No abstract

Green infrastructure (GI) has increasingly gained popularity for achieving adaptation and mitigation goals associated with climate change and extreme weather events. To continue implementing GI, financial tools are needed for upfront project capital or development costs and later for maintenance. This study’s purpose is to evaluate financing tools used in a selected GI dataset and to assess how those tools are linked to various GI technologies and other GI project characteristics like cost and size. The dataset includes over 400 GI U.S. projects, comprising a convenience sample, from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). GI project characteristics were organized to answer a number of research questions using descriptive statistics. Results indicated that the number of projects and overall cost shares were mostly located in a few states. Grants were the most common financial tool with about two-thirds of the projects reporting information on financial tools receiving grant funding. Most projects reported financing from only one tool with a maximum of three tools. Projects primarily included multiple GI technologies averaging three and a maximum of nine. The most common GI technologies were bioswales, retention, rain gardens, and porous pavements. These findings are useful for decision-makers evaluating funding support for GI.

One of the primary eviction prevention measures jurisdictions across the country have taken is to expand access to free legal counsel for lowincome tenants facing eviction. In 2017, New York City became the first jurisdiction to enact universal access to counsel (UAC), guaranteeing free legal representation to all low-income tenants facing eviction in the city's housing courts, and other cities are also starting to channel significant resources into programs designed to increase representation in eviction proceedings. Proponents argue that access to counsel will reduce the incidence of evictions and decrease levels of homelessness. Research, however, has yet to evaluate these claims rigorously. We aim to address this gap by examining the effectiveness of legal representation in preventing evictions. Specifically, we study the early implementation of UAC in New York City and use its sequential rollout across ZIP Codes to study impacts on both individual case outcomes and broader eviction patterns. We find relative increases in legal representation for treated ZIP Codes after the adoption of UAC. We also see small relative (and absolute) reductions in the share of filings resulting in executed warrants after UAC was implemented in the earliest ZIP Codes.