ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (Current Projects)

For completed Economic Development projects click here.

The State of North Carolina's Cities
Todd Owen--PI. This project will develop an index to show levels of urban well-being in North Carolina's largest cities using readily available data from the US Census Bureau. Funded by the Z.Smith Reynolds Foundation, research will focus on information gathered on a range of categories available from public databases to create the index. This project will enable researchers to test the feasibility of using and taking advantage of the new ways that the U.S. Census Bureau is providing data, primarily from the American Community Survey.

The Reality Education and Asset Partnership Narrative
Mark McDaniel-PI. Almost 40% of student borrowers now graduate with unmanageable levels of debt, meaning that their monthly payments are more than 8% of their monthly expenses. The debt burden for students of color is considerably larger with 55% of blacks and 58% of Hispanics graduating with high debt levels. Institutions that have traditionally served students of color, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), have been particularly hard hit by these trends as their student body has both higher debt burdens and default rates as well as low endowments. There is a need to address the disproportionate debt burden and default rates of students at HBCUs and provide graduates with a foundation for financial success. The Reality Education and Assets Partnership project, funded by the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund, will help develop the institutional capacity at participating schools to deliver financial and investor education and counseling resources by supplementing the general academic learning experience. The pilot will help build student proficiency in money and debt management and establish the financial competencies necessary to make informed consumer decisions over a lifetime.

Research Support for the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks
Janneke Ratcliffe-PI. This research is partnership between the Center for Community Capital (CCC) and the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks (NCCOB) to provide ongoing support to help expand the research capacity of NCCOB, building on the Center’s previous research work with the NCCOB. This research support will include assistance with development of data collection tools, data gathering and analysis, report writing, and other special projects. The project will include, but is not limited to, the following types of activities: 1) Management assistance with monthly collection and analysis of data provided by subprime mortgage servicers participating in the state foreclosure prevention working group. Produce monthly analysis, including trend analysis. Assist NCCOB in comparing results to research and data issued by other efforts, such as HOPE NOW, California state banking, and investor analysts; 2) Assistance in developing data requests for mortgage licensees (lenders and brokers) to provide loan-level data. Assist NCCOB in initial data collection to ensure integrity of data, and assisting in analysis of data. Data collection to be implemented in Spring 2009; 3) Assistance and advisory capacity to NCCOB on special projects as needed, such as the annual public survey of North Carolina consumers, preparing up-to-date analysis on foreclosure trends.

Doctoral Dissertation Research / Mexico's "New" Rural Women: Gendered Labor and Formulations of Rural Citizenship
Wendy Wolford--PI, Holly Worthen--PhD Candidate. As men increasingly migrate away from the Mexican countryside to seek work in the United States, women are left behind to take on new roles in agricultural fields, households, and communities. While studies of U.S.-Mexican migration often focus on the economic impact of remittances from migrant laborers, the political and economic role of undocumented workers in the United States, and migrant experiences of border crossing and settlement, less attention is given to the shifting dynamics of labor in Mexican sending communities. A key aspect of transforming labor relations in rural Mexico is the role of state-led development projects that promote grassroots development initiatives. As part of the Mexican state’s attempt to formulate a new rural citizen who no longer relies upon state support, but rather sees the state as a partner in self-initiated economic prosperity, state-led development projects are specifically targeting rural women. The objective of this study is to investigate how male emigration and state-run development projects are reshaping women’s rural labor in the state of Oaxaca. Through quantitative methods of household and community surveying and qualitative methods of participant observation, life histories, and semi-structured interviews, I seek to understand how dramatic political and economic changes in Mexico are restructuring gendered labor in three key areas: household labor, productive economic labor, and political labor. Through an examination of changing labor relations in each of these areas, this project will explore how both Oaxacan women and the Mexican state are using changing labor discourses and practices to formulate a new type of rural gendered citizenship.

Doctoral Dissertation Research / Re-Conceptulizing Havana: The Role of Public Space in Urban Transformations
Altha Cravey-PI, Matthew Reilly--PhD Candidate. This dissertation research, funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution the Eastern Bloc in 1989 sent tremendous shock waves throughout the world, of which, ripple effects are still being palpably felt within the city of Havana, Cuba. After decades of benign neglect, a consequence of the Revolutionary government’s anti-urban development policies, the urban landscape of Havana is being transformed as the government, in cooperation with foreign corporations, and newly formed quasi-private entrepreneurial Cuban companies, NGOs, and local participatory planning groups, are re-investing (materially and symbolically) in the built environment and public spaces of the city. Cuba’s efforts at aggressively marketing the cultural economy of Havana, through urban redevelopment, heritage preservation, and tourism development, can be seen as an attempt to marshal space and place as a means of capital generation in line with neo-liberal strategies being employed throughout the West. The main argument of this research is that the combined impact of these global (the collapse of the socialism in Europe, the increased tightening of the U.S. embargo, the emerging support of Venezuela, and the reintegration of Cuba into global markets amidst a prevailing neo-liberal ideology) and local (socio-economic restructuring) processes are necessitating the creation of new temporal and spatial meanings for, and on, the subjects and spaces of the city.