Following a year (2023) in which no new issues of High Road Policy (HRP) were released in order to free up resources to build out dedicated, standalone websites and reports on (1) inequality in wages and the likelihood of earning a living wage in New York State (NYS), (2) inequality in the NYS child care industry and access to it, and (3) inequality in patterns of NYS eviction filings and the community-level consequences of eviction – in addition to multiple longer-format reports on wage disparities and the care economy, all of which adopt an implicit high road policy framing and advance the HRP mission – the HRP team is excited to return to a regular release schedule.

In addition to getting back to regular releases, HRP moved to a simpler document layout for which a Microsoft Word template is available upon request. All prospective HRP contributors will be sent the template in response to their accepted pitches. This move should create efficiencies in the publication process, which will reduce the amount of time between an external submission being accepted and its appearance in the HRP archive online.

To kick off its 2024 volume, the June issue of High Road Policy explores the gap in voter turnout by housing tenure in NYS. The piece draws on detailed voter records from Catalist, a commercial data vendor that augments official state voter files with modeled attributes to represent each voter’s likely race-ethnicity and housing tenure, among other characteristics. Using these data, Vol. 4(1) finds that likely renters turned out to vote in the 2022 statewide NYS General Election at rates that were, on average, 31 percentage points lower than their likely homeowner counterparts. This finding is similar to the size of the tenure turnout gap that can be estimated from national public data sources. Importantly, though, the analysis finds that renter turnout was significantly higher in races that featured vocal supporters of a policy known as “Good Cause” eviction. Relative to a 31-percentage point difference, the turnout gap between likely renters and likely owners in such races dropped to, on average, 18 percentage points. The implication is that tenants might be more inclined to participate in statewide elections when they see a clear opportunity to advance pro-tenant policies and interests. The issue ends with a thought experiment that shows what the 2022 General Election would have looked like if tenants turned out at the same rate as their homeowner counterparts. In this scenario, likely renters would have cast a majority of ballots in a majority of districts in both houses of the legislature, as well as in statewide contests. In other words, a unified tenant voting bloc that turns out at the same rate as homeowners would potentially have the power to form a pro-tenant-majority government in NYS.

Read the new issue here.