Boston 101 Fall 2005 - Spring 2006 Lecture Series

Each semester the Rappaport Institute sponsors an informal series of discussions about the people, institutions, and customs that make Greater Boston what it is. The series brings in notable figures from a variety of fields. These events are open to all, but are specifically geared towards students in Greater Boston who are just getting to know this great region. For more information on the series, call 617-495-5091. All lectures are held at the John F. Kennedy School of Government campus and are free to all.

To add your name to our Boston 101 e-mailing list for a reminder about the next Boston 101 lecture or changes and additions to the lecture series, please send an email to Polly O'Brien.

Past Boston 101 Events - Fall 2005

Lessons from Boston's Police-Community Collaboration and the 1990s Drop in Violent Crime
September 26, 2005

Over the course of the 1990’s, Boston received national attention for Operation Ceasefire and other innovative efforts to prevent youth violence. In the four years after Operation Ceasefire was launched in 1996, youth homicides in the city dropped by almost two-thirds. As a result, the U.S. Department of Justice embraced Operation Ceasefire's "pulling levers" strategy as an effective approach to crime prevention and, with funding from federally sponsored violence prevention programs, many American cities developed programs like Operation Ceasefire. Unfortunately, serious youth violence has returned to Boston streets and many other cities have been unable to replicate Operation Ceasefire’s success. This panel discussion highlighted how Boston succeeded in reducing violent youth crime in past and discussed what lessons history offers as the city comes to grips with a new cycle of youth violence.

Panelists included

Anthony Braga, Lecturer, Kennedy School of Government
Superintendent Paul Joyce, Boston Police Department
Rev. Eugene Rivers, National Ten Point Leadership Coalition
Christopher Winship, Norman Tishman and Charles M. Diker Professor of Sociology, Harvard University


Christopher Stone, Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice, Kennedy School of Government, moderator

This event was co-sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government's Program on Criminal Justice Policy and Management and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. It is available on video tape. Please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 for viewing options.

Housing in Boston: The View from the Globe
October 3, 2005

Kim Blanton, Housing Reporter,
Boston Globe

Co-sponsored by the Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston

Conference on Adequacy Lawsuits: Their Growing Impact on American Education
October 13 and 14, 2005

The Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and The Program on Education Policy and Governance hosted a major conference this fall. At Adequacy Lawsuits: Their Growing Impact on American Education, a distinguished group of scholars from several disciplines presented papers on the historical origins of adequacy lawsuits, the implementation of recent adequacy judgements, and the impact of spending levels on student outcomes. As of January 2005, lawsuits challenging the adequacy of state finance were in various stages of litigation in more than 20 states, but existing research on this subject has been limited. This conference provided an environment for spirited discussions on this pertinent issue and offered useful guidance to advocates and policymakers intent on improving American education.

For a detailed agenda ank links to papers that were presented at the event, please visit the event webpage at: http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/pepg/conferences/adequacy.htm. Sponsored by Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance supported in part by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

Educated Decisions: The Impact of New Housing on Localities' School Spending in Massachusetts and What to Do About It
October 19, 2005

Ted Carman, President of the Concord Square Development Company, Inc.
Eleanor White, President, Housing Partners Inc.
Co-authors of "Chapter 40R and Proposed Smart Growth School Cost Insurance Supplement"

In 2003, Massachusetts passed a landmark law, designed to encourage the construction of affordable housing in ways that also advanced the state's Smart Growth goals. While hailing the law's passage, many of its supporters worried that it would not generate significant new housing if the cost of educating the children who might live in the new units exceeded the property taxes paid by the people who owned the new housing. In a May 2005 report, Carman and White found that in most communities, a $125,000 single-family home would impose net costs averaging $5,000 a year, and only homes worth more than $550,000 would strain local budgets. In this talk, Carman and White explained their calculations and discussed their ideas for how the state can remove this obstacle to the construction of new affordable housing in Greater Boston.

This event was presented by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. It is available on video tape. Please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 for viewing options.

A Less Lethal Death: How Victoria Snelgrove's Death is Changing Policing
October 24, 2005

Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole, Boston Police Department
Donald K. Stern, chair, Boston Police Department Commission Investigating the Death of Victoria Snelgrove; and partner, Bingham McCutchen
Carolyn Ryan, Assistant Managing Editor, Metro Section, The Boston Globe

Moderated by Christopher Stone, Professor of Practice of Criminal Justice, KSG

One year ago, Victoria Snelgrove died when a Boston police officer fired a plastic pellet into a crowd celebrating the Red Sox’s victory in the 2004 American League Championship Series. Her tragic death focused public attention on the dangers of so-called "less lethal" weapons increasingly used by police departments throughout the country for crowd control. The tragic incident provoked major changes not only in the Boston Police Department but also in the ways that American police departments manage their increasingly sophisticated "less lethal" weaponry. In Boston and around the country, these improvements are being guided by the report of an independent commission, appointed by Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole, and chaired by Donald K. Stern, the former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. At this panel discussion, which was held a year after Snelgrove's death, O'Toole, Stern, and Carolyn Ryan, a Boston Globe editor who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the incident, discussed how the events changed the way police in Boston and around the country approach crowd control, less-lethal weapons, and public disorder. Christopher Stone, a professor of criminal justice at the Kennedy School who was also a member of the Stern Commission, moderated the discussion.

Excerpts of this panel discussion were aired on New England Cable News. The full discussion is available on video tape. Please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 for viewing options.

Funding Local Government: Revisiting the Fiscal Partnership
November 2, 2005


John Hamill, Chairman, Sovereign Bank of New England and chair of the Municipal Finance Task Force;
Representative Rachel Kaprielian, Massachusetts House of Representatives and Co-Chair of the Joint Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government
Linda Bilmes, Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government; former Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary for Management and Budget at the U.S, Department of Commerce

Virtually all of Massachusetts’ cities and towns face a long-term financial problems, according to a September 2005 report by the Municipal Finance Task Force, a blue-ribbon committee chaired by John Hamill, one of the region’s most respected civic leaders. Many costs are rising faster than existing revenue sources and rigid constraints make it difficult, if not impossible, to tap new sources of revenue. Local aid payments from the state fluctuate greatly and often come with significant requirements and restriction on local governments’ use of those funds. The task force concluded that these problems have caused has a decline in municipal services that will grow into crisis proportions unless the state and its localities change policies for both taxation and management. At this event, Hamill -- who chaired a similar commission 15 years ago -- discussed the task force’s key findings. Representative Kaprielian, who was a member of the task force, commented on the prospects for legislative action. Ms. Bilmes provided insights from her broad career in public budgeting and management.

The task force report and executive summary can be found at the following link: http://www.mapc.org/Municipal_Finance_Task_Force/Municipal_Finance_Task_Force.html

Powerpoint presentation given by John Hamill. The full discussion is available on video tape. Please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 for viewing options.

Sprawl in Overdrive: Hurdles to Smart Growth
November 9, 2005

Co-sponsored by the Kennedy School's Taubman Center for State and Local Government

Anthony Flint, Smart Growth Education Director at the Office for Commonwealth Development and author of the forthcoming book, "This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America" (Johns Hopkins University Press). Alan Altshuler, Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design

Anthony Flint, author of the forthcoming book, This Land: the Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America discussed the anti-sprawl movement, the backlash against it, and the continuing of dispersal of residential living. Anthony Flint was a reporter for 16 years at the Boston Globe, a visiting scholar at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and a research fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. He offered a political, cultural and economic analysis of movements such as smart growth, New Urbanism, green building, and why these new ideas are encountering such stiff resistance. This event was co-sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

Immigration and Crime: Recent Patterns and Future Challenges
November 21, 2005

Co-sponsored by the Kennedy School’s Program on Criminal Justice Policy and Management

Robert J. Sampson, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Co-author (with Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Stephen Raudenbush) "Social Anatomy of Racial Ethnic Disparities in Violence," American Journal of Public Health (February 2005) Larry Mayes, Chief of Human Services for the City of Boston, who formerly worked with members of Boston's Cape Verdean Community as head of the Log School and as a youth street outreach worker employed by the Ella J. Baker House

Why do black youth in the United States commit violent acts almost twice as often as white or Latino youth? In recently published research based primarily on data from Chicago, Sampson and his colleagues found that the reasons have little to do with individual poverty or inherent racial differences. Rather, four factors—the marital status of a young person's parents, the prevalence of professionals and managers in his or her neighborhood, whether he or she is a first- or second-generation immigrant, and the proportion of other people in the neighborhood who are immigrants—account for most of the differences in violent crime rates for youth. According to Sampson, the findings suggest that the disparity in crime rates "is largely social in nature and therefore amenable to intervention in community rather than individual settings." At this event, Sampson discussed this research and its implications for policymakers. Larry Mayes offered a brief response, reflecting on his own experiences working on these issues in Boston's Cape Verdean community.

This event was presented by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Kennedy School's Program on Criminal Justice Policy and Management. This event is available on video tape. Please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 for viewing options.

The Effects of New Rail Transit: Lessons from Boston
December 7, 2005


Matthew Kahn, Associate Professor of International Economics, Tufts University
Co-author of “Effects of Urban Rail Transit Expansions: Evidence from Sixteen Cities,” Forthcoming in Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs

James Kostaras, Executive Director of the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development, City of Somerville and Lecturer at Harvard's Graduate School of Design

Over the past three decades, the federal government and the Commonwealth have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to expand, improve and operate Greater Boston’s rail transit system. Despite these investments, between 1970 and 1990 the fraction of Boston-area commuters using public transit declined from 18 percent in 1970 to 13.5 percent in 1990 before rising to 14.6 percent in 2000. In this talk, Kahn, author of a forthcoming study on the effects of urban rail transit expansions in 16 U.S. cities between 1970 and 2000, examined the impacts of Boston’s transit expansions on ridership, housing costs, and demographics in neighborhoods near new transit stations and compare the impacts in Boston to those in other cities that built or expanded their rail transit systems.

This event is available on video tape, please contact Polly O’Brien at 617-495-5091 or polly@rappaportinstitute.org for viewing options.

Excerpt from Brookings paper
Powerpoint Presentation

Past Boston 101 Events - Spring 2006

Land-Use Regulation and Housing Prices: A Study Based on Data from 187 Communities in Eastern Massachusetts
January 5, 2006  

Featuring

Edward L. Glaeser Director, Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and Professor of Economics, Harvard University
Amy Dain, Housing Policy Analyst, Pioneer Institute
Jenny Schuetz, PhD Candidate, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Bryce Ward, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University

Housing prices in Eastern Massachusetts are higher than in all but a handful of other areas in the United States. Over the last 25 years, price increases in Eastern Massachusetts have been second only to one other region. In previous research, Glaeser and others have found that increasingly stringent land-use regulations are the primary cause of high housing prices in
regions such as greater Boston. At this event, Pioneer Institute and the Rappaport Institute released a publicly accessible database that details the full array of regulations that 187 communities use to shape residential development within their borders. The event also marked the release of a major study by Glaeser, Schuetz, and Ward that analyzes whether and how local regulations have affected housing production and prices in the region.

Charles D. Baker, Jr., President and CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care
David Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Economics, Faculty of Arts and Science
Jerome H. Grossman, director, Harvard/Kennedy School Health Care Delivery Policy Program
Katherine Schwartz, Professor of Health Economics, Harvard School of Public Health and author of a forthcoming book, “Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do.”

Moderated by Jeanne Shaheen, director of the Institute of Politics

Spurred by continued inaction at the national level over rising health care costs governors and legislators in more than 20 states, including Massachusetts, have passed or are considering plans to greatly expand access to health care. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and the Democratic controlled legislature, for example, are negotiating over competing plans to provide coverage for the half-million Bay State residents who lack health insurance. In Illinois, a measure signed into law last November will ensure that all children in that state have access to affordable health insurance. And Oklahoma is using money from a tobacco tax to enroll small firms and their employees in a program that subsidizes premiums for private health insurance. Finding adequate funding for these programs, however, often is difficult and in many states, including Massachusetts, has spurred intense debate, particularly over whether imposing new taxes would, in the long away, drive away employers and residents.

At this panel discussion, several leading experts on health care funding and management offered their thoughts on what states can do to expand access to health care without imposing taxes that would significantly harm local businesses and residents.

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics; the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston; Harvard/Kennedy School Health Care Delivery Policy Program; The Institute for Quantitative Social Science; The Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; and The Taubman Center for State and Local Government.

Alexander von Hoffman, Senior Research Fellow, Joint Center for Housing Studies
James Segel, principal, Smith, Segel and Sowalsky, and former president of the Massachusetts Municipal Association

Since the 1970s, like countless other American communities, Arlington, Massachusetts has replaced its informal, pro-development system of approving residential development projects with a complex and increasingly controversial obstacle course of regulations that greatly limited the development of new single- and multi-family buildings. At this event, Alexander von Hoffman, a noted urban historian and senior research fellow at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, discussed his new paper on the history and implications of Arlington’s changing policies towards development. James Segel, an attorney who works extensively with local communities and who has also served as president of the Massachusetts Municipal Association and as a state representative, commented on the lessons that can be drawn from Arlington’s history and on the need for and prospects of changing the region’s current land-use regulation system.

Co-sponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, the Joint Center for Housing Studies, and the Real Estate Academic Initiative. This event is available on video tape, please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 or polly@rappaportinstitute.org for viewing options.

Powerpoint presentation given by Alex von Hoffman

Crime, Time, and Employment: Realistic Options for Helping People Leaving Prison Find Better Jobs
March 13, 2006

The overwhelming majority—at least 97 percent— of inmates will eventually be released from prison or jail but many of these people are subsequently convicted of other crimes and return to prison or jail. At this event, a panel of expert scholars and practitioners discussed whether this cycle can be broken via programs that provide guaranteed short-term jobs, intensive counseling, and extensive supervision. The speakers are

Richard Freeman, the Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard, who also directs the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Mindy Tarlow, executive director of the Center for Employment Opportunities in New York City.
William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, who directs Harvard’s Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program.
Christopher Stone, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice and director of the Kennedy School’s Program on Criminal Justice Policy and Management, moderated the discussion.

Powerpoint presentation given by Mindy Tarlow

Cosponsored by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and Harvard Interfaculty Partnership on Crime and Justice. This event is available on video tape, please contact Polly O'Brien at 617-495-5091 or polly@rappaportinstitute.org for viewing options.

Guarding the Town Walls: Mechanisms and Motives for Restricting Multifamily Housing in Massachusetts
March 22, 2006

Jenny Schuetz, doctoral student in public policy, Kennedy School of Government
Clark Ziegler, Executive Director, Massachusetts Housing Partnership Fund

Local governments frequently restrict multifamily housing by limiting the districts where it is allowed, creating procedural barriers to development, and mandating large lot sizes or other dimensional standards. Such restrictions are thought to reduce the ability of low- and moderate-income households to afford housing in desirable locations. To test several hypotheses about why localities pursue such policies, Jenny Schuetz, a doctoral student in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, coded and analyzed information in the Pioneer-Rappaport Housing Regulation Database, a comprehensive guide to land-use regulation in 186 Greater Boston communities. At this talk, Ms. Schuetz discussed the conclusions that emerge from this analysis. Clark Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, a statewide public non-profit affordable housing organization, commented on Schuetz's findings.

This event was presented by the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Real Estate Academic Initiative at Harvard University and is available on video tape. For viewing options, contact Polly O’Brien at 617-495-5091 or polly@rappaportinstitute.org.

From clipper ships to high tech, for over 400 years, Bostonians have a long record of groundbreaking innovations that have both revitalized the region’s economy and had significant impacts on the country and the world. In a new study, the Boston History and Innovation Collaborative examined this long history of innovation and economic reinvention to see what, if any, lessons the region’s past might offer for its future at a time when globalization and corporate consolidations are dramatically changing Boston’s economic base. At this event, Robert Krim, the collaborative executive director and the lead author of the study, explained how he and his colleagues came to conclude that five critical factors have repeatedly made innovation possible in the city’s past and discuss the implications of that finding for the future. Rappaport Institute Director Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics whose studies of Boston’s economic history greatly influenced the collaborative’s analyses, commented on the findings.

Policing Democracies in Times of Terror
April 11, 2006

Nick Hardwick, chair, Independent Police Complaints Commission, Great Britain
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, New York City Police Department
Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole, Boston Police Department

Police in New York and London are today engaged in some of the most sophisticated anti-terrorism operations ever mounted by local police, but these same operations raise difficult questions of democratic accountability. For example, in July 2005, the day after terrorists unsuccessfully tried to launch a second attack on London’s subway system, police in London shot and killed an innocent Brazilian immigrant who they thought was trying to carry out yet another terrorist attack. The investigation of that shooting was conducted by Britain's new Independent Police Complaints Commission, although some argued that outsiders could not, and should not, be responsible for investigating anti-terrorism operations. How can police organizations strengthen their own accountability systems to deal with potential misconduct in these operations? How effectively can outside organizations investigate alleged misconduct of this kind?

Co-sponsored by the Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, The Taubman Center for State and Local Government, The Institute of Politics and Harvard University's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

"Panel Discusses Police Role in Combatting Terrorism," By Christine McCarthy, Boston University Daily Free Press, 4/12/2006.

Planning at the Cutting Edge: How are the Communities in the I-495 Corridor Responding to Rapid Growth?
April 12, 2006

Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Tina Rosan, doctoral student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-authors of “Land Use Planning in the Doldrums: Case Studies of Growth Management in the I-495 Region."
Marc Draisen, executive director, Metropolitan Area Planning Council

Land use planning in greater Boston’s fast-growing suburbs, lags far behind what is happening in other parts of the country, according to Rosan and Susskind, authors of a forthcoming Rappaport Institute working paper. Rosan and Susskind reached this conclusion after supervising a research team that interviewed planners, officials, and activists in eight fast-growing communities in the fast-growing I-495 corridor: Acton, Boxborough, Carlisle, Framingham, Franklin, Hopkinton, Marlborough, and Westford. They found that while each community has responded differently to development pressures, all have seen very active citizen involvement in planning and development. However, most of those who get involved, focus on ad hoc efforts to stop development (or preserve open space) and few focus on ensuring that future development in their communities will meet the full range of community needs. Rosan and Susskind discussed their key findings. Marc Draisen, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, greater Boston’s regional planning agency, commented on their findings.

"Report Suggests Need for More Land Planning," By Andrew Manuse, MetroWest Daily News, 4/13/2006.

"I-495 Communities Not Keeping Up With Planning," By Erik Arvidson, Lowell Sun, 4/13/2006.

To add your name to our Boston 101 e-mailing list for a reminder about the next Boston 101 lecture or suggestions for the lecture series, please send an email to Polly O'Brien.