PolicyLink research builds on best practices and the wisdom, voice, and guidance of community partners. Our key publications focusing on Equitable Public Investment include:
Safety, Growth, and Equity: Infrastructure Policies that Promote Opportunity and Inclusion, Winter 2006 Infrastructure—transit, schools and colleges, roads, water systems, parks, telecommunications networks—is the backbone of strong, healthy communities and regions. Population growth, resource-intensive development patterns, new technology requirements of a changing economy, and several decades of underinvestment have created a large backlog of infrastructure projects in urban, suburban, and rural areas across the country—and over the next two decades, even more new infrastructure projects and upgrades will be needed to keep communities running. In a policy and budget system of fierce competition for limited public funds, decisions about how and where to allocate infrastructure dollars literally shape our communities and affect access to economic opportunity.
Shared Prosperity, Stronger Regions: An Agenda for Rebuilding America's Older Core Cities, Winter 2005
Older core cities are primarily located in the Northeast and Midwest and are often referred to as rust belt, weak markets, slow growth, or undercapitalized cities. They face significant obstacles to a sustainable future and are struggling to reposition themselves in the face of a changing economy and the movement of people and resources out of urban centers to other parts of the region, the country, or overseas. This report explores the opportunities and challenges confronting older core cities by looking closely at five of them: Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh and answers questions about how older core cities can become economically competitive and socially inclusive places where all residents can participate and prosper.
Ending School Overcrowding in California: Building Quality Schools for All Children
Over a million California schoolchildren—predominantly from low-income families and communities of color—attend severely overcrowded schools. Yet school construction resources are too often diverted to newer schools in suburban or exurban communities, bypassing critically overcrowded urban or inner-ring suburban schools that typically lack vacant land for expansion or local funding sources. Ending School Overcrowding in California: Building Quality Schools for All Children explores California’s overcrowding relief initiatives and proposes policy recommendations for fair and equitable distribution of school construction funds.
Investing in a Sustainable Future: An Analysis of ACA 14 and SCA 11
PolicyLink analyzes the infrastructure shortfall in California's unmet community infrastructure needs and made the case for two constitutional amendments before the California state legislature-ACA 14 and SCA 11-that would have provided these tools. ACA 14 and SCA 11 would have lowered the two-thirds voter approval threshold to 55 percent for local sales tax and bond measures for communities that want the flexibility to invest in a mix of community infrastructure and amenities, with a minimum investment of 20 percent in affordable housing, transportation improvements, parks, and other general infrastructure.
Building A Healthier Sacramento Region: An Analysis of Assembly Bill 680
This paper provides a brief review of the regional growth challenges facing the Sacramento region and analyzes how California State Assembly Bill 680 proposed to address some of the key contributing factors.