A Twenty-First-Century Subway

This chapter explores how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) relied on debt to pay for 65 percent of its 2000–2004 capital program, compared to 37 percent in the previous program. When negotiating the MTA's $17.1 billion five-year capital program, Governor George Pataki and the legislative leaders agreed to place a $3.8 billion bond referendum on the November 2000 ballot. The referendum failed, but instead of eliminating funding for the Second Avenue subway, Pataki wanted the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to help pay for the new subway by selling off some of its extensive real estate holdings, most notably the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. At the same time, the governor was turning over the reins of the MTA from Virgil Conway to a real estate developer named Peter Kalikow, who would be the first MTA chair to champion the Second Avenue subway since William Ronan in the early 1970s. In early 2001, the MTA said it would begin construction on the Second Avenue subway in 2004. On September 11, however, building a Second Avenue subway was not a priority to anyone, anywhere. Nevertheless, the aftermath of the September 11 attacks highlighted how the subway had prevented the city's economy from collapsing.

Public Housing for Lower-Middle-Income Families: New Jersey’s State Housing Program in the Late 1940s

This article addresses a lost housing alternative at the dawn of post-New Deal, homeowner-centered America. At the end of the 1940s, the State of New Jersey attempted to launch a state public housing program for lower-middle-income families who had been left out of both the private market for prospective homeowners and the existing public housing projects. The program, however, was incompatible with business-backed plans to create a mass homeownership society. Galvanized by anti-tax sentiment among current and prospective homeowners, voters rejected a state housing bond referendum necessary to the program. An additional factor was white residents’ politics of exclusion that produced anti-public housing hysteria. Finally, plan proponents’ lack of consensus about financial resources and grass-roots activities failed to sway public opinion and resulted in low voter turnout in central places.

School Bond Referendum, Capital Expenditure, and Student Achievement

In the United States, the reform of the financial system of capital expenditure is under consideration, as people believe the current system through local referenda contributes to inequality in student achievement across school districts. Several studies using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) find zero to modest positive effects of capital expenditure on student achievement; however, these studies identify only the effect of capital expenditure financed by a marginally passed bond with a vote share at the cutoff. In this paper I estimate the average effect of capital expenditure on student achievement by incorporating a latent factor model into the existing RDD framework, and comparing school districts that are similar in their underlying confounding variables, namely preferences for educational investment. The results show that, on average, capital expenditure financed by a passed bond does not have significant effect on student achievement.