these assumptions for the 95th Congress (1977-1978), using the same methods. As before, we compare the proportion of legislators from birthplaces of a given size with the proportion of the national population residing in cities of similar size in the census year (1930) nearest the average date of birth for the lawmakers. Once again, the conclusion is clear: rural areas were underrepresented in the House; all other areas were overrepresented. Forty-four percent of the 1930 population resided in rural regions, but only 19 percent of the legislators were born there; each other community type provided a greater proportion of House members than of the population. The data on the second hypothesis (see Table 1) suggest that the link between birthplace and conservative voting remained, but was somewhat attenuated in the 95th Congress. Democrats born in rural areas and small towns supported the conservative coalition more frequently, but the distance between them and their colleagues born in more urban areas decreased. For Republicans, the tendency was in the same direction, with

Environmental Effects Upon the Mobility of Older People

This is a study of environmental determinants of mobility among older people, comparing mobility behaviors and attitudes among residents of two cities of similar size but markedly different in physical characteristics including size, shape, topography and climate, as well as distribution of facilities and services. Respondents were representative samples of 709 retired people in San Antonio, Texas, and 899 residents of San Francisco, California, aged 65 and older. Predictions of behavior and attitude based upon similarities and differences in environmental variables were confirmed. The data support the conclusion that urban environments strongly affect the mobility of their older residents and suggest that the design of cities can have a major and beneficial effect upon the quality of life in later years.

Simplified Traffic Forecasting Process for Small Cities

Urban transportation studies cost roughly 1 dollar/capita with approximately 50% of the expenditures consumed in the collection of data on travel habits. Many small cities, those 50 000 population and under, have limited budgets for data collection and analysis. In addition, the conventional urban transportation planning process is not only expensive but may be out of scale in terms of the order of magnitude of transportation decision-making in small cities.The simplified traffic forecasting process suggested in this paper requires a minimum amount of data collection and relies to some extent on travel parameters taken from cities of similar size and characteristics. Thus, the problem of costly home-interview surveys is avoided in addition to the fact that the model can be quickly updated by hand. The simplified model is based on the premise that travel time does not affect trip distribution to any extent due to the fact that significant differences in travel times between short and long trips are not perceived by the trip maker. The model was applied to the town of Fort McMurray which is the residential and operations base for the development of Alberta's Tar Sands. Comparisons of model output with traffic counts show that the simplified model gives reliable results.

Riots and Welfare: Are They Related?

This paper examines the impact of riots on the percentage increase in financial support of welfare programs at the local level. Data on 23 riot cities are compared to 20 nonriot cities of similar size to determine if the percent change in the combined city and state expenditures on welfare were different. Analysis revealed riot cities had larger budgetary increases in welfare the year following their riot; whereas, nonriot cities had no such pattern of expansion. While the welfare system was not the object of attack in the riots, more relief was given because it is believed to be the service which could be expanded most easily by local municipal officials without threatening other interest groups.

Factors Affecting Social Acceptance of High-School Students

S OCIAL PSYCHOLOGISTS have long recognized that acceptance by his associates is fundamental in the integration of an individual's personality. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that a primary goal of education by parents and teachers is to make the individual acceptable to, and accepted by, the persons with whom he associates in childhood and in adulthood. Awareness of these facts, developed over a number of years as a teacher, counselor, and parent, motivated the writer to undertake some research to ascertain what factors affect the social acceptance or nonacceptance of adolescents. Since, at the time of undertaking the research, the writer was director of counseling services in the Anderson, Indiana, High School, it seemed appropriate that he make a study of this kind in his own school. Anderson High School has an enrolment of twentyfive hundred students in Grades IXXII. It is fed by four city junior high schools and by ten elementary schools in four townships. Principal among these ten are the five schools in Anderson Township. Two of these five are populated largely by children from fashionable residential sections in which the finest homes in the community are to be found. The high-school enrolment consists of 70 per cent city residents and 30 per cent transfer students from the ten outlying schools. Anderson is an industrial center with a predominantly Protestant, white, native-born population of fiftyfive thousand in the city proper and fifteen thousand living outside the city limits in Anderson Township. In kind and number of churches, religious groups, and other types of associations, organizations, and clubs, Anderson is typical of cities of similar size. Most persons depend on the industries of the city as a source of livelihood. Of those persons living outside the city, few are true agricultural families, but more than 50 per cent supplement their income by agricultural means.

The University of Nebraska Art Collection

A Lively interest in art has been maintained continuously in Nebraska since it became a state in 1867. In Lincoln, the state capital, art organizations have flourished and cooperated with each other more effectively than in most cities of similar size. One such organization, the Haydon Art Club, founded in 1888, started immediately to sponsor annual art exhibitions.

The functions of research bureaus in city school systems

The year 1912 marked the beginning of this important movement in education. Baltimore in that year established a Bureau of Statistics to make administrative studies at the request of the board of education or the superintendent. At that time there was much criticism of Baltimore's arithmetic program; the children were not, it was alleged, attaining as they should in this subject. Consequently, the first study made by a city school bureau of research in the United States had as its purpose the showing of what Baltimore schools were doing in arithmetic. This study was followed by one comparing the Baltimore course of study in arithmetic with the courses in use in the ten or twelve other cities of similar size. Thus began an educational movement which has had significant and far-reaching influence upon educational progress in city school systems. Research bureaus in city school systems have developed rapidly. This development has been the result of felt needs on the part of the administrators of city school systems and of various movements in education that have characterized American education during the last quarter century. As city school systems became more and more complex, especially in large and medium-sized cities, superintendents of schools found themselves increasingly unable to collect, compile, and interpret data about the numerous phases of their respective school systems. As the scientific movement in education developed, superintendents recognized that scientific instruments were being made available whereby decisions, policies, and plans need not be based upon mere opinion, or trial and error, but might be made more intelligently upon the basis of scientific investigations and facts. These realizations brought superintendents and boards of education to establish agencies to carry on these functions. Bureaus of research have been established to meet real needs. These needs have been as varied as the systems which they have been created to serve are varied. Yet, one function has stood out through

The heart disease situation in Cincinnati

The heart disease situation in Cincinnati

The Individuality of Public Utilities, Notably Water Works

The fact that there has been a popular tendency in the past to measure the reasonableness of rates of one public utility plant, or even to fix rates for a new plant, by a comparison of those in force in other cities seems to warrant a little consideration of the differences between various plants of like kind and between the conditions under which they are constructed and operated. These differences seem generally far from being fully appreciated except by the comparatively few who have had something to do with a considerable number of such properties and had occasion to make comparison between them. The popular comparison of rates of different water or other utility plants appears to be merely a superficial one, due to the lack of knowledge and appreciation of the great differences that may exist even in cities of similar size. Certain water works franchises have specified that the rates to be charged by the grantees under those franchises should not exceed the average of those in certain other cities named therein. Those who have had experience in construction and valuation of railroad property, and doubtless others as well, are aware of the existence of a wide range of values per mile of roadbed or track, which are the common bases of comparison of different roads. The heavier types of construction on heavy traffic roads is by no means the only cause of the differences in costs or values per mile. Construction difficulties may be relatively so serious in the case of a so-called small road, or light traffic road, as to offset the extra expenses for stiffer construction in the cases of certain higher class lines. These relative construction difficulties may, in other cases, operate to augment, instead of to offset, the differences in cost that are due merely to construction standards. Topography and geology of the country traversed are important factors in the results.