Chris Goodman

@cbgoodman.co

1678 Followers 557 Following

Professor & MPA Director @ NIU. Public finance & local govts. Special districts, mostly. 🚴 📍 Chicagoland 🌐 hello.cgoodman.com

The Duty to Serve Final Rule defines a “rural area” as: (i) a census tract outside of a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) as designated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB); or (ii) a census tract in an MSA as designated by OMB that is (A) Outside of the MSA’s Urbanized Areas as designated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) Code #1, and outside of tracts with a housing density of more than 64 housing units per square mile in USDA’s RUCA Code #2; or (B) A colonia census tract that does not satisfy paragraphs (i) or (ii)(A) of this definition (effective July 1, 2023). This DTS-specific definition of rural areas, which comes from 12 C.F.R. 1282.1, may lead to statistics which do not align with those reported by other sources. More information is available at https://www.fhfa.gov/programs/duty-to-serve.
MAJOR RESEARCH GRANTS GOVERNANCE AND DEMOCRACY IN THE LOS ANGELES REGION Our initiative on Governance and Democracy funds high-quality planning and research grants that: Add significantly to knowledge and understanding of governance and democracy issues in the Los Angeles region (Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Orange counties). Help influence policies and practices. Offer promise of helping to improve the lives of people and our communities. We expect researchers to seek opportunities to collaborate with community-based organizations and/or policymakers. We are open to all fields of study and disciplines that address governance and democracy in the Los Angeles region. SPECIAL FOUNDATION FOCUS: County Governance Reform The Foundation particularly invites proposals focused on Los Angeles County governance reform, as well as county governance reform across the broader LA region. Applicants can view the full RFP, including suggested topics, here. Planning grants are made for up to one year for up to $100,000. Research-to-action grants can be made for up to two years, with a third-year renewable that may be considered. The grant maximum is $250,000 per year. Depending on the nature of the research-to-action project, consideration may be given to a larger award. NEW!! The Haynes Foundation considers grant applications from public and private universities, university centers, and nonprofit 501(c)(3) organizations, including academic partnerships, whose work aligns with the Foundation’s mission and priority areas.
“A computer can never be held accountable; therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
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The third issue commonly encountered is the choice of which communities to use for comparison. Cities hoping to improve their own performance will want to choose communities toward whose ranks they aspire—communities with good reputations. Officials choosing comparison cities should be wary of the tendency to only choose others “as much like us as possible.” If officials were certain that all the good ideas were confined to cities “just like theirs,” then this might be a good selection strategy; however, many benchmarking experts consider heterogeneity across the members of the comparison group to be a factor likely to expand the number of important findings and increase interorganizational learning. Perhaps this suggests that a balanced perspective in the selection of comparison cities would be well advised—a strategy that includes some cities that share certain social, economic, and regional factors that could influence the difficulty of incoming workload and includes other cities simply because they are strong performers achieving good results.
Reusable shopping bag full of gummy bears, water bottles, and energy gels.
Zoning regulations drive rising regional housing costs and residential segregation in the United States. In response, governments are passing laws to override local regulations that limit housing density, despite entrenched opposition from incumbent residents. We study how residents living near housing permitted under one such law, Massachusetts’ Chapter 40B, are affected by and respond to this new, denser housing. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in proximity to 40B developments, we find that the average development does not affect these residents’ property values (95% CI: [–0.4%, 2.4%]). For larger developments that do decrease values, outmigration and political responses are small or non-existent.
In their early years, schools of public policy focused on federal policies and programs, as did APPAM and its journal, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. While this federal bias has diminished over time, it hasn't entirely gone away. This essay makes the case for more attention to local government policies and programs. It argues that studying local government policies and management can deliver unique value. First local governments perform essential, and salient functions that shape people's views of government performance. Second, local governments offer substantial variation in policy design, implementation, and context that researchers can study and from which they can draw lessons. Third, there is considerable demand from local governments for policy and management research, as they typically lack the resources to do much themselves. Fourth, research on local governments arguably has a better chance of influencing actual decision making. Finally, local governments offer uniquely rich administrative data that can provide insights on long-run impacts, heterogeneity, and spillovers.
Line graph, two lines (private employment index and local government employment index, starting January 2018 and ending March 2026), showing the convergence of the two indices, post-COVID.
One might think that wise policymakers would never provide cash incentives to nontradable firms. But incentives are often provided to business activities that are in part nontradable. Witness government subsidies for sports teams. If we’re trying to increase total local jobs, such subsidies make little sense.27 Any expanded jobs at the sports stadium in large part come from local residents spending more at the stadium. This leaves less local disposable income for other local goods and services. Jobs at the stadium and at nearby bars and restaurants may go up, but jobs in other neighborhoods’ restaurants and bars, and other local retailers, will go down.
Original iPod v. Original Mac.
iPod 4th gen v. iPod Nano 2nd gen
Hypercard vs Apple I
Choice between an Apple I and an iPhone XS
By 2020, 54% of Black Americans in the nation's largest metropolitan areas lived in suburbs, reflecting the ongoing “third Great Migration” and a profound restructuring of metropolitan space. This study develops a novel political development framework, racial spatial orders (RSO), which conceptualizes metropolitan and Black suburban development as the result of historically contingent configurations of institutions, policies, and racial ideologies that (re-) produce metropolitan inequalities and spatial differentiation. Through mechanisms of intercurrence, path dependency, and layering, RSOs explain the persistence of racialized spatial governance while illuminating the adaptive strategies of Black spatial agency, including incorporation, political mobilization, and placemaking. Using qualitative process tracing, the study identifies five RSOs to analyze the formation and differentiation of Black suburbs in Cook County, Illinois, from 1900 to 2020, and develops a socio-spatial typology that captures variation among Black suburbs, offering a comparative lens for analyzing racialized political development across metropolitan contexts.
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# Introduction Local governments in the U.S. are highly decentralized, dynamic, overlapping, and ever-changing. The most popular type of these are special districts, according to the U.S. Census of Governments, and many scholars have noted their proliferation over time, especially when compared to cities and counties. When we look closer at the changes to special districts we see that they are created, merged, or dissolved over time [@goodman2024] Since special districts are typically highly focused on a single purpose, they vary in size, scope, and policy domain. Their rules are defined by state law, the federal government, economics, technology, changes in other local governments, and entrepreneurs. This research addresses the particular nature of special districts by examining their demise by the top four functional areas: Fire Protection Districts, Housing & Community Development Districts, Natural Resource Districts, and Water Districts.
The first page of a syllabus created using Quarto rendered by Latex.
Map of the North Atlanta suburbs with regional job centers circled in Red.
Is there a differential recovery among local government sectors? Employment index for the local government (excluding education) and local education sectors (2020-01-01 = 100), CES National
Charlie Day Strings Meme.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the boosterism is seeing people give up their own agency, their training, to dwell in the enthusiasm machine. Our interaction with any LLM is optional, yet many of these conversations are treating AI as inevitable. Human choices over time create the conditions in which we live, work, maybe even occasionally thrive. Social sciences are, at their core, about studying these choices. What are the actual policy bundles available, how will we make decisions about our lives, and how are we materially or psychologically limited when we make choices? How do the choices at T1 impact the choices at T2?