Commentary on Camden by CURE affiliated scholar Howard Gilette

MARCH 12, 2014 ESSAYWORKS

‘Manhattanizing’ Philadelphia could help make Camden the next Brooklyn

Looking west on Market Street in Camden you can see the renovated RCA building and rising fortunes of Center City. (Alan Tu/WHYY)

COMMENTARY BY HOWARD GILLETTE

Could it simply be a coincidence? Hard on the exciting news that celebrity Iron Chef Jose Garces will soon be serving exquisite dinners priced between $150 and $250 a person pre-performance at the Kimmel Center, we learn of a new tower apartment complex overlooking historic Independence Hall.

For those unlucky enough not to grab a multi-million dollar condo on Rittenhouse Square, developer Tom Scannapieco is offering a second chance at 5th and Walnut. Prices for the 40 new units aren’t public, but Scannapieco’s research assures him that among the 2,000 people in the Philadelphia metropolitan area worth more than $10 million, there are bound to be enough customers to fill the new structure. Certainly, he thinks, the city’s 10-year tax abatement program offers “a very valuable incentive.”

Philadelphia doesn’t project the image of “super luxury” easily. That Quaker frugality so firmly associated with the city may be a thing of the past, but surely these new efforts to cater to the super wealthy must mean something.

Please click here to read the full article

CURE affiliated scholar Lori Minnite testifies in voting rights hearing, again!

Dr. Minnite, Associate Professor DPPA, Rutgers-Camden, was asked by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to submit written testimony to their Wisconsin-Minnesota regional National Commission on Voting Rights Hearing, held on February 25, 2014. See submitted testimony at: https://www.lawyerscommittee.org/newsroom/press_releases?id=0415.

Congrats to Lori for weighing in on court cases and the opportunity to offer her expertise in this important issue!!

Center director Paul Jargowsky cited in IBT news story about the City of Camden

George Galster, CURE seminar and special book signing event: Friday, February 28, 2014

Please join us for our next seminar and book signing event:

Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City

George Galster

Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit

George Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at Wayne State University. Dr. Galster has held positions at the Universities of: Harvard, Berkeley, North Carolina, Amsterdam, Delft, Glasgow, Mannheim, Oslo, and Western Sydney, among others. He served as Director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute before coming to Wayne State University in 1996. His research has focused on urban neighborhoods and housing markets, exploring how they change and how they change the people who live within them. This has resulted in over 130 peer-reviewed articles, 30 book chapters and seven books. His latest book is Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (2012). He has provided housing policy consultations to public officials in Australia, Canada, China, Scotland, and the U.S. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T.

Friday, February 28, 2014
12:15pm – 2pm
Executive Dining Room, Camden
Campus Center
Lunch will be served

book available for purchase at seminar

Detroit is the international icon for a once-thriving industrial powerhouse transformed within half a century into a dysfunctional metropolis. George Galster’s Driving Detroit paints a stunning portrait of Metropolitan Detroit through an eclectic application of urban planning, economics, sociology, political science, geography, history, and psychology. But Driving Detroit is also partly a self portrait, wherein Detroiters paint their own stories through songs, poems, and oral histories. This remarkable mix of scholarly disciplines and media of communication make the book distinctively insightful, accessible, and memorable. Driving Detroit is uniquely powerful because its portrait not only helps the reader clearly see the subject but, more importantly, understand why Metropolitan Detroit’s social, cultural, political, institutional, commercial, and built landscape has been transformed. Though appropriate for graduate and undergraduate courses in urban studies, geography, planning, social sciences and history, the book should be of interest to the general public, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

CURE affiliated scholar Lori Minnite joins Scholars Strategy Network!

Lori Minnite recently joined the Scholars Strategy Network, a research organization to “Improve Policy and Enhance Democracy”. Congratulations, Lori!

Here the related post from the SSN website:

Lorraine C. Minnite

Associate Professor of Public Policy, Rutgers University-Camden

Department of Public Policy and Administration

401 Cooper Street, Room 102

Camden, New Jersey 08102

lcm130@camden.rutgers.edu

(856) 225-2526

EXPERTISE & CIVIC INVOLVEMENTS

Minnite is a policy-focused political scientist with expertise in American and urban politics and policy. She specializes in the study of inequality and how it is dealt with by the American political system, teaching courses on political participation, poverty, community development, urban politics, and policy analysis. Her earlier work on immigrant communities in New York City engaged a community collaborative research process that produced new insights into questions about immigrant political incorporation. She is a Senior Fellow at the policy think tank and advocacy organization, Demos, and serves on the research board of the Urban Justice Center’s Participatory Budgeting in New York City project. With her expertise on voter fraud, she has testified before Congress, advised government agencies such as the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission and the U.S. Government Accountability Office, been invited to speak to state elections officials about her research, and participated as an expert witness in high profile legal challenges to new voter identification rules adopted in a number of states.