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Native ecosystem and biodiversity loss from land use conversion into human‐modified landscapes are evident in the United States and globally. In addition to public land conservation, there is an increase in private land conservation through conservation easements (CEs) across exurban landscapes. Not every CE was established strictly for biodiversity protection and permitted land uses can increase human modification. No research of which we are aware has examined the actual tax assessor's land use designations (LUDs) through time. We constructed granular CE datasets (GCED) of CEs and their parcels' tax assessment LUDs for 1997–2008/2009, based on original data from 12 counties in six US states. Using the GCED, we examined patterns in the LUDs, with implications for land uses that could impact CE biological outcomes. We show that LUDs on exurban private conservation lands were predominately residential and agricultural, with increased residential over time. Critically, the LUDs lack a biological conservation exempt designation/category. There is no consistent trend in association between the primary CE reason and its parcel's LUD, suggesting that they coincide in some circumstances but in others, the CE may be a response to contravene the LUD. The majority of the first CE reasons are focused on open space preservation, except in some counties where agricultural land uses and agricultural CEs are associated. The economically and human‐focused LUD is one of many social factors that should be considered in a classification system for private land conservation and CEs more specifically. These results prompt the land conservation, conservation biology, and environmental planning communities to explore assessed land uses' impact on biodiversity conservation objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the US, land records are fragmented and difficult to assemble. This paper details issues of access to land records from traditional land record institutions within US counties, focusing on conservation easements (CEs), CE geospatial data, and tax-assessment data. This paper also explores the issue of privacy related to CE land records and land trusts, the primary type of non-profit that holds CEs. Previous literature has cited landowner concerns about privacy as a driving force behind land trust's hesitancies to share information. However, we find evidence that landowner privacy concerns may be overestimated and more nuanced than previously reported. Additionally, we document widespread issues related to access of CE documents from register of deed's offices. This paper supports reforms to better track CEs within register of deeds offices and reforms to make land records data more accessible for pluralistic societal needs and to support inclusion in environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. To characterize the association between social needs prevalence and no-show proportion and variation in these associations among specific social needs. Methods. In this study, we used results from a 10-item social needs screener conducted across 19 primary care practices in a large urban health system in Bronx County, New York, between April 2018 and July 2019. We estimated the association between unmet needs and 2-year history of missed appointments from 41 637 patients by using negative binomial regression models. Results. The overall no-show appointment proportion was 26.6%. Adjusted models suggest that patients with 1 or more social needs had a significantly higher no-show proportion (31.5%) than those without any social needs (26.3%), representing an 19.8% increase (P <.001). We observed a positive trend (P <.001) between the number of reported social needs and the no-show proportion—26.3% for those with no needs, 30.0% for 1 need, 32.1% for 2 needs, and 33.8% for 3 or more needs. The strongest association was for those with health care transportation need as compared with those without (36.0% vs 26.9%). Conclusions. We found unmet social needs to have a significant association with missed primary care appointments with potential implications on cost, quality, and access for health systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Ethical considerations are integral to most aspects of planning, but the bases of planners’ ethical decisions are not well understood. In fact, there has been no follow-up to Elizabeth Howe and Jerome Kaufman’s original 1979 survey of the ethics of American planners in this journal(45(3), 243–255). Our research evaluates the differences in planning roles and planners’ ethical perspectives since then. In their study, Howe and Kaufman use hypothetical scenarios to determine which of three roles planners play:technician, politician, or ahybrid. They also evaluate how the role that planners assume affects their ethical views. Our research uses similar scenarios to evaluate these relationships in contemporary planning practice while simultaneously evaluating the influence of professional experience on the ethical bases of those choices. We confirm many of Howe and Kaufman’s findings, but first we find that today’s planners assume different roles than they did in the mid-1970s, conforming more often to a technical role and less to a political or hybrid role. Second, today’s planners tend to make virtue-based choices when concerned with ideological and legal issues, but revert to rule-based or utilitarian choices when faced with the dissemination and quality of information and segments of the population receiving special advantages. Finally, we find that planners, at all stages in their careers, maintain a mixture of virtue- and rule-based ethical choices while affirming the profession’s core values (as represented in the 2009 AICP Code). Takeaway for practice: The vast majority of practicing planners in our sample (80%) use the AICP Code of Ethics in response to our hypothetical scenarios. At the same time, self-interested responses were rarely made. These findings reaffirm the code’s value to the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settlement conditions the formation of modern queer subjects and politics in the United States. This essay newly interprets the settler formation of U.S. queer modernities by inspiration of Jasbir Puar' s critique of homonationalism. Puar argues that homonationalism produces U.S. queers as regulatory over the racialized and sexualized populations targeted within the imperial biopolitics of the war on terror. I explain homonationalism as a quality of U.S. queer modernities having formed within a colonial biopolitics, in which the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produces modern sexuality as a function of settlement. This essay reinterprets historical accounts at the intersections of queer, Native, and colonial studies to show how a colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality relationally produces Native and settler sexual subjects. Modern queer projects enact this biopolitics when their normatively non- Native and settler form distances Native people from sexual modernity, even as they seek modern sexual freedoms in the settler state. Homonationalism arises here, as one effect of settlement's naturalization and defense in U.S. queer modernities, and as one means by which the continued colonization of Native peoples and land shapes the imperial projections of the United States and its subjects. Settler homonationalism may be destabilized by marking and challenging its historical formation and holding queer projects accountable to Native struggles for decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the speed at which lender's enter the mortgage foreclosure process, interpreting slower rates as evidence of forbearance. A telephone survey was conducted to evaluate the presence of lender discrimination in defaults that lead to foreclosure in New Orleans, Louisiana between 1985 and 1990. These data are used to estimate the independent effects of race and neighbourhood characteristics on the extent of lender assistance during the foreclosure process. The analysis does not reveal discrimination based on race of borrower or racial composition of the neighbourhood. Instead, greater time in default is granted loans with lower interest rates and loans with outstanding balances below the mean value of housing in the surrounding neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the article 'Plans, planning and Tragic Choices,' by John Foley and Mickey Lauria published in volume 1, number 2 of the 'Planning Theory & Practice' journal. Examination of the claims of communicative planning theory in relation to what could be achieved through collaborative processes and consensus building in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Communicative planning theory, with its emphasis on collaborative processes and consensus-building, has become widely accepted as a new and dominant paradigm for planning practice. It appeals especially to planners concerned with the potential for creating social change through planning processes. It also attracts those trying to escape from the narrow confines of traditional rational policy analysis. It avoids the pessimism of structuralist notions of the role of planners by identifying cracks in the structure that allow agency to survive. However, there are pitfalls in the communicative emphasis on reaching consensus which need to be avoided. This is illustrated through a study of recent debates about the character of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the role of plans in sustaining this. Qualitative research, utilizing conversations with neighbors in New Orleans' French Quarter as well as documentary sources, demonstrates the limitations of consensus-building processes when conflict between visions exists. First, the antagonism between groups, some favoring preservation and others development (visions not necessarily oppositional), creates animosities that are difficult to resolve through communicative processes. These antagonisms point to the ongoing difficulty of dealing with the 'tragic' choices created where substantial differences in systems of meaning collide. Second, the role of a substantive normative vision appears unclear in communicative approaches. In New Orleans, public pressure has persuaded the city administration to elaborate a Master Plan indicating the population's need to define what is desired for the city and their neighborhood. The Plan is still held up as a way of confronting differences. At the same time, neighborhood movement organizations are important for their construction of visions of a desirable urban environment at the margin of the formal planning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which explored residential mortgage foreclosure as a mechanism that links economic shocks and the process of racial transition. Data, variables and methods used; Economic change and racial transition in New Orleans; Multivariate analysis of foreclosure and racial transition.

Public housing, if located proximate to the central business district or other valued development sites, is often seen as a threat to urban regeneration activities. Growth coalitions may develop strategies to remove the threat to increase the value of the land and probability of reinvestment. In cities with an African-American majority electorate, like New Orleans, the electoral coalition of the governing regime is inherently unstable and has to pursue its development strategies carefully. Public housing poses a more intractable political barrier to regeneration strategies than do privately owned slum neighborhoods. In New Orleans, the governing coalition has been forced to retreat to its previously faltering spatial-containment policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates identity politics and student resistance among Afro-Americans in inner city schools in the United States. Difference of Afro-Americans' experience from those in citywide schools; Background on the social construction of racial-ethnic identity.

Presents the results of a case study of two inner-city high schools in the southeastern United States. Background information on the enrollments at these schools; Description of how students' racial, ethnic identity becomes a means of resistance and accommodation to white hegemony; Perceptions of social relations in the classroom.

Community-controlled implementation organizations are necessary to initiate redevelopment in many urban areas, but because of their dependency on external sources of capital they may be transformed into organizations that enhance the extraction of private profit rather than community reinvestment. Internal social and political processes may generate another transformation process with similar results. A contradiction may develop because the social power relations within the organization—defined by its morphological structure—are a mirror image (reversed) of those in society. This incongruence in social relations disrupts the legitimation and reproduction of the organization's morphological structure. If these internal problems are not understood and ameliorated, either the organization will be transformed into a bureaucratic, professionalized organization, or it will dissolve during the transformation process. A case study is presented to demonstrate the intricacies of this process. In this case, the professional bureaucratic transformation process was interrupted by the Office of Economic Development's termination of their funding. Suggestions are made to assist urban planners in minimizing their interactive effect on communitycontrolled implementation organizations, while facilitating the organization's effort to minimize the internal transformation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presented is an abstract to the article “Settler Homonationalism: Colonial Biopolitics and Queer Modernities” by Scott Lauria Morgensen.