ABSTRACT Specific Plans: An Implementation Tool for Downtown Revitalization A Specific Plan Proposal for Downtown Delano, California Emily Suzanne Henderson This study builds off the assumption that downtowns are socially and economically important to cities and the people who live, work, and visit them. For these reasons, many suffering downtowns are pursuing revitalization strategies. The strategies summarized in this paper represent mainstream revitalization techniques currently practiced by cities, planners, and developers. The strategies and techniques presented in this paper are supported by two case study specific plans. The case studies serve as model specific plans that were able to successfully utilize multiple of the proposed revitalization strategies. This paper demonstrates the potential for specific plans to be used as an implementation tool for downtown revitalization. These comprehensive documents are able to combine multiple regulatory processes in order to achieve the overarching goals of a city’s general plan and the detailed community goals generated through public outreach and participation. The case studies exhibit how cities have been able to complete revitalization projects in their downtowns through the use of specific plans. The proposed strategies and case study findings were used in the creation of a Specific Plan Proposal for Downtown Delano, California. In early 2008 the City of Delano underwent a community participation planning process to improve their downtown. The resulting Downtown Delano Concept Plan urged the City of Delano and the Community Development Department to produce a Downtown Specific Plan as soon as possible. The Downtown Delano Specific Plan Proposal contains a summary of the Concept Plan’s findings and recommendations. The plan begins with a vision statement and a set of goals created from community input received during public meetings. The plan includes proposed land uses for the downtown project area. A circulation concept is presented for the major downtown streets and thoroughfares. Form Based Codes include design guidelines for new development and redevelopment projects. The proposal concludes with project cost estimates and suggested financing mechanisms. The attached Downtown Delano Specific Plan Proposal is a guide for the future completion of a Specific Plan for Downtown Delano.

Lack of access to information on the cost and timeframe for the permitting and interconnection of distributed renewable energy generation facilities may hinder renewable energy capacity development. This issue is examined within the specific context of solar photovoltaic systems developed for participation in the Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program hosted by the Marin Energy Authority (MEA). A guide on the permitting and interconnection of solar PV generators for participation in the program was produced for the host agency. This guide seeks to assist property owners and solar developers in overcoming existing informational challenges. By providing an overview of the procedural requirements and process, as well as reference tools that highlights helpful resources and documents, the guide provides readers with an introductory tool for overcoming existing non-market barriers to participation in the MEA FIT program. In addition, a Recommendations Report has also been produced to provide the MEA with a discussion of existing procedural challenges faced by program participants. This report, which details the issues identified by those stakeholders that participated in the development of the guide, concludes with a series of recommended actions that the MEA may take to enhance the ability of potential FIT participants to accurately estimate and plan for the costs and timeframes associated with permitting a solar PV facility.

This research investigates the demographic and local government permit characteristics of communities with high levels of solar adoption in the San Diego Region. Utilizing a statistical model, this research illustrates which communities have been able to benefit from the current solar incentive programs in a robust market with an abundant solar resource. In San Diego, zip codes with large proportions of people over 65 have the highest correlation with high levels of residential solar adoption. This potentially illustrates that the life changes associated with retiring, including accumulated wealth, stable homeownership, and a fixed income, make residential solar systems accessible and appealing. Moving forward solar policy should expand to better facilitate installations for renters, sharing between neighbors, and clear pathways to retrofit older homes.

The urban waterfront areas of the United States have grown increasingly neglected and derelict due to changes in traditional industrial uses and their physical severance from the downtown core. A revived interest in urban living has brought downtown property values up, including waterfront areas, and has jump-started a movement towards waterfront revitalization. In an effort to understand the specific characteristics that make some waterfront revitalization projects more sustainable over time than others, this paper employed a case study approach. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, San Francisco, and Seattle’s Central Waterfront were selected for analysis based on three specific perspectives: recreation; development; and tourism. Using criteria determined from the literature review in conjunction with key player interviews and documentary evidence, the three case study waterfronts were analyzed for their ability to sustain revitalization. The results indicate that waterfronts must provide a balance and mix of uses, assimilate with the surrounding city, provide connections between attractions and with the city and region, continuously reinvent themselves, provide attractions that draw both locals and tourists, and have a clear identity. These findings, while quite broad, are intended to provide a foundation that will be relevant to any city undertaking new waterfront revitalization projects.

Over the past twenty years bicycle use as a mode of transportation has grown considerably in the United States. Other studies have examined the individual bicyclist’s risk in proportion to the growth in cycling across cities, a phenomenon referred to as ‘safety in numbers.’ This study expands from that research and examines the effect of cyclists on road safety for all road users. The study examines the roles of bicycle modal split, a city wide analysis, and bicycle infrastructure, a site based analysis, in road safety outcomes. For the city based analysis, twenty years of crash data in 12 California cities were analyzed over a 20 year period. This study primarily used census data and State wide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) data. This study concludes that as bicycle modal split increases in a city, the traffic fatalities tend to decrease and the relationship is an exponential function. The site based analysis focuses on the effects of installing a bicycle lane on a street and examined its effect on injury crashes. 20 sites in San Francisco, CA that had bike lanes installed on them were compared to 25 control group sites, also in San Francisco, that did not have any bike lanes or other significant changes. An Empirical Bayes method of analysis was done to test its effects and determined that the effects were statistically significant.

Climate migration has been identified as an urgent issue that will likely add greater complexity to existing climate change planning efforts (Black, 2011; Ahsan, 2011). Existing climate migration literature has primarily focused on international migration and the Global South, offering limited applicability to internal conditions in developed countries due to the issue’s high context dependency (Hoffman, 2020). Local and municipal planners have a responsibility to pursue evidence-based climate adaptation strategies (Mitchell, 2020). Yet, planners lack reliable data to forecast potential changes to regional migration based on repeated exposure to climate stressors. To date, research has been primarily qualitative in nature, leaving a need for quantitative, spatial studies to detect larger patterns in comparison to survey and interview-based findings (Piguet et al., 2018). Within developed countries, research that integrates environmental factors into typical migration estimation methods used by community development and economic planners is needed to determine the extent that rapid environment change may alter existing migration trends. In beginning to address this gap, this study tests the relationship between wildfire displacement events (i.e. evacuation events) and household out-migration rates amid a host of competing socioeconomic factors for all western US counties during years 2016-2019. Wildfire displacement data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) is combined with out-migration estimates from the IRS SOI program in a times series, then joined to cross-sectional census data on county demographics to form a panel dataset for investigation. Modeling results show an expected 1.5% decrease in household out-migration rates for county-years experiencing repeated wildfire displacement events in comparison to non-treatment county-years. These results suggest a potential lowering of mobility capacity or desire within impacted communities for areas experiencing repeated wildfire. Whether this is linked to impacts on economic resources, i.e. exaggeration of underlying vulnerabilities, or suppressed desire to move is unclear. Direct implications for planners depend on greater understanding of causality. The study suggests that climate-related wildfire migration in the US warrants continued research, especially with focus on equity implications of unequal access to migration as a method of climate adaptation.

The purpose of this study was to measure the impact of caregiver-student collaborative learning classes on an urban community. The study examined whether the self-efficacy of the caregivers increased with helping their children with school work due to the caregiver-student classes. The study also examined whether providing access to a resource not normally provided within this particular community led to increased self-efficacy within caregivers. The research questions that guided the study were as follows: How do collaborative caregiver-student classes that focus on collaborative strategies impact the self-efficacy of the caregivers in helping their children with school work? How does increasing access to educational services impact the self-efficacy of the caregivers who participate in collaborative caregiver-student classes? The researcher collected data through classroom observations, reflections from participants, and an initial focus group and closing individual interview. Classes were taught by a co-teacher selected by the researcher with the input of the principal. Four total sessions were held, three of which included the teaching of collaborative learning strategies, and the last of which was an individual interview. Overall, data indicated increased self-efficacy within caregivers. The caregiver roles within the neighborhood proved not to always be between an adult and child, but rather cousins and siblings who may have been close in age. Families within the neighborhood exchanged care in different ways according to their culture, work demands, and family dynamic. This program led to strengthened relationships between home and school, as well as enhanced self-efficacy and stronger relationships between caregivers and students.

How does transportation shape the cities we live in? This paper takes a close look at the practice of transit-oriented development to assess its implications for the future of urban areas. Through the design of a hypothetical light rail station in the suburb of Redmond, WA, this paper demonstrates how targeting sustainable development around transit has the potential to influence entire towns to “go green,” and proposes that, moving forward, cities be designed to maximize mobility, livability, and sustainability.

This doctoral thesis centres on children of immigrant background, who live and go to school in a non-urban community. The emphasis is on their narrated experience of a sense of belonging in and out of school. The study is based on interviews with 13 children at two different schools in two small-sized municipalities, and aimed at identifying the factors in their narratives that impact on their sense of belonging as well as the related conditions and means of action. The interviews were conversational and most of the children were interviewed on three occasions.   Each result chapter analyses a specific dilemmatic space related to a sense of belonging, such as peer relationships, trips to the “home country”, and managing in school. In particular, the emotions related to the children’s narrative positionings are analysed as well as the narrative resources employed in their narration.   The results show that their sense of belonging is produced in the interplay between the conditions of immigration and the socio-cultural conditions in the small-sized community. The children describe extensive relational and emotional work to enter into comradeship. Dimensions of being like and unlike gain importance and involve clothing, height and colour of skin. Several of the children describe how they cope with ‘racifying’ and other excluding processes of ‘othering’ on a daily basis. Trips to the home country emerge as central events in their lives and it is clear that a sense of belonging is connected to place attachment and anchored in embodied sensory emotions. Managing school is important to all the children but is attributed different meanings in the pursuit of the long-term goal of employment.   In conclusion, the children’s experiences are discussed in terms of two interwoven and sometimes separate projects emerging in the children's narratives: the Swedishness project and the family project. / Vad innebär det att vara barn med migrationsbakgrund om man bor och går i skolan på en mindre ort? Vad och hur berättar barnen om sin vardag och sina sociala relationer i och utanför skolan? Om dessa frågor handlar den här avhandlingen och det specifika forskningsintresset är känsla av tillhörighet i och utanför skolan. Denna studie bygger på intervjuer med barn med migrationsbakgrund som bor och går i skolan på två mindre orter i Sverige. De har alla erfarenhet av att antingen de själva eller någon av deras föräldrar har brutit upp från det sammanhang där de tidigare levt. Barnen har därmed ofta erfarenhet av att tillhörighet blir något som utmanas. Resultaten visar hur känsla av tillhörighet formas i samspelet mellan migrationens villkor och villkor på den mindre orten. Barnen beskriver ett omfattande relationellt och emotionellt arbete i berättelser om kamratrelationer, resor till hemlandet och om att klara skolan.   Barnens erfarenheter kan ses som relaterade till två tydliga projekt: svenskhetsprojektet och familjeprojektet. Dessa projekt vävs samman i barnens berättelser och svenskhetsprojektet kan både vara och inte vara en viktig del i ett familjeprojekt.

Success rates for students in developmental education are dismal. The greatest need for developmental education instruction occurs in mathematics, where high numbers of underprepared students generate great concern and the need for substantial changes in higher education institutions. With higher rates of students requiring remediation in the community colleges, the identification of effective policies and practices in developmental education is necessary to increase the achievement rates of developmental education students, and more specifically developmental mathematics students. This study explored the relationship between developmental mathematics student performance and developmental education programs of the Urban Community College District colleges. In addition, this study set out to identify institutional characteristics between colleges whose developmental mathematics students met state mandated academic outcomes at higher rates than their sister colleges. / text