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CURE Virtual Roundtable: Bandos, Symbolism, and Placemaking in Camden, NJ

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“Bandos, Symbolism, and Placemaking in Camden, NJ”

Thursday, March 25, 2021 from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

In her forthcoming book Toward Camden, Mercy Romero writes about the relationships that make and sustain the largely African American and Puerto Rican Cramer Hill neighborhood in Camden, New Jersey where she grew up. She walks the city and writes outdoors to think about the collapse and transformation of property. She revisits lost and empty houses—her family’s house, the Walt Whitman House, and the landscape of a vacant lot. Throughout, Romero engages with the aesthetics of fragment and ruin; her writing juts against idioms of redevelopment. She resists narratives of the city that are inextricable from crime and decline and witnesses everyday lives lived at the intersection of spatial and Puerto Rican diasporic memory.

Toward Camden travels between what official reports say and what the city’s vacant lots withhold. In this virtual roundtable, Mercy Romero, Ph.D. was joined by Vedra Chandler, Rev. PJ Craig, and Sis. Anetha Ann Perry to talk about landscape, dispossession, and the making of public memory in Camden, New Jersey.

Panelists:

  • Mercy Romero, Ph.D. Associate Professor of American Literature and American Studies, Hutchins School of Liberal Studies, Sonoma State University, CA Author of Toward Camden (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press (release date 10/15/21).

  • Rev. PJ Craig Sr. Pastor, Cumberland Presbyterian Church of Germantown, TN Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at Rutgers–Camden. PJ’s work focuses on youth connections with place. In her current project, she worked alongside youth as co-researchers in North Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ to understand how youth shape stories about their neighborhoods and themselves.

  • Vedra Chandler (pronouns: she/her) Project Manager, Cooper’s Ferry Partnership. Born and raised in Camden, Vedra Chandler graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government before pursuing a careers in business, music and now community development and creative placemaking. Since 2017 Vedra has worked as a project manager at Cooper’s Ferry Partnership where she uses the arts as a vehicle to tap into the potential of Camden city and its residents. She coordinates the Connect the Lots and A New View initiatives which revitalize underutilized spaces with vibrant programming and public art.

  • Moderator: Sis. Anetha Ann Perry Ph.D. candidate in Public Affairs at Rutgers–Camden. Sis. Anetha Ann Perry grew up in Camden. In her dissertation research she uses auto-ethnography to tell the story of her family’s home, Perry House, and investigates the uses of “good neighboring” as an African American survival strategy. Despite evolving societal dynamics, Anetha’s study purports to show how settlement houses such as Perry House practice “good neighboring” as part of a modern-day underground railroad support system to African Americans living in urban fragmented communities.

CURE Roundtable: After 2020 – A New Beginning for Political Activism and Civic Engagement?

After 2020 roundtable event header

“After 2020 – A New Beginning for Political Activism and Civic Engagement?”

Thursday, March 4, 2021 from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

The past few years have been a period of dramatic and consequential political change, on a local as well as a national level. Many first-time candidates for federal, state, or municipal offices spectacularly defeated their establishment-supported opponents; many communities across the U.S. experienced record-high voter turnouts in the November election; and the increased participation of Black and Latino voters had a decisive influence on election outcomes in many states and legislative districts.

New vehicles for promoting political activism, such as Indivisible and the Working Families Party became more influential at the same time as new initiatives designed to reduce voter participation were introduced in legislatures across the country.

What can be learned from the political turmoil of the past years about the prospects for creating a better informed, more fully engaged electorate in the future? In a roundtable conversation, John Kromer, Lorraine Minnite, and Shauna Shames will discussed their research on voting trends, electoral rules, and the influence of gender, race, and ethnicity on political candidacies and election outcomes, with particular reference to urban communities. They were joined by Rutgers-Camden undergraduate students Oriana Holmes-Price, Political Science major, Adrian Rentas, Urban Studies and Community Development major, and Jose Zarazua, Political Science major.

Panelists:

  • John Kromer is the author of Philadelphia Battlefields: Disruptive Campaigns and Upset Elections in a Changing City (Temple University Press, 2020), has participated in many local political campaigns as a volunteer, election worker, and candidate. He served as Philadelphia housing director during the mayoral administration of Edward G. Rendell (1992-2001) and as interim executive director of the Camden Redevelopment Agency during the state-administered Camden receivership (2006-07). He teaches a fall-semester class in The Politics of Housing and Urban Development at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Lorraine C. Minnite is an Associate Professor of Public Policy in The Department of Public Policy and Administration at Rutgers-Camden. Her research focuses on issues of inequality, social and racial justice, political conflict, and institutional change.  Dr. Minnite is the author and co-author of two books on electoral rules and racial and class politics in the U.S., as well as other published work addressing various aspects of political participation, immigration, voting behavior and urban politics. 

  • Shauna Shames is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department of Rutgers-Camden. Her primary area of academic interest is American political behavior, with a focus on race, gender, and politics. Dr. Shames has published articles, reports, and book chapters on women as candidates, black women in Congress, comparative child care policy, work/family conflict, abortion, feminism in the U.S. and internationally, gay and lesbian rights, and U.S. public opinion.  She has designed and taught courses on race, class, gender, American politics, women’s studies, the history of feminism, freshman writing, and futuristic fiction and has lectured widely on gender, race, and politics.

CURE virtual roundtable: Community-based approaches to creating sustainable affordable housing

“Community-based approaches to creating sustainable affordable housing”

Thursday, January 28th 12:30pm – 1:30pm via Zoom.

This virtual roundtable we discussed housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and shared equity housing models as viable alternative approaches to creating sustainable affordable housing and building community wealth. Non-market strategies have proliferated over recent years as many lower-income communities, especially in “hot” real estate markets like NYC, experience rising housing cost, fewer affordable housing options, and long-term housing insecurity. The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a brighter light on the chronic and dire state of housing insecurity in the US as millions of lower-income households are facing evictions and potential homelessness. In this virtual roundtable, our panelists shared their insights on the processes of creating affordable housing collectives, and discussed the role of public policy, community organizing, and housing advocacy in the quest for fair housing.

Panelists:

  • Edward Garcia is lead community organizer and involved with community development at the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition and member of the Northwest Bronx Community Land Trust.
  • Judy Meima works with tenant groups and cooperatives as an independent consultant. She previously worked at the D.C. nonprofit Mi Casa Inc. and served as the manager of the organization’s TOPA program. In a recently published article in Shelterforce, she shares lessons from 20 years of enabling tenants to buy their buildings.
  • Ruoniu (Vince) Wang is research manager at Grounded Solutions where he focuses on evaluating affordable housing policies and programs, geography of inequality, and residential mobility. He has recently co-authored a report with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that presents the most comprehensive study of shared equity housing programs conducted to date.
  • Stephanie Rivera, Esq. is a member of the nascent East New York Community Land Trust Initiative

Moderator:

  • Natasha O. Fletcher, PhD, Assoc. Director of CURE

 

Chaos or Community? Urban Policy in the Biden Administration.

Thursday, November 19, 2020
12:30-1:30 p.m.
Online Zoom. Registration Required.

 

Click to Register Now

 

Panelists:

 

Dr. Algernon Austin

Dr. Algernon Austin
Senior Researcher, Thurgood Marshall Institute
NAACP Defense Fund

Algernon Austin is a Senior Researcher at the Thurgood Marshall Institute. He conducts social science research and writing across a range of areas relevant to civil rights, policy development, public education, and advocacy. He is also involved in building partnerships with other research organizations and individuals. 

More information at https://www.naacpldf.org/about-us/staff/dr-algernon-austin/.

 

Alan Mallach, (Credit: Jim Moy)

Alan Mallach
Senior Fellow
Center for Community Progress, Washington DC

Alan Mallach is a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress in Washington DC. A city planner, advocate and writer, he is nationally known for his work on housing, economic development, and urban revitalization, and has worked with local governments and community organizations across the country to develop creative policies and strategies to rebuild their cities and neighborhoods. A former director of housing & economic development in Trenton, New Jersey, he currently teaches in the graduate city planning program at Pratt Institute in New York City. He has spoken on housing and urban issues in the United States, Europe, Israel and Japan, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Nevada Las Vegas for the 2010-2011 academic year. 

More information at https://www.communityprogress.net/alan-mallach-pages-116.php.

Sandra J. Newman

Sandra J. Newman
Nonresident Fellow
Urban Institute

Sandra Newman is a nonresident fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. She is professor of policy studies at the Johns Hopkins University, where she directs the Center on Housing, Neighborhoods, and Communities at the Hopkins Institute for Health and Social Policy in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She holds joint professorial appointments with the department of sociology and the department of health policy and management. Newman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the effects of housing and neighborhoods on children and families and on the dynamics of neighborhood change. Her current research includes studies of the effects of key housing attributes, such as affordability, tenure (owning versus renting), and receipt of housing subsidies on the life outcomes of children and adults; racial disparities in the effects of the tumultuous 2000 decade on young adult household formation; and the Housing and Children’s Healthy Development Study, a new longitudinal survey that includes a housing voucher experiment.

More information at https://www.urban.org/author/sandra-j-newman.

About the Seminar

Cities in the US are at a crossroads, with a severe lack of affordable housing, exclusionary zoning in the suburbs, persistent racial and economic segregation, rising homelessness, and a steep increase in evictions. In “hot market” cities, these problems coexist with rapid gentrification in favored corridors, often leading to displacement and a loss of affordable units. As Martin Luther King, Jr., asked, “Where do we go from here – Chaos or Community?” CURE, as part of our ongoing webinar series, is presenting a panel discussion on the priorities for programs and policies to address urban and metropolitan problems. Our panelists, noted urban policy experts from different backgrounds and perspectives, will share and debate their visions for what urban policies and practices should be pursued during the next administration at the federal, state, and local levels. In addition, panelists will discuss ways to address the housing needs of low- and very low-income residents, based on their experience and different vantage points (academia, policy circles, city government, and grassroots organizations).

CURE Webinar: October 8

 

Attack on the Suburbs? AFFH explained and debated
Online Webinar/Discussion
Thursday, October 8, 2020 | 12:30pm – 1:30pm

Registration is required.

Click to Register Now

 

The 1968 Fair Housing Act contained the notorious Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) provision to put an end to housing discrimination and hold cities, counties, and states accountable to that charge. However, the Trump administration has recently repealed the rule as part of a broader deregulation push, warning suburbanites that Democrats want to “eliminate single-family zoning, bringing who knows into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down.” In this event, experts will address recent attacks on AFFH, critically examine its efficacy & (missed) potential after it was resuscitated by the Obama administration, as well as discuss ways in which its implementation could be improved.

 

Panelists:

 

Staci Berger is the President and CEO of the Housing and Community Development Network of New Jersey. Staci Berger directs this statewide association of over 150 community-based development organizations, created in 1989 to enhance the efforts of these groups to create affordable housing and revitalize their communities, and to improve the climate for community development in New Jersey. Before becoming the President and CEO, Staci served as the Director of Advocacy & Policy. In this role she was responsible for leading the community development policy staff team, including working with the Policy Coordinator and field organizers, to broaden and mobilize support for the Network’s public policy agenda.

Katherine O’Regan is Professor of Public Policy and Planning at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where she also serves as a faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.  From April 2014-January, 2017, she served in the Obama Administration as an Assistant Secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In that role, she was part of the cross-HUD leadership team that worked on the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, and the supporting data tool.  Her primary research interests are at the intersection of poverty and space –the conditions and fortunes of poor neighborhoods and their residents, and how space and segregation may affect opportunities for those most disadvantaged. 

 

Additional panelists include local public officials who have been involved with the AFFH process. (TBD)

 

Moderator:

 

Paul Jargowsky, Director, CURE, Prof of Public Policy, Rutgers University Camden whose work has examined the role of exclusionary land use regulations by suburban jurisdictions in contributing to racial and economic segregation.

The discussion will be followed by a moderated audience q&a. This event is free to the public, registration is required.

 

Click to Register Now