Maxwell School News and Commentary

While the urban opioid crisis is a crisis of heroin and illegal drugs, the rural opioid crisis of prescription drugs is largely a story of growing spatial inequality and of places left behind, most often occurring in places that tend to have a declining industrial base, finds a study co-authored by Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion.

Shannon Monnat, Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, argues that in both rural and urban communities, two key factors—economic distress and supply of opioids—predict the rate of opioid deaths. "I really do want to push back against this cliché that addiction does not discriminate," Monnat says. "The physiological processes that underlie addiction themselves may not discriminate, but the factors that put people in communities at higher risk are are not spatially random."

A study co-authored by Stuart Rosenthal, "The vertical city: Rent gradients, spatial structure, and agglomeration economies," was published in the Journal of Urban Economics and is featured in the CityLab article, "Cities and the Vertical Economy."

Don Mitchell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography, discusses how the nature of riots and rebellions has changed over the centuries, New York’s place within the history of protest, and how Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side has always been a hotbed of defiance.

Kristy Buzard, assistant professor of economics, and her co-authors find that private R&D labs are highly concentrated over a wide range of spatial scales in both California and the Northeast Corridor of the United States. The authors use distance-based point pattern techniques and a novel approach called the multiscale core-cluster approach to identify major clusters of R&D labs in both regions.