Because the use of tax abatements to foster local economic development is widespread despite uncertainty about their effectiveness, is it possible to allocate abatements in a way that increases the likelihood that tangible benefits will result? This research suggests that few municipalities place conditions on abatements, most never evaluate the performance of firms granted abatements, and abatement requests are seldom or never rejected. The project focuses on the implementation of tax abatements, explores the use of tax abatements over a relatively long time period, and makes explicit policy recommendations for more effective policy implementation. Changes in state enabling legislation targeting abatements to distressed areas and adding requirements for evaluation may produce more effective use of abatements at the local level.
In recent years, a cavalcade of books has sought to reflect and speculate on the post-industrial fate of Detroit. The city and its body politic have stirred a seemingly endless stream of inquiry from urban scholars. Broad and complicated narratives dominate the discourse: abandonment and disinvestment, poor race relations and a high degree of regional fragmentation, political scandal, and financial bankruptcy. June Manning Thomas's Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit offers a valuable historical account and critical analysis of the city planning process in Detroit, and John Gallagher's Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention presents an inspired collection of "best practices" that can inform the way scholars, practitioners, and students view opportunity and transformation in the Motor City.Thomas's book, originally published in 1997 and now re-released in paperback, charts the evolution of urban planning against the backdrop of Detroit's redevelopment efforts in a rapidly deindustrializing economy, with a focus on race relations. The text is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on urban and regional planning. Thomas examines both process and outcomes through an evaluation of planning documents, including city plans for 1944, 1947, and 1951. Through her review, she describes the technocratic framework in which planners operated and the consequences that such a limited purview wrought for Detroit's African American community, in particular widespread relocation and displacement.In the second section, Thomas documents the precursors to Detroit's racial change and links them to city planning policies. Detroit's redevelopment strategies, with their emphasis on the clearance and redevelopment of Gratiot Park, had devastating consequences for the largely African American residential population. Thomas identifies Detroit's neighborhood conservation program as a promising but missed opportunity, and emphasizes the role Detroit city planners played in perpetuating racial discrimination. She effectively illustrates the tensions between the implementation of Detroit's lauded 1951 award-winning master plan, the evolution of organized citizen protests, and deep fissures in a loosely organized growth coalition.In the last section, Thomas describes the effects of the 1967 riot, the litany of federal programs aimed to eliminate poverty which failed to affect lasting change for city residents, and the tenure and the enduring impact of Coleman Young as the city's first African American mayor. Most of this section consists of a wholesale and warranted critique of urban planning in Detroit. Thomas offers a number of explanations for the failure of planners, including lack of knowledge, changing local policy environment, changes in federal legislation, and a new city charter that institutionally divided planning and development. Effective planning, she asserts, requires vision, social justice and equity, participation, consultation, and professionalism; qualities Detroit lacked....
Locating and understanding the internal and external forces that inform and shape the policies of U.S. local governments is a common undertaking in the social sciences. However, Gerald Frug and David Barron's City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation provides a fresh and fundamentally different approach to this task. The primary objective of the book is to illustrate how state-defined designations of city authority can affect local governments' policy-making efforts. The authors' central premise is that an examination of the legal framework in which cities operate-what they call "city structures"-can reveal the parties responsible for resolving urban dilemmas. This examination can facilitate an amendment of local government power through state legislation and ultimately enable communities to craft creative and workable initiatives that will enable greater autonomy over the direction and implementation of their vision for the future. Frug and Barron state that they "want the reader to experience the ways in which city policy is controlled by state law" (p. 53). And yet the book provides readers with much more than that. This book provides a compelling and detailed look at the different kinds of allowances and limits of power that govern cities and provides illustrative alternatives for urban development.The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, the authors review major strands in the urban theory literature and address misconceptions about the nature and degree of autonomy allotted to local governments in the United States. Frug and Barron posit that the reigning narrative among many legal scholars-an "unrealistically expansive idea of the amount of legal power that states have conferred upon their local governments" (p. 31)-is one that perpetuates the privilege of the suburbs and hurts declining central cities. Ultimately, this can foster what Frug and Barron term defensive localism-"an effort to defend local power in order to preserve the status quo" (p. 207). The authors advocate the reconceptualization of local autonomy by "recognizing that the current legal structure does not grant autonomy to local governments. Instead it grants them some substantive powers but denies them others" (p. 35).In the second section of the book, Frug and Barron effectively illustrate how states have held city power in check. Focusing principally on the city of Boston, with New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta, and Seattle used for comparative purposes, the authors demonstrate how state laws, statutes, and constitutional provisions constrain local policy choices. This is accomplished through an in-depth examination of the nature of home rule and a detailed illustration of how city policy making is limited in the critical municipal matters of raising and spending money, planning for land use and development, and education.In the third part of the book, the authors present four futures that cities might envision and plan for: a global city, a tourist city, a middle-class city, and a regional city. Aga...
Introduction: Readmission to the hospital after discharge following a stroke or TIA remains a nation-wide problem. While the CMS national benchmark was approximately 12% in 2015, our hospital Medicare stroke readmission rate rose from approximately 12% at the end of 2014 to 28.6% in February 2015. Our goal was a reduction in stroke readmission rates to below the national benchmark of 12% by December 2015. Hypothesis: We hypothesized that implementing a transition of care program at our 200 bed community hospital would reduce hospital stroke-related readmissions. Methods: In March 2015, a random sample of forty stroke/TIA patients that were discharged home between December of 2014 and February of 2015 were interviewed. The patients were asked about barriers to discharge, what could have improved the discharge experience, and what problems they encountered that could have resulted in a readmission. Based on their answers, risk factors were identified using an inverse Pareto graph and a transition of care program was implemented which included the following work flow: 1) daily rounding to query patients regarding insight into stroke risk factors, environmental concerns, and social impacts to discharge in the stroke unit by the stroke coordinator (a registered nurse); 2) a discharge telephone call within two business days to high risk patients identified during rounds focusing on review of the discharge summary, re-education regarding stroke risk factors, and ensuring that follow-up appointments were in place; 3) an outpatient follow-up appointment with a board certified vascular neurologist within two weeks of discharge. Results: Our transition of care program resulted in an improvement of 82.5%, with a Medicare stroke re-admission rate of 5% in December 2015. As of May 2016, our year-to-date hospital stroke readmission rate is 8.1%, while the current CMS national average is 12.7%. Conclusions: A transition of care program is implementable in a community hospital setting, and results in reduced stroke-related hospital readmissions. Its success emphasizes the importance of identifying high risk patients and assessing individual drivers of readmission risk.
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