This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

This book represents the most comprehensive exploration of corruption in U.S. municipal governments written to date. Exploring the 30-year time period from 1990 to 2020 and including all U.S. municipalities with populations of 10,000 people or more, Municipal Corruption: From Policies to People uses both quantitative research and case study analysis to answer the question of why some municipalities fall victim to corrupt acts, while others do not. It tells the stories of a number of communities that suffered through public corruption, investigating factors that contribute to a greater risk of corruption in municipalities, and identifying steps to prevent corruption in communities—including strengthening resident interest and involvement in local affairs, offsetting the decline in local journalism, and reinforcing scrutiny by state governments. Municipal Corruption is ideal supplemental reading for courses on ethics, public affairs, local government, and urban affairs, and it will be immeasurably useful to municipalities considering how to better insulate themselves and their constituents from corrupt acts.

[FOR HISTORY CATALOGS]Drawing on the pronouncements of public commentators, this book portrays the 20th century history of U.S. cities, focusing specifically on how commentators crafted a discourse of urban decline and prosperity peculiar to the post-World War II era. The efforts of these commentators spoke to the foundational ambivalence Americans have toward their cities and, in turn, shaped the choices Americans made as they created and negotiated the country's changing urban landscape. [FOR GEOG/URBAN CATALOGS]Freely crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book uses the words of those who witnessed the cities' distress to portray the postwar discourse on urban decline in the United States. Up-dated and substantially re-written in stronger historical terms, this new edition explores how public debates about the fate of cities drew from and contributed to the choices made by households, investors, and governments as they created and negotiated America's changing urban landscape.

Understanding Municipal Fiscal Health provides an in-depth assessment of the fiscal health of cities throughout the United States. The book examines the tools currently available to cities for designing a revenue structure, measuring fiscal conditions and measuring fiscal health. It explains how artificial policies such as tax and expenditure limitations influence fiscal policies, and how communities can overcome socioeconomic and state-policy barriers to produce strong fiscal conditions. The authors go beyond simple theory to analyze patterns of fiscal health using actual financial, demographic and TEL data from an accurate data source, the Government Financial Officers Association survey. The book offers a solid basis of empirical evidence including quantitative case studies—complete with discussion questions—to help practitioners better understand the environment in which they are functioning and the policy tools they need to help advocate for change. This book teaches the reader the science and art of municipal financial analysis, and will be invaluable for local and state officials, analysts, and students and researchers.

This book, first published in 1979, examines the economic lives of municipal governments. Local government provides a great deal of services, all of which must be paid for. The sources of these revenues are analysed here, in three sections: bonding and debt; taxation; and other, miscellaneous sources of revenue. The bibliographic entries stretch back into the nineteenth century, and see a large postwar increase as the financial problems of municipal corporations grew alongside the growth of the suburbs.