Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-80). / by Ayesha Malhotra. / M.C.P.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1974. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 264-282. / Ph.D.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2018. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 162-180). / With declining federal assistance for essential infrastructure upgrades, water and wastewater utilities have increasingly relied on customer revenue to fill funding gaps. This has led most recently to "water crises" in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit, where residents who cannot afford to pay increasing rates have been disconnected from water services altogether. Although utility disconnection is a common practice to collect unpaid revenue, the scale and duration of these shut-offs is unprecedented, and, in both cases, the result of concurrent urban fiscal and social crises. In the absence of legislation that secures the right to water for all American citizens, people addressing the problems have typically tried to identify sources of infrastructure funding that would be more equitable, or calculate levels of payment that are truly affordable. In light of these debates, this thesis asks whether processes of deliberation between the government and the public might serve a critical role in alleviating the problem. After investigating Baltimore's financial structures and exploring causes of confrontation between the public and the utility, this thesis suggests transparency and accountability reforms that enhance planning processes which involve citizens so Baltimore's DPW can move beyond the practice of just counting meters, to one of seeing and hearing customers. The thesis argues that, short of improving the infrastructure, the processes of citizen engagement, particularly via the collaboration of various state and utility departments, will help improve the technical and financial efficiency of the utility and create greater equity for customers through providing data and records that bolster various processes and programs, from account classification to collection to customer assistance to information about cognate programs such as affordable housing -- all of which will make it easier to assess and determine equity. The ultimate goal is to meet the financial and physical needs of water and wastewater utilities, while also addressing issues of equity, with a focus on deliberation and data collection that places an emphasis on process that leads to both desired outcomes. / by Haleemah N. Qureshi. / M.C.P.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1974. B.S. / Bibliography: leaves 47-48. / B.S.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 112-116). / In late 1990s and early 2000s Harlem, an affordable housing production "ecosystem" comprised of elected officials, city planners, civic advocates, builders, and financial institutions at the local, state, and national level supported a reliable, systematic pipeline of new affordable housing construction. The output of this pipeline included Harlem's first midrise affordable housing construction in thirty years in the late 1990s and, by the early 2000s, over 15,000 units of affordable housing construction starts per year. This thesis seeks to describe the creation and operation of this affordable housing production ecosystem within a framework of "push," "pull," and "safety net" factors influencing the allocation of capital and resources. "Push" factors consisted of the Community Reinvestment Act and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the evolution of which led private investment into low-income and minority communities such as Harlem. "Pull" factors included the deeply-experienced, closely-knit network of affordable housing professionals working in Harlem that had the skills and influence to execute projects; and a long-term, comprehensive community development framework, spearheaded by the public sector, that organized affordable housing efforts across the public, non-profit, and private sectors. / (cont.) "Safety net" factors included local subsidies, housing finance innovations, and the emergence of secondary markets, all of which decreased the risk and uncertainty of investment in pioneering Harlem affordable housing projects. This thesis will also assess the ecosystem in practice by examining key representative projects: Maple Plaza and Maple Court; The Renaissance; and Madison Park, Madison Court, and Madison Plaza. These projects roughly represent an initial stage, fully-formed stage, and further evolved stage of the affordable housing production ecosystem at work. Looking ahead, this thesis seeks to identify and assess future challenges that the ecosystem must address as the banking industry evolves, local market and policy conditions change, and secondary markets grow larger and more complex. Lastly, this thesis seeks to draw insights from the Harlem experience for affordable housing practitioners and for communities seeking to create their own affordable housing production ecosystems. / by Ben Dookchitra. / M.C.P.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 84-86). / This thesis seeks to understand how rental housing market dynamics-particularly landlord behavior, and the policies and players that shape it-contribute to the spatial clustering of households that participate in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program in New York City. Scholars have long been interested in understanding the reproduction of HCV holders into higher poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods in cities across the U.S. Most of the research to date has focused on the ways demand-side factors influence locational outcomes of voucher holders, specifically why they move, where and under what circumstances. However, to fully understand the residential patterns we see among voucher holders, we need to look beyond the demand-side barriers to understand the structural problems of the rental housing market and the voucher program itself. This thesis draws on in-depth interviews with landlords who participate and do not participate in the HCV program in New York City to better understand their experiences with the program and what drives their decision-making practices. Interviews were also conducted with realtors, public agency officials, landlord associations and a legal advocacy organization to better understand the role that intermediaries, public policies and city agencies play in influencing these decisions. Findings provide detailed accounts of the policies and agency practices landlords and realtors are responding to; they begin to explain how the structure of the rental housing market and voucher program itself lends to the reproduction of HCV clustering into high poverty neighborhoods. Ultimately, these findings indicate how deeply embedded our housing problems are within our economic system and the need to question the adequacy of market-driven housing policies. If we hope to realize a more socially just city, a rethinking of our rental housing policies is in order. / by Dara N. Yaskil. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74). / This study utilizes data from a national-level survey conducted by the Aspen Institute to examine the strategy of microenterprise assistance and microcredit provision in the United States. Four program groups are analyzed: training programs that do not offer loans, lending programs that serve primarily low income individuals, lending programs that serve primarily minorities, and lending programs that report unusually large average loan sizes. Within each of these groups, this study identifies significant subgroups that are making specific contributions to the strategy or employing it in unusual ways. The data confirm a diversification of the field that provides strong evidence against data aggregation and universal performance measures for microenterprise programs. The study concludes that there is a place for microenterprise programs in economic and community development in the US, but that the strategy may have a different role to play than originally anticipated. Policy implications and avenues for future micro- and macro-level research are discussed. / by Jennifer A. Langer. / M.C.P.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-224). / by Abel Valenzuela, Jr. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D. in Urban and Regional Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 296-314). / This dissertation examines how three Dominican hometown associations (HTAs) define, negotiate and practice transnational community development, by carefully analyzing the processes through which state, migrants and non-migrant actors engage in "messy" local projects. I identify two interrelated factors that explain the differences and commonalities in how the three organizations under study muddle through transnational community development processes: (1) the intra organizational dynamics that take shape as HTAs engage in cross border efforts, and (2) the types of project-based engagements between the associations, the state and other development actors. I also devised some stylized analytical categories that allow for a more refined analysis of how power is negotiated and exercised in cross-border development situations, and the ways in which the transnational relationships between diverse development actors are shaped. I argue that the more promising processes of transnational community development are those characterized by the coexistence of well articulated transnational cooperation networks that allow migrant and home country HTA chapters to contribute effectively to a common development agenda, together with empowered exchanges that enable the effective coproduction of projects while allowing local community leaders to play a protagonist role. More than a mechanistic cause and effect story, what the data confirms is a co-evolving relationship between the patterns of organizational politics and project-based engagements. By unpacking projects and processes, I also document the routines and tactics that HTAs employ to achieve their goals. In general, all the organizations studied have a tendency to seek answers to complex development issues through experimentation and problem-oriented strategies. Being able to experiment and troubleshoot, these organizations sidestep the strictures of policy and programmatic "monocropping", which, in turn, provides them with increased opportunities to learn from practical experience. That is, in the absence of formal structures, learning becomes a continuously evolving exercise. Nevertheless, learning opportunities come in many guises, so development trials can lead to important process innovations, but also costly mistakes. In light of this, the ability to identify and make the most out of unforeseen or unintended development consequences stemming from experimental projects becomes a fundamental skill for HTAs. / by Deepak Lamba-Nieves. / Ph. D. in Urban and Regional Studies

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2010. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-59). / This thesis examines two approaches to housing the urban poor in the city of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat - the Slum Networking Project, an attempt to institutionalize slum upgrading at the city-level and the Development Plan-Town Planning Scheme mechanism, an enabling approach similar to land readjustment that seeks to deliver serviced land to the urban land market and contains a provision to reserve some of this land for housing for economically weaker sections of society. Given the shifts in thinking in the past three decades around housing policies in developing countries, and particularly in India, from project-level approaches to enabling approaches that attempt to tackle housing shortages and substandard quality at a broader scale, this thesis asks the question: What is the appropriate role of cities in adequately housing their poor populations? In conjunction with this, additional questions explored include: What has been the history of housing strategies in India? What are some relatively successful efforts that are not national-level policies or small community-level projects, but instead use the scale of the city to address this pressing issue? What are the barriers to bringing these methods to scale?This thesis finds that while upgrading approaches may provide basic services to slum dwellers at the project level, attempts to take upgrading to scale must carefully consider the prevalence and implementation capacity of NGO or other intermediaries, the demand of residents for the services offered, the incentives for participation by private sector entities and the pace of urbanization in the city in question.With respect to the Town Planning Scheme mechanism, there has been considerable success in converting agricultural land to serviced urban land and in appropriated land for housing for the urban poor, but concerns remain about the overly centralized nature of the process, its openness to corruption, and its neglect to consider informal or tenants claims on the land to be developed. Finally, it is found that the mere designation and availability of urban land for housing for the poor is not sufficient to instigate housing production and more research is needed to determine appropriate policies to encourage affordable housing development on this land. / by Sunaree Marshall. / M.C.P.