MIT Architecture

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Obama administration’s urban policy create an opportunity to link community development with health in new and powerful ways. New federal programs, such as the Affordable Care Act’s Community Transformation Grants, seek to prevent death and disability through policy, environmental, programmatic, and infrastructure changes. But fragmented congressional jurisdiction and budget “scoring” rules pose challenges to needed reform.

Written during the Fall 2008 Presidential campaign season, this essay explains why the conventional way of thinking about and pursuing "urban policy" is myopic and broken--and what America should do instead. What would smarter "place policy" look like, and where should we start?

Complexity, division, mistrust, and "process paralysis" can thwart leaders and others when they tackle local challenges. In Democracy as Problem Solving, Xavier de Souza Briggs shows how civic capacity—the capacity to create and sustain smart collective action—can be developed and used. In an era of sharp debate over the conditions under which democracy can develop while broadening participation and building community, Briggs argues that understanding and building civic capacity is crucial for strengthening governance and changing the state of the world in the process.

A group of the nation’s leading scholars and experts on housing and urban policy respond to The Atlantic’s “American Murder Mystery.”

Improving locational outcomes emerged as a major policy hope for the nation's largest low-income housing program over the past two decades, but a host of supply and demand-side barriers confront rental voucher users, leading to heated debate over the importance of choice versus constraint. In this context, we examine the Moving to Opportunity experiment's first decade, using a mixed-method approach.

Moving to Opportunity tackles one of America's most enduring dilemmas: the great, unresolved question of how to overcome persistent ghetto poverty. Launched in 1994, the MTO program took a largely untested approach: helping families move from high-poverty, inner-city public housing to low-poverty neighborhoods, some in the suburbs.

Economic Development Finance is a comprehensive and in-depth presentation of private, public, and community financial institutions, policies and methods for financing local and regional economic development projects. The treatment of policies and program models emphasizes their applications and impact, key design and management issues, and best practices.

J. Phillip Thompson III, an insider in the Dinkins administration, provides the first in-depth look at how the black mayors of America's major cities achieve social change. Black constituents naturally look to black mayors to effect great change for the poor, but the reality of the situation is complicated. Thompson argues that African-American mayors, legislators, and political activists need to more effectively challenge opinions and public policies supported by the white public and encourage greater political inclusion and open political discourse within black communities.