Other Publications

	BRIEF: A companion to High Road Policy Vol. 4(1), Activating the Tenant Vote examines the untapped potential of the tenant electorate as a voting bloc in state and federal elections in New York, based on new analyses by the Cornell University ILR Buffalo Co-Lab of voter data from the Catalist national database. Nearly half of New Yorkers are renters, yet tenants vote at far lower rates than homeowners. The findings in this brief suggest that candidates for office, political parties, and other groups can can activate tenants as a voting bloc by campaigning on and passing tenant protections, with the potential to transform both election results and policy decisions affecting New York tenants.
	BRIEF: A companion to the sweeping updates that the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab made in May 2024 to the New York State Digital Equity Portal, Toward Digital Equity documents recent progress on, and remaining barriers to, achieving digital equity in NYS. Drawing on data from the Digital Equity Portal, this fact sheet shows that: (1) nearly a quarter-million households still lack any type of high-speed Internet connection; (2) an additional ~810,000 households can only access the Internet through cellular data plans, bringing the total number of potentially “underconnected” households to more than 1.5 million; (3) there is reason to believe that insufficient affordable access to multiple and diverse types of computing devices is keeping many households “underconnected” to broadband Internet; (4) lack of at-home broadband subscriptions is a problem with multiple dimensions – including but not limited to lack of infrastructure, too few providers, and unaffordable prices for local populations – that cut across the rural-urban gradient; (5) households headed by Black or African American and Hispanic or Latinx New Yorkers continue to have the lowest rates of broadband take up, and the groups’ take up rates are falling farther behind statewide averages; and (6) income still appears to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a household can access a broadband Internet subscription.
	BRIEF: New York State’s Minimum Wage is not Keeping Pace with the Rising Cost of Living examines the expected impacts of various potential minimum wage targets under the proposed New York State Raise the Wage Act on aggregate earnings. The brief finds that the Raise the Wage legislation – and, more directly, the productivity-adjusted minimum wage that it aims to impose – has the potential to substantially increase the amount of disposable income, consumer spending, and, consequently, jobs throughout the NYS economy.
	REPORT: The Status of Child Care in New York State is a continuation of the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab’s multi-phase action research project on the state of child care in New York. This report describes a mixed methods study that combines quantitative analyses of economic and demographic data with qualitative data obtained via focus groups to show an unevenly changing child care landscape, with minor gains in aggregate capacity over the past 2.5 years, and meaningful losses in many areas across the state, especially in upstate counties and low-income communities, where child care deserts and near-deserts already existed. In addition to presenting the bleak economic status of the child care industry in NYS, this report showcases one of the proposed solutions for the crisis facing child care: a workforce compensation fund (rather than temporary wage stabilization grants).
	PUBLIC TESTIMONY: Read the testimony given by the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab Research Director to the 2023 Chief Judge’s Hearing on the NYS Permanent Commission on Access to Justice. The testimony focuses on the need for more, and more accessible, nonprofit legal assistance to match rising eviction levels in NYS, especially in relatively rural upstate counties.
	FACT SHEET: Declining State Government Employment in Mental Health-Related Industries has Disproportionately Affected Women and Workers of Color: Four Key Findings presents four main takeaways from the ILR Buffalo Co-Lab/ILR Worker Institute report on austerity and privatization in the NYS mental health workforce (see Diminishing New York State’s Public Mental Healthcare Sector… below.
	REPORT: Diminishing New York State’s Public Mental Healthcare Sector: The Impact of Austerity and Privatization on Wages and Employment explores the effects that privatization and austerity have had on mental healthcare capacity in New York State and the employment and wages of public sector mental health workers. The report finds that both the public sector mental healthcare workforce and the state’s mental healthcare capacity have decreased significantly between 1990 and 2021; and that ongoing contraction of the state’s public sector mental health workforce—and the concomitant privatization of mental health work—likely has had (and will potentially continue to create) disparate and negative impacts on mental health workers, their families, and their communities. These negative impacts disproportionately affect women, people of color, and working-class New Yorkers.
	REPORT: Living with a living wage is the annual update to the Tompkins County Living Wage calculation. Researchers at the ILR Ithaca and Buffalo Co-Labs took over the annual calculation in 2023, following multiple decades of the calculation being led by Alternatives Federal Credit Union (AFCU). When the Co-Labs inherited the task from AFCU, researchers updated the methodology to draw on localized (Tompkins County specific) consumer spending data from a commercial data program to which Cornell University subscribes.
	REPORT: Building Responsible Projects in New York City: Assessing the Impact of Prevailing Wage Benefits on Workers, Contractors, and the New York City Economy illustrates how Prevailing Wage (PW) laws might make union construction labor more cost effective than non-union construction labor for PW jobs. Among other things, the report argues that supporting union firms: increases those firms’ ability to take on, train, and pay new apprentices, thereby paving the way for a future experienced, high-quality workforce; gives those firms more capacity to hire additional qualified workers at journey and provisional levels, thereby putting upward pressure on union density in the industry; and, arguably, puts pressure on non-union firms to raise wages and benefits to levels that are more competitive with their union counterparts.
	BRIEF: No Shelter, No Safety: How Rising Evictions in New York Could Pose a Risk to Public Safety—And How Eviction Prevention is Violence Prevention is a hybrid literature review, data brief, and policy brief that summarizes interconnected findings from the growing body of research on the association between eviction and public safety. The brief uses data on eviction filings, social connectedness, and voter turnout from New York State (NYS) to argue that the negative community-level effects of eviction observed in the literature appear to be playing out in NYS, where eviction filings surged following the lifting of a statewide moratorium. Various policy proposals are highlighted as prospective opportunities to mitigate these negative effects.
	REPORT: The True Cost of Child Care: Erie County NY is the culmination of Phase Two of a collaborative action research project on the status and cost of child care (work) in Erie County, NY. The report compares current operational monetary costs per child at care establishments in Erie County to indicators of broader social costs of the child care system in Erie County and New York State.
	BRIEF: Raising the Minimum Wage: The Impact on Women, People of Color, and Immigrants in Western New York examines the potential impact for Western New York of implementing a productivity-adjusted NYS minimum wage. The brief finds that such a proposal would go a long way towards moving pay in Western New York closer to a living wage – with tremendous benefits for women workers, workers of color, and foreign-born workers.
	REPORT: Unvarnished: Precarity and Poor Working Conditions for Nail Salon Workers in New York State, a project led by the ILR Worker Institute, maps out the contours of New York State’s nail salon industry and workforce and examines labor conditions in the industry and their impact on workers’ lives, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent legislation regulating the industry.
	REPORT: The New Possible: Innovative Workforce Development and Skills Maps for Tompkins County, a project led by the ILR Ithaca Co-Lab and its Director Ian Greer, examines the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the labor market, including the changing skills needs of employers, the availability of workers with those skills, and how existing skills can be adapted and “outskilled” to meet new needs.
	REPORT: Engaging the Future of Housing in Buffalo-Niagara, a project supported by LISC WNY and PPG Buffalo and carried out in collaboration with Dr. Jason Knight at SUNY Buffalo State, quantifies and unpacks supply- and policy-related shortcomings in the Buffalo-Niagara region’s housing landscape. In addition, the report looks ahead to project ways in which observable changes to the region’s demographics and population might exacerbate systemic housing challenges in Erie and Niagara Counties. Situated in empirical evidence, the report concludes with recommendations for moving forward and linking disparate housing-related efforts in the region together in a concerted effort to advance housing security.
	REPORT: Advancing Housing Security studies and documents conditions of rent burden, renter power, and renter exploitation in Erie County, New York, to inform strategies and actions for creating a more equitable, democratic housing landscape. (We are currently preparing an addendum to this draft that contains additional demographic breakdowns of our findings on rent burden.)
	FACT SHEET: This fact sheet analyzes a tax incentive package offered by the Hamburg IDA to Amazon to influence the firm’s decision to build a last-mile warehouse to the Town of Hamburg. The warehouse would create 50 full-time jobs, most of which would pay just $15/hour. The Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab’s factsheet asks whether the incentive package is a good deal for residents of Hamburg through the lens of High Road economic development.
	PUBLIC TESTIMONY: Read the testimony given by the Cornell ILR Buffalo Co-Lab Research Director to the Hamburg IDA at a February 2021 public hearing on the IDA’s proposed tax incentive package for an Amazon last-mile warehouse.
	REPORT: Building Next Generation Democratic Workplaces explores strategies for building on existing institutions that work to make the economy more democratic and equitable in the here and now, and for designing and implementing new tools and mechanisms to to develop “Next Generation Enterprises” that are worker-owned, worker-controlled, mission-driven, and deeply inclusive.
	REPORT: Buffalo-Niagara’s Union Members draws on national consumer survey data and employs statistical methods to show that, relative to the rest of the region’s population, labor union members in Western New York appear to be more charitable, more active in volunteering, and more likely to report that they are happy with their lives and standards of living. Taken together, the evidence suggests that union membership might be a path to a more fulfilling, altruistic, and happy life in the Buffalo-Niagara region.