Urban and Regional Planning and Design Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/26355
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Item SMALL, SLOW AND STEADY: ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF ARTS DISTRICT DESIGNATION AND ARTS-LED DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES ON ENTERPRISE GROWTH IN A SMALL, MID-ATLANTIC TOWN(2021) Manjarrez, Carlos Arturo; Howland, Marie; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Researchers and planning professionals have become increasingly interested in leveraging arts and culture programming and investments as strategies for community revitalization. Arts-themed strategies employed by local governments and community organizations include arts and music festivals, commissioning public art, physical development of cultural facilities, artist live/work spaces and more. As these practices expanded in the early 2000s, local actors began concentrating arts-led development activities in designated “arts districts. Many of these new districts received their designation from state agencies hoping to bolster tourism, support local business, and attract artists, knowledge economy workers and creative industries. Despite their impressive growth, evidence of arts district effects on local economies is limited. Past research has focused narrowly on single sites, without the benefit of controlled comparisons, or has pooled many different arts districts into the same model, ignoring the unique effects of the different arts-led development strategies they employ. This project offers a middle ground, one that combines quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the impact of arts district designation and programming on business enterprise growth. The primary focus of the project is Frederick, Maryland, a small city 43 miles northwest of DC, which received formal recognition from the State of Maryland in 2002. The first part of the project uses the Synthetic Control Method to compare the enterprise growth rate of the Frederick arts district to that of a statistically-derived, synthetic comparison unit over a 20 year time period. Frederick's business growth rate was found to be significantly larger than its synthetic counterpart, and enjoyed a more robust recovery after the Great Recession. The second part of the analysis employs a site-based qualitative analysis of interviews, local media and administrative records, and an analysis of visitorship using a unique dataset derived from the cell phone location data. Triangulating findings from these different sources provides a more robust basis of evidence to assess arts district impacts, detailing the ways in which arts-based development efforts, concentrated in narrowly targeted areas, can result in significant business enterprise growth in small communities.Item Modeling the Relationship Between the Housing First Approach and Homelessness(2020) Boston, David; Lung-Amam, Willow; Urban and Regional Planning and Design; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A growing body of evidence from individual-level studies demonstrating that the Housing First approach is effective at keeping those experiencing homelessness in stable housing has led to the approach being championed by many leading experts, especially as a way to address chronic homelessness (O'Flaherty, 2019). This helps us understand the relationship between Housing First and an individual’s homelessness, but we know very little about the relationship between implementation of a Housing First approach and overall homelessness rates in a community. In a 2019 survey of homelessness research published by the Journal of Housing Economics, Brendan O’Flaherty wrote: “What has been missing in studies of Housing First are estimates of aggregate impact: does operating a Housing First program actually reduce the total amount of homelessness in a community?” Through this study, I sought to understand if Continuums of Care (CoC) that have adopted a Housing First approach by dedicating a higher proportion of their resources towards permanent housing units are associated with a lower proportion of people experiencing homelessness between the years 2009 and 2017 than CoCs dedicating a higher proportion of their resources towards emergency shelter and other short-term solutions. Additionally, I sought to understand how that relationship between the implementation of a Housing First approach and homelessness rates change as the values of median rent, unemployment, and other covariates typically associated with homelessness rates change. I hypothesized that CoCs adopting a Housing First approach, as defined in the context of this study, would experience lower homelessness rates. The hypothesis that homelessness rates would decrease as the Housing First index increases was supported by the results, but the relationship is more complex than hypothesized. The relationship between Housing First and homelessness rates was quadratic in nature and influenced by an interaction effect with housing tenure. Jurisdictions that adopted a Housing First approach generally experienced lower homelessness rates, except where a vast majority of households are owner-occupied.