During the 20th century, federally sanctioned housing "redlining" influenced the composition of neighborhoods in large cities across the country, including Washington, D.C. The term "redlining" came from the color-coded maps developed by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) (on which mortgage lending under the Federal…

Background and Context: U.S. schools rely heavily on property tax revenue. Local funding represents more than 45 percent of district-level revenues in the United States, and 60 percent of local funding comes from property taxes (Evans et al., 2019). This funding structure exacerbates educational inequalities between property-rich and property-poor…

The aim of this study is to examine whether the emotional intelligence of 5-6 years preschool children differs significantly according to the frequency of outdoor play. The sample consists of 208 children and their parents. The data were collected through Sullivan's Emotional Intelligence Scale for Children (EISC) and the Personal Information…

We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local institutions that constrain residential location and…

School desegregation and equitable access to educational opportunity takes alignment in the housing and education sectors. Racist housing policies and practices have systematically limited access to opportunity for generations of people of color, profoundly affecting their wealth, and perpetuating racial disparities in opportunity and well-being…

Moving can be a stressful and disruptive event for children, but the associations among the type of move, accompanying neighborhood characteristics, and children's development are less well understood, particularly for elementary school children. In the current dissertation, I developed and tested components of a conceptual model that uses…

This report examines the ways in which zoning laws affect housing and schooling opportunities in the Buffalo region. It begins with an examination of two communities--the Martin Luther King Park neighborhood in Buffalo and the suburban Village of East Aurora. In addition to the two Buffalo communities where discriminatory zoning has caused extreme…

This article traces the spatial history of New York City's geographic school subdistrict boundaries throughout the 20th century, exploring the historical relationship between race, space, and schooling in New York City and beyond. It seeks to both make the case for studying the spatial history of within-district education boundaries and put the…

Access to large data sets, including geographic information systems (GIS), provides teachers and students an opportunity to investigate policies of the past and their impact on people's lives. Students now have access to these digital resources through a variety of virtual, online collections, including the Library of Congress. Using a combination…

This dissertation explores how afterschool programming shaped New York City children's experiences from the 1930s-1960s. Centering the many organizations that planned activities for children, I explore the beliefs and institutional dynamics that determined what the work of afterschool involved. With purposes spanning education, recreation,…

This project aims to gain a new understanding of redlining and the nature of how human beings occupy their time. Redlining was/is government sanctioned discriminatory race-based exclusionary tactics in real estate. Occupational science and adult learning tenets support the idea that how we occupy our time matters; Black Americans could not buy…

After the 2008 housing loan crisis, many houses were foreclosed/abandoned in Michigan, and specifically Grand Rapids (GR). Our study provides a collaborative and scalable model for collecting parcel-level housing data, in a southeast GR neighborhood within 15 U.S. Census Blocks. Grand Valley State University Geography faculty and students…

Geography, as a social studies discipline, can be a powerful tool for students to explore how their social and political worlds have been built. In this sense, the discipline can be an affirmational, positive inquiry into how humans organize in and around spaces to form communities. It can also, however, be used to explore how discriminatory…

Studies document inequitable tobacco retailer density by neighborhood sociodemographics, but these findings may not be robust to different density measures. Policies to reduce density may be less equitable depending on how the presence of store types differs by neighborhood characteristics. We built a 2018 list of probable tobacco retailers in the…

Promise Neighborhoods attempt to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone's "cradle to college pipeline" model of coordinated and continuous child and family services for a single neighborhood. We analyze the 46 planning and 18 implementation grants to determine which factors these neighborhoods plan to address and compare these efforts with…