Ohio Metropolitan Area Research Articles

Exploring the Neighborhood Contingency of Race Discrimination in Mortgage Lending in Columbus, Ohio

Discrimination in mortgage lending on the basis of race and the racial composition of neighborhoods has emerged as a hotly debated issue over the last several years. Part of the problem with the existing debate, however, is that the geographically contingent nature of discrimination has not been recognized. This paper argues that discrimination motivated by prejudice is contingent on the racial composition of neighborhoods—i.e., that lending institutions treat black mortgage applicants differently when buying homes in white neighborhoods than when buying homes in black neighborhoods. Using a sample of mortgage applicants drawn from the 1992 individual-level Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data for the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area, I found that the effect of being black on the conditional probability of having a loan application denied is much higher in all-white neighborhoods than in minority neighborhoods, especially for applicants making large loan requests. I also found that white applicants for small loans had a higher conditional denial probability in minority neighborhoods than in all-white neighborhoods. Moreover, both race-based and neighborhood-based discrimination appear not to exist until the interaction between race and neighborhood is accounted for. The implications of the findings are clear—we must consider the geographically contingent nature of prejudice and discrimination in order to understand the factors that produce and maintain extremely high levels of segregation in our metropolitan areas.

Fiber optic highways and network bridges: Planning for the telecommunications infrastructure needs of the city in the 21st century

In building the “National Information Infrastructure,” it is important to directly ask nonprofit, public, and private organizations about their telecommunication infrastructure needs. These organizations, after all, will be actually deciding which technologies will increase their productivity and competitiveness, enable them to reach new markets, and provide new and improved services. This study focuses on what organizations in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area felt were the most important telecommunications policy issues, their motivations and needs in introducing new telecommunications services, and the relative importance of telecommunications vis-a-vis other location factors in making their businesses and organizations efficient and competitive. Some of the interesting findings include: Out of 18 possible recommendations for action, organizations identified protecting privacy, reliability, and security of the network as the areas in most need of attention. Interestingly, the survey identified increasing the amount of competition, and knowing the trends in state and federal regulation as the least important items needing attention. This finding is robust for large, medium, and small companies as well as computer-intensive companies and companies which are self-described as having knowledge of telecommunications. Organizations in Central Ohio are embracing change. A full 66% of the stratified sample reported introducing new applications or services which uses some kind of telecommunications. Looking beneath this rosy picture, however, innovation is not uniform across all kinds of organizations. More often than not, the innovative organizations tended to be (a) larger organizations, (b) which have developed a strategic plan, (c) developed a telecommunications plan, (d) use a wide variety of information sources including university resources, (e) are oriented towards digital communications; and (f) have a large telecommunications budget as a percentage of total operating budgets. These results confirm both our interview results and conventional wisdom that larger organizations are the first to understand the implications of the new technologies and reap their benefits. Recommendations for these and other empirical findings are then proffered.

No-Opinion Filters and Attitude Measurement Reliability

Many survey researchers believe that the quality of answers to attitude questions may be improved by using no-opinion filters to remove those responses that are not based on true opinions. The authors investigate whether reliability, one aspect of data quality, is greater for filtered questions. Split-ballot experiments from two telephone surveys of the Akron, Ohio metropolitan area are used to estimate the effect of filtered questions on the reliability of items from Srole's anomia scale, Rosenberg's self-esteem scale, and a scale of attitudes toward lawyers. There is no evidence that filtered questions improve reliability, and in the case of self-esteem, reliability may be reduced on the filtered form.

A multiobjective vehicle routing problem with soft time windows: the case of a public library distribution system

Over the years, the central focus of vehicle routing problems has been the construction of minimum cost delivery routes, i.e. the creation of spatial utilities without considering temporal aspects. In many public service organizations, however, the minimum cost route without time windows can lead to poor customer service due to its ignorance of delivery deadlines. On the other hand, the most timely route may excessively lengthen vehicle travel distance, thereby increasing the total distribution cost. Consequently, the public distribution system calls for a new vehicle routing model that both considers time windows and analyzes the tradeoff between time and cost. This paper develops such a model and verifies its practical usefulness by applying it to the case of a public library distribution system in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area.