News and Events

November 10 CURE Seminar Series with Nikil Saval

The Whole-Home Repair Program

Thursday, November 10
12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Alumni House Conference Room (Hybrid via Zoom)
Lunch will be served
Open to the public

Register Now

 

Abstract: 

Creating equitable and just communities and maintaining safe and healthy homes are two sides of the same coin. Hundreds of thousands of homes across Pennsylvania have moderate to severe physical inadequacies, including leaky roofs or windows, inadequate wiring, unreliable heat, or the lack of a flushing toilet. This deferred maintenance endangers the health of the home’s residents, including through exposure to mold, lead, and extreme temperatures in the winter and summer. The climate crisis, causing Pennsylvania to become increasingly hotter and wetter, exacerbates the deterioration of our homes by exposing them to conditions they were never intended to withstand, simultaneously burdening residents with crushing utility bills. 

The Whole-Home Repairs Program—introduced by Senator Saval this past March and signed into law in July—establishes a one-stop shop for home repairs and weatherization while building out local workforces and adding new family-sustaining jobs in a growing field. This program is the first of its kind in the nation, making it so that Pennsylvanians can stay warm, safe, and dry in homes they can afford.    

This program reinforces the adage that “the most affordable home is the one you already have.” It also speaks to the belief in the preservation community that preserving a home is about more than saving a building and keeping its occupants healthy; it is about preserving cultural memory and the character of neighborhoods and cities. 

The Whole-Home Repairs Program won because of bipartisan support in both chambers of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, champions at all levels of government, and grassroots support from practitioners, advocates, community organizations, and residents across the state, revealing that rural and urban communities alike are engaged in a shared struggle against the detrimental effects of blight, abandonment, vacancy, and displacement, and the accompanying community-wide harms that this cycle triggers. 

About Nikil Saval: 

Senator Nikil Saval represents the First Senate District in the Pennsylvania legislature, where he serves as Democratic Chair of the Senate’s Urban Affairs & Housing Committee. Saval’s legislative work is focused on addressing Pennsylvania’s ongoing housing, mass incarceration, wage, and climate crises, while simultaneously pushing for structural change. His office led the creation of the Whole-Home Repairs Program, which establishes a one-stop shop for home repairs and weatherization, and which was adopted by the legislature in July.   

Saval has written extensively for The New York Times and The New Yorker and served as co-editor of literary journal n+1 (he remains on its board). He is the author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (Doubleday, 2014).

September 15 CURE Seminar Series with Sarah DeGiorgis

Fall 2022 Cure Seminar Series - Upcoming seminars

Housing Policies and Home:  Tenant Experiences in Public Housing

Thursday, September 15
12:30 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Campus Center, West Conference Room (also live-streamed on Zoom)
Lunch will be served
Open to the public

Register Now


Abstract:

How do public housing authorities and public housing residents differ in their views of key aspects of public housing policy such as the concept of home?  Public housing residents are bound by public housing policies but we know very little about the experiences of the residents themselves.  Sarah DeGiorgis became interested in this topic while working as the Program Manager for the Choice Neighborhoods Planning and Implementation Grants at the Housing Authority of the City of Camden.  Her interviews with residents will provide important insight into understanding how public housing policies directly affect residents’ lives, centered on the concept of home.

About the speaker:

Sarah DeGiorgis is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at Rutgers University. She holds a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers and a bachelor of arts in English from Oberlin College.  Sarah’s research interests include affordable and public housing, community erasure, the financialization of housing, and participatory mapping/GIS.

 

April 7 CURE Seminar Series: The Paradox of Urban Revitalization by Howard Gillette

April 7 CURE Seminar Series: The Paradox of Urban Revitalization by Howard Gillette

View this seminar recording below:

 

Date: Thursday, April 7
Time: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Location: Rutgers–Camden Alumni House

About the Seminar:

In the twenty-first century, cities in the United States that had suffered most the shift to a postindustrial era entered a period widely proclaimed as an urban renaissance. From Detroit to Newark to Camden as well as elsewhere commentators saw cities rising again. Yet revitalization generated a second urban crisis marked by growing inequality and civil unrest reminiscent of the upheavals associated with the first urban crisis in the mid-twentieth century. The urban poor and residents of color have remained very much at a disadvantage in the face of racially biased capital investments, narrowing options for affordable housing, and mass incarceration. In profiling nine cities grappling with challenges of the twenty-first century, Howard Gillette evaluates in his new book the uneven efforts to secure racial and class equity as city fortunes have risen. Charting the tension between the practice of corporate subsidy and efforts to assure social justice, The Paradox of Urban Revitalization assesses the course of urban politics and policy over the past half century, before the COVID-19 pandemic upended everything, and details prospects for achieving greater equity in the years ahead.

About Howard Gillette, Ph.D.: 

Howard Gillette is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers-Camden, the founding director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, and co-editor of the on-line Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, which is hosted at Rutgers-Camden. His new book builds on previous work, including previous studies of Camden and Washington, DC, to bring the stories of the drive for urban social justice up to the present.

 

 

 

CURE Seminar Series: Urban Renewal and Black Business in Detroit with Kendra Boyd

 

Date: Thursday, February 3
Time: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
NEW Location: Campus Center, South BC Conference Room
Free and open to the public. 

About the Seminar:

This talk examines the effects of mid-20th century urban redevelopment projects on Detroit’s black business community. Urban renewal in Detroit disproportionately affected African Americans, so much so that black Detroiters often referred to urban renewal as “Negro Removal.” Non-whites made up 98 percent of the families living in some urban renewal locations. Most scholarship on urban renewal focuses on housing and residential displacement, yet, in some ways, black business owners were more adversely affected by urban planning initiatives than residential renters and homeowners.  

About Kendra Boyd, Ph.D.: 

Kendra Boyd is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She is a scholar of African American history, focusing on black entrepreneurship, racial capitalism, migration, and urban history. Her article “A ‘Body of Business Makers’: The Detroit Housewives League, Black Women Entrepreneurs, and the Rise of Detroit’s African American Business Community” (Enterprise & Society) won the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. Dr. Boyd also co-edited (with Deborah Gray White and Marisa J. Fuentes) Scarlet and Black, Volume 2: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865-1945, (Rutgers University Press, 2020). Currently, she is writing a book on black entrepreneurship in Great Migration era Detroit, Michigan.  

 

 

 

CURE Seminar Series: Diverging Space for Deviants – The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing with Akira Drake Rodriguez, Ph.D. – December 2

Date: Thursday, December 2
Time: 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
NEW Location: Campus Center, South ABC Conference Room
Free and open to the public. Lunch will be served.

Registration is required. Register now at https://go.rutgers.edu/6xfyoerg.

In 1936, the City of Atlanta was the first US city to open federally-financed and locally-administered public housing developments to low-income families in need of safe and sanitary housing (Techwood Homes).  For the city’s Black residents, and later, other marginalized groups, these developments provided political opportunity to assemble, mobilize, and make claims on the State in ways that were otherwise inaccessible. Over time, tenant associations served as conduits for working-class political interests centered in spatial justice – the very politics of planning that were used to segregate and marginalize developments and residents served as an organizing logic around spatial justice issues. However, in 2013, demolition began on one of the city’s last public housing developments for low-income families, nearly two decades after Techwood Homes was demolished for the 1996 Olympics. This talk examines the historical role of public housing in working-class politics and how the loss of tenant associations in the city has deepened contemporary inequities.


About the speaker

Akira Drake Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.  Her research examines the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. She is the author of Diverging Space for Deviants: The Politics of Atlanta’s Public Housing, which explores how the politics of public housing planning and race in Atlanta created a politics of resistance within its public housing developments. Dr. Rodriguez was recently awarded a Spencer Foundation grant to study how educational advocates mobilize around school facility planning processes.