Karen Chapple, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC-Berkeley, specializes in local economic development and metropolitan planning.  She is currently at work on a book about mobility regimes, or how nonprofit organizations embedded in the regional economy are able to organize and innovate solutions to poverty.  In addition, she heads a HUD-funded Community Outreach Partnership Center in Richmond, California that is looking at the best practices in creating mixed-income communities and equitable development.  

    Her most recent publications include a study of policies linking economic and workforce development, an analysis of the potential for upward mobility in information technology, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of regional collaboration in workforce development.  She has also published recently on metropolitan high-tech indicators (in Economic Development Quarterly), the relationship between information technology and housing price appreciation in the Bay Area (in Housing Policy Debate), and the role of social networks for welfare-to-work clients in San Francisco (in Urban Geography, Economic Development Quarterly, and the Journal of Urban Affairs).  She serves as co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research and is on the editorial board of Economic Development Quarterly.  

    Prior to academia, Chapple spent ten years as a practicing planner in economic development, land use, and transportation in New York and San Francisco.  In her courses, which are on local economic development, methods, and metropolitan planning, she brings planning practice into the classroom, links scales (from the parcel to the region) and disciplines (from design to economic development), and focuses on critical, balanced evaluation of ideologies and outcomes. During 2005-2006, Chapple is a visiting professor in City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will teach courses on regional economic development, neighborhood change and gentrification. 
        

Research and Teaching Statement

            I start from an interest in the uneven distribution of economic opportunity across space—regions, cities, neighborhoods.  How does metropolitan spatial structure exacerbate the growing income inequality of the past 40 years?  In what ways does urban space shape and articulate socio-economic inequality and thus life chances for the disadvantaged?  Development patterns are uneven across and within regions, creating issues of regional equity.  How is this unevenness interacting with the transformation of global capitalism to shape local opportunity structures? What are the opportunities for planners to intervene and advocate for social justice at a local level?

             If economic opportunity—jobs, labor market institutions, schools, and so forth—is increasingly concentrated in just a few locations, planners play an important role in helping disadvantaged communities connect.  Networks bridge the divide between local communities and the economy.  Such networks consist not only of infrastructure—transportation, information technology, and communications—but also social ties and institutions, and even language and cultural signals.  Without these networks, multiple barriers emerge to participating in the economy.  A barrier might arise in the form of discrimination or lack of education, but it could also be a perception, such as the fear I found among some low-income mothers of riding BART to jobs in the suburbs or searching for jobs downtown.  My contribution to date has been to show how women on welfare construct these personal geographies (“Out of Touch, Out of Bounds,” in Urban Geography), use networks in order to work close to home (“Time to Work,” in the Journal of Urban Affairs), and develop connections outside of the network of family of friends in order to access jobs with possibilities for advancement (“’I Name It and I Claim It’,” in Economic Development Quarterly). 

             Despite evidence of the importance of networks, we still have not fully untangled the complex causes of poverty.  In some of my earliest work, with Michael B. Teitz, we dissect the interplay of structural, supply-side, social, and spatial factors in causing inner-city poverty.  This article, “The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality,” (Cityscape) has become a standard of urban economics classes across the country.

             During the dot-com boom, I became involved (with AnnaLee Saxenian and Matthew Zook) in research on emergent networks among information technology (IT) employers and training providers that help low-income adults bridge the Digital Divide and enter the workforce with a career ladder out of poverty (“From Promising Practices to Promising Futures,” Ford Foundation and “Why Entry-Level IT Jobs Stay,” Journal of Urban Technology).  My IT research, assisted at various points by Chandra Egan, Melissa Edwards, Annelies Goger, Sena Ku, Guangyu Li, Euzane Pao, Carrie Ridgeway, Enrique Silva, Jeff Vincent, and Steve Wertheim, explores this question from multiple angles.  From 2001-04, we followed the IT careers of a sample of 100 graduates of community-based training programs to see whether the foot-in-the-door in IT actually leads to upward mobility.  From 1998-2003, we interviewed 80 employers about their hiring practices, with a current focus on how global outsourcing is reshaping the entry-level IT labor market in the United States.  Our interviews and surveys of some 200 training providers showed how these organizations are linking program graduates to local employers.  Finally, we interviewed some 50 key policymakers and stakeholders in the workforce development system in California and New York.  

             I also explore the theme of uneven regional/metropolitan development in three recent papers on housing price appreciation, the rankings of high-tech metros and the regional fair share housing program in the Twin Cities.  "Fueling the Fire" (in Housing Policy Debate, with John V. Thomas and others) shows that the key to understanding recent intrametropolitan differences in price appreciation lies in understanding the location pattern of high-tech jobs.   “Gauging High-Tech and I-Tech Activity” (in Economic Development Quarterly, with Ann Markusen, Greg Schrock, and others) debunks the many metropolitan high-tech rankings developed in recent years and offers instead a human-capital-based definition. This study has garnered attention in the national media and has already induced researchers to revise their approach to high-tech indicators.  “Enabling Exclusion” (in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, with Edward Goetz and Barbara Lukermann) suggests that before trying to create new regional institutions, we need to evaluate how our existing programs are working.  Using the case of the Twin Cities’ regional fair share housing planning process, the article argues that regional planning, in this case, has failed to increase affordable housing production because of poor monitoring (by the Metropolitan Council) and implementation of local land use plans.

             My teaching reflects my interest in the distribution of economic opportunity within metropolitan areas but adds a new dimension, a focus on the realm of the possible.  Where economic theory may tell us that transformation is impossible, planning practice shows us the many possibilities for improving local opportunity structures.  In my seminars on local economic development and metropolitan planning, we focus on the role of ideologies and politics in shaping policy choices, as well as the effectiveness of policy solutions.  We ask questions such as: Who benefits from business attraction strategies?  What are the politics and assumptions behind regional tax base sharing as well as its actual outcomes on regional equity?  What practices ensure that community residents benefit from real estate development?  In the past, we have had visitors from organizations such as Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, West Contra Costa Business Development Center, Strategic Economics, The Urban Explorer, the Downtown Berkeley Association, and others.

             In my methods classes and studios, we focus explicitly on planning practice and the links between place and region, design and the economy. For PolicyLink we performed an award-winning analysis of the potential impacts of smart growth on local equity (e.g., job quality and residential displacement) for the Smart Growth Strategy/Regional Livability Footprint Project (see http://www.abag.ca.gov/planning/smartgrowth/).  For the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors and Community Development Department, we analyzed the economic impact of out-of-area refinery workers .  As part of an ongoing series of projects on neighborhood commercial revitalization with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, we surveyed Richmond locals about the businesses they’d like to see on Macdonald Avenue  and performed an analysis of the mix and vitality of businesses in seven different low-income neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area.  In fall semester 2005, we conducted an analysis of the economic impact of the proposed San Pablo Casino and the potential for 23rd Street to capture some of the benefits of redevelopment.