Resource Reallocation Lab

The Resource Reallocation Lab at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice is a collective of faculty, students, researchers, organizers, and community members. We believe budgets are moral documents that have consequences for the wellbeing of communities. We also believe community input and empirical evidence should shape policy surrounding the best response to crime and poverty but that these values tend to be minimized in decision-making processes. Therefore, we aim to make local government expenditure data accessible to all people and assess and clearly present the implications of budget allocation decisions for communities.

To achieve this aim, we are collecting local government expenditure data for populous counties in the Great Lakes Region from 2012 to 2020 and creating a data portal that will allow people to determine how expenditure patterns in their county compare to other counties and how these patterns have changed over time. Specifically, we are interested in the extent to which local governments spend money on the criminal legal system instead of community investments, such as K-12 education, health, and community development. In addition to the data portal, we will also conduct statistical analyses to assess the implications of local government resource allocation for community outcomes.