Essays on the Role of State and Local Government in Low-Income Housing Development

In this dissertation I consider the politics shaping the interactions of local and state governments and their policy administration efforts. I conduct my analysis in the context of housing and land use policy, in particular leveraging the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) subsidy program and an associated national dataset of all completed LIHTC developments. Before turning to investigations of specific local and state politics phenomena, I dedicate a chapter (Chapter 2) to providing a brief technocratic history of the LIHTC program and discuss how its unique design offers theoretical and methodological opportunities for research both in the case of this specific work and for social scientists more broadly. In the first of three empirical chapters (Chapter 3), I suggest that the distributive politics of the LIHTC program do not follow straightforward models of voter-targeting--as previously suggested in the literature--because of the ability of local governments to act as veto players in the development approvals process. I find evidence that an alternative and more compelling explanation of the distribution of LIHTC units throughout a state is political homophily between a given mayor and the state governor. I find evidence of a greater boost to LIHTC unit production when mayor and governor are both Democrats than when both are Republicans, and a decline in unit production when mayor and governor have opposite party affiliations. In the second empirical chapter (Chapter 4), I examine whether previous work on the effects of professionalism in state legislatures translate to professionalism among state agency staff. I conduct a comparative analysis of the state Housing Finance Agencies--the entities designated to distribute Low-Income Housing Tax Credits under the program’s enabling legislation. I find evidence that the effect of agency staff professionalism is mediated by the party affiliation of the governor: under Democratic governors, I find evidence that increasing the level of HFA staff professionalism increases the number of LIHTC projects per capita allocated credits; under Republican governors, I find evidence that the reverse occurs. In my final empirical chapter (Chapter 5), I build on previous findings that local government decisions to engage in collective action with their fellow localities can be explained by the specific transaction benefits and costs, as described by the Institutional Collective Action model of local government collaboration, and that political homophily is a specifically important determinant of those costs. I consider whether political homophily and the Institutional Collective Action model can similarly describe the particular case of an existing regional institution engaging in collaborative policymaking in a new policy domain. I consider this question in the context of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), federally-mandated transportation planning institutions that have in some cases also begun to develop prescriptive, coordinated regional land-use plans. While I find evidence that transaction benefits and costs do help to explain which MPOs engage in land-use policymaking, per the Institutional Collective Action model, I do not find evidence that political homophily in particular helps to explain the decision---but I offer an explanation for why future research should not write off political homophily as a factor shaping MPO collective action decisions. Using the distribution of LIHTC housing units throughout metropolitan areas, I also find evidence that MPO regional land-use plans have concretely shaped land-use outcomes.PhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/172589/1/ndcarney_1.pd