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US federal and state agencies have advocated for the development of derelict, polluted, often post-industrial and urban sites, i.e. “brownfields,” with large-scale solar (LSS). So too have local officials, developers, industry experts, and rural community residents arguing LSS development of brownfields represents a ‘win-win-win’. They argue these developments face less opposition from local communities than rural development, are a pathway to remedy prior injustices, and can reutilize industrial sites rather than develop valuable farmland or natural habitats. Yet little research exists examining residents’ perceptions of LSS development of urban brownfields and the perceived local community impacts that accompany such development. This is a key gap and raises the question of whether these developments indeed promote justice and whether and how opposition may arise from local communities. Using the theories of place attachment, procedural justice, along with resident perception of benefits, this study examines urban resident perceptions and preferences of urban LSS developments. The study utilized a mail survey disseminated via the Every Door Direct Mail service provided by the United States Postal Office to gather data from urban residents in three Michigan communities living within one mile of an urban LSS development. The response rate to the survey across all three communities was 10.2%, with 158 complete surveys returned. Respondent support rates were found to be similar to previous studies that looked at large-scale grid-feeding solar developments, with the two significant predictors of support being positive perceptions of local benefits and procedural justice. 

Frequently, users on the web need to show that they are, for example, not a robot, old enough to access an age restricted video, or eligible to download an ebook from their local public library without being tracked. Anonymous credentials were developed to address these concerns. However, existing schemes do not handle the realities of deployment or the complexities of real-world identity. Instead, they implicitly make assumptions such as there being an issuing authority for anonymous credentials that, for real applications, requires the local department of motor vehicles to issue sophisticated cryptographic tokens to show users are over 18. In reality, there are multiple trust sources for a given identity attribute, their credentials have distinctively different formats, and many, if not all, issuers are unwilling to adopt new protocols.We present and build zk-creds, a protocol that uses general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs to 1) remove the need for credential issuers to hold signing keys: credentials can be issued to a bulletin board instantiated as a transparency log, Byzantine system, or even a blockchain; 2) convert existing identity documents into anonymous credentials without modifying documents or coordinating with their issuing authority; 3) allow for flexible, composable, and complex identity statements over multiple credentials. Concretely, identity assertions using zk-creds take less than 150ms in a real-world scenario of using a passport to anonymously access age-restricted videos.