Community Engagement and Housing

09/09/20 • 67 min

This week, on episode 2 of the CitySCOPE podcast, Joy Chen, Charles Gress and Kate Cooney speak with Anika Singh Lemar and David Schleicher, both from Yale Law School about the ways in which land use community engagement practices might actually hinder rather than help the development of new housing supply. Access to safe, suitable, and affordable housing is a cornerstone of inclusive community and economic development, but cities around the United States are experiencing significant shortages in affordable housing and housing supply in general does not always keep up with demand. We discuss models to overcome barriers to equitable participation processes in affordable housing development. We also discuss how process reforms, such as procedural rules, "zoning budgets" and comprehensive plans with binding targets, might allow for more housing supply. Tune in for an interesting conversation!

Previous Episode

Rethinking Community Engagement

In episode 1, Allen Xu and Kate Cooney talk to Elihu Rubin, from the Yale School of Architecture about his work on the built environments of the 19th and 20th centuries. In thinking about the American landscape of wealth, poverty, race and space, a first step in mobilizing for new arrangements is to consider how a city's current landscape encapsulates notions of place-making from earlier eras. These earlier era settlements live on in both the built environment and in the mental and emotional models of space in cities that structure the American mind. Elihu Rubin's work on critical heritage sheds light on how the past is both elided and selectively commemorated in building reuse. We also speak with Robert Shiller, Nobel Prize-winning economist from the Yale School of Management, about his new book Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Both of these conversations help us set up our themes for Season 2 of the CitySCOPE podcast. We conclude with a snapshot of the conversations to come over the future 7 episodes of the 2020 season

Next Episode

Geography of Race and Space

Americans live in a landscape of race and space inherited from an earlier era. How do historical narratives about the places we call home shape our understanding of them? What is left out of those narratives? And how can new understandings spark movements that drive equitable economic development?

This week on the CitySCOPE Podcast, in episode 3, Naomi Shachter, Arianna Blanco and Kate Cooney talk to Kirsten Delegard and Kevin Ehrman-Solberg about the Mapping Prejudice Project in Minneapolis, the first project in the country to gather a comprehensive count of racially-restrictive housing covenants in a regional housing market.

Kirsten Delegard, one of the co-founders of Mapping Prejudice, and her team at the John R. Borchert Map Library at the University of Minnesota, set out to unearth the complex past of their hometown not knowing how the story would end. They were soon joined by 3,000 volunteers in the region, who were inspired by public workshops about the project and joined the effort. Tune in to learn about what they found and to hear about what happened next!

Photo credit: The Mapping Prejudice Project, the University of Minnesota Libraries