“As with racial justice, as with climate change, when it comes to public health crises, cities tend to be on the frontlines,” said Nestor Davidson, the Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law and faculty director at the Urban Law Center.

Davidson said that one set of questions the Urban Law Center looks at, particularly in times of crisis like this, are those of authority and power.

“Who can act? Who is prevented from acting? What levels of government take responsibility for what kinds of things?” he said. “Even though it’s still early, one of the emerging lessons from the pandemic is that we have a system of federalism that isn’t necessarily as well-suited as it could be to responding to this kind of a crisis. We’ve had an incredibly fragmented response.”

Even though cities are often the first to grapple with “an issue like a pandemic, and it’s often where the effects of crises like this are felt most deeply,” Davidson said city leaders are sometimes challenged when it comes to their authority to act.

“We’ve had conflicts where cities have wanted to take more aggressive steps to protect public health, and you’ve had some states preventing that, and some states reversing course now,” he said.

Overcrowding vs. Density

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., director of Urban Studies at Fordham, said that while there’s no question New York City in particular was dramatically impacted by the pandemic, neighborhoods with overcrowding, or a high number of people per household, bore the brunt of the crisis more than those that are simply considered densely populated areas, containing high-rise, residential buildings.

Using data collected by the Furman Center at New York University, Hinze was able to analyze how different neighborhoods were impacted by the pandemic as well as the impact on certain demographic groups, such as those determined by race and economic status. She found that those in overcrowded situations, likemultiple people living in tight quarters, had higher rates of infection than those living in densely populated areas where overcrowding is not as common.

“The neighborhoods with the highest density in New York City had almost half of the infection rate of those with lower densities, meaning that Manhattan, which is the densest borough in the city, had the lowest infection rates of all five boroughs, and that the outer boroughs, especially Queens and the Bronx, had severely higher infection rates than Manhattan,” she said. “So housing density seems to not be the culprit with COVID-19 infection rates; it was overcrowding.”

Hinze has been working to analyze how overcrowding has contributed to the virus’s spread in other areas of the country. She’s been collecting data from Finney and Ford counties in Kansas, which are home to meatpacking plants, as well as data from Tulare and Kern counties in California, which are home to many agricultural workers. While she’s still collecting the Kansas data, the California data has shown that areas where workers live in tight quarters also have higher rates of infection.

“There was definitely a correlation between overcrowding in the census data and COVID-19 infection rates. Tulare and Kern counties, they’re among the most rural counties in California, yet they were as of June, number 8 and 11 respectively in the state for COVID-19 infections,” she said.

Social Distancing: ‘A Luxury Good’

One of the reasons why parts of cities with overcrowding have seen higher rates, according to Hinze, is because some of the best measures to combat COVID-19, including social distancing and easy access to hand washing, hand sanitizer, and other cleaning products, aren’t possible.

“I think social distancing in many ways is a luxury good, and maybe we’ve been talking about this too little as a country,” she said. “If we look at the numbers for New York City, [the highest number of cases]are in many poor and immigrant neighborhoods in Queens and in the Bronx where people don’t have, essentially, the luxury of social distancing.”

By contrast, some of the wealthiest city dwellers were able to take social distancing measures a step further and move out of the urban areas, at least temporarily, Davidson pointed out.

“Cities are great engines of growth and innovation and economic power and that’s become increasingly true as our society has kind of shifted in a post-industrial way,” he said. “At the same time, they’re places of great inequality, and again, something like a pandemic shines a very bright light on pre-existing inequality … certainly in a time when statistics show that, over time, more than 400,000 New Yorkers have left the city.”

The Cost of Leaving

Hugh Kelly, Ph.D., CRE, the chair of the Fordham Real Estate Institute, cautioned against people seeking “long-term” solutions, like moving, to “short-term” problems.

“If it made sense pre-COVID, then why wouldn’t you have done it pre-COVID?” he said.

While Kelly said that he expected the real estate market, particularly in cities, to take a hit in the near future due to social distancing and other public health guidance, he didn’t expect those trends to continue long-term.

“In the near-term, it’s clear that things like density, mass transit dependence, high-rise building forms are disadvantageous in the midst of the height of the pandemic,” he said. “For the short-term, metropolitan areas that are more sprawling, more low-rise, automobile-dependent, and have the ability to have the built-in equivalent of social distancing have the advantage and that’s probably the case for the next 12 months or so.”

Premature Predictions of the “Death of Cities”

But Kelly said that he believes that after we’ve adjusted to living with social distancing measures, or once effective treatments and vaccinations are available, the characteristics of cities that made them appealing in the first place will still be thee.

“The elements that have made for the most vibrant and the most successful cities … are going to reassert themselves,” he said. ‘The vibrancy that comes with businesses and people interacting with each other—that’s what promotes innovation. Innovation produces productivity and productivity produces profits and that’s what attracts businesses and people to places to work.”

Both Davidson and Kelly said they’ve seen the predictions that this will be the “death of cities” before, including after the 9/11 terrorists attacks at the World Trade Center.

This same round of articles was written after 9/11, Davidson said, noting that after the city rebounded, there were also conversations about too many people wanting to live there. And those are really problems as well. We have to think about housing affordability, and we have to think about unequal access to opportunity, and all the real challenges in cities that are successful.”

Looking Toward a Better Future

Cities won’t look exactly the same as they did before the pandemic, the professors said, as they tend to take something from each of the crises they endured.

Hinze said she hopes that policy makers see how crowded dwellings and other symptoms of inequality have been exacerbated by the pandemic, and that they look to address them in the future.

“It’s most important,” she said, to “make sure that people do not live in these conditions and to sort of provide them with enough of a social safety net so they can live in conditions that are safe,” she said.

Other aspects of life in the city will also likely see some major changes. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, announced on Aug. 3 that the Open Restaurants initiative, which allows restaurants to take over certain streets and sidewalks for outdoor dining, will return next summer.

“You think about ways in which cities are repurposing public space, and taking advantage of a moment where cars haven’t been as dominant a part of the landscape at the local level. Maybe that means we’re going to have more walkable cities, maybe that means we’re going to have a greater embrace of the importance of public space,” Davidson said.

Kelly said from a real estate perspective, he could see offices refitting themselves to allow more space per employee, as well as apartments getting reconfigured to allow for some type of work-from-home model.

“There’s a sea change in that the square footage per employee, which has been going down for about 25 years, begins to reverse itself and becomes a larger space allocation,” he said.

He added that shared office spaces like WeWork will probably no longer appeal to people because social distancing would be too complicated.

Kelly pointed to one major sign he’s looking for to know that New York City has fully re-emerged—food trucks.

“When the food trucks are back on the street, people are coming back,” he said. “It means two things. That there are enough people coming into the central areas to support those food trucks and, even more, the food truck operators feel that they can do so safely.”

With this in mind, a new collaboration spanning four schools across Fordham will revitalize the way real estate education is delivered at the University.

“Real estate is one of the largest industries in the city and in the country overall,” said Nestor Davidson, associate dean for academic affairs at the law school and co-director of the Fordham Urban Law Center.

“To be a successful real estate professional today, you have to be able to navigate multiple aspects—marketing, management, finance, law, policy. As a university, we’re well-suited to build that platform.”

Building that very platform is at the heart of FIRE, Davidson said. Its first objective has been to spotlight each school’s approach to substantive and pedagogical questions concerning real estate, and to examine how these approaches might formulate a holistic real estate education.

“This gets into questions of housing, of inequality, of what it means to be a city today,” Davidson said. “As the Jesuit university of New York City, Fordham has always been in the city and of the city… And, as a university, we have an obligation to engage with these questions.”

Second, FIRE has been reaching out to alumni from law, business, and the humanities who work in real estate to serve as resources and mentors for current Fordham students seeking careers in the industry.

The alumni will also benefit from the initiative, said Kevin Mirabile, DPS, clinical assistant professor of finance and business economics at the Gabelli School. Ultimately, the members of FIRE hope to establish executive education opportunities for working professionals.

These opportunities would be cross-disciplinary—much the same as the real estate industry itself.

“Once alumni graduate from their respective schools, the lines get blurred in terms of the actual work they do,” Mirabile said. “Often, a person in this field is called upon to have some legal knowledge, an understanding of urban economy, of accounting, and more.

“There’s a whole universe of people who go on to operate in a field outside of their original academic discipline or who need to manage people across disciplines. We think that’s an audience that would like to come back to Fordham for lifelong learning opportunities,” he said.

FIRE’s goals to offer continuing education and to align the University’s diverse real estate pedagogies are pertinent as the world becomes increasingly urbanized, said Rosemary Wakeman, PhD, director of the urban studies program. Real estate professionals will need to be prepared to grapple with these manifold challenges.

“It’s not just the number of people coming into cities, but what happens to the building and real estate industries under the pressures of housing demands, gentrification, commercial development,” Wakeman said.

“These are not just industry questions. These are also social and cultural questions, and they’re important ones for everyone involved… It’s an industry you have to deal with from a wide variety of lenses.” 

Fordham University will host a symposium on Feb. 27 and 28 on “Smart Law for Smart Cities: Regulation, Technology, and the Future of Cities.”

The event, to be held at Fordham Law School, is co-organized by the Fordham Urban Law Journal, the Fordham Urban Studies Program, the Center on Law and Information Policy, and the Center for Digital Transformation, and is available for CLE credit.

“[Smart city] is an umbrella term that covers a whole range of tech changes happening in cities, from how governments interact with their citizens to how they make use of their data,” said Nestor Davidson, professor of law and director of the Fordham Urban Law Center.

The symposium will primarily explore the regulatory landscape for potentially disruptive advances in urban governance from a variety of sectors, including energy, sustainability, surveillance, and healthcare.

“Whether it’s on the data side or on the infrastructure side, there are concerns that laws could become a barrier to progress,” said Davidson. “My sense is that the legal side isn’t as prominent a part of the conversation as it should be.”

Davidson said that with technology advancing so rapidly, the pace of law remains at a pre-digital grind. Legal reform that can respond to the pace of change and yet allow for thoughtful deliberation is becoming increasingly important, he said.

Much of the conversation on smart cities focuses on privacy concerns. Davidson cited the example of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent initiative to reduce traffic deaths by installing cameras. The initiative has been celebrated by pedestrian and cycling activists, but has also become a cause for privacy advocates. In Great Britain, Davidson said, there is currently a national conversation about the pros and cons of security camera surveillance—yet cameras are already ubiquitous.

“The best we can do now is to have a dialogue before the technology is already there and we can’t participate,” he said. “People need to understand the benefits and the costs before it all becomes a reality.”

One panel, “Perspectives from the Public Sector,” will feature Manhattan Borough President Gail Brewer, who recently launched an initiative to train community board members on parsing the city’s data. Brewer has been a longtime advocate for opening the government’s data closet, having sponsored the city’s open data legislation in 2012.

“We have to make city data usable and we have to be able to coordinate the various agencies,” said Brewer.

The Fordham Urban Law Journal will publish a selection of articles and essays from participants. Panelists said that they hope the articles will lay the groundwork for a scholarly discourse on the role of law in the technological transformation of urban governance.

“I can’t wait to see the results and how we can begin to implement them,” said Brewer.

Tweet #smartcitieslaw

For more information or to register, visit the website.

Following decades of population shifts, today more people live in urban environments than outside of them. That’s a lot of humanity to supervise, and Nestor Davidson is deeply involved in how the law keeps them in harmony.

“There are some really interesting legal questions that you can filter through place and filter through what is unique about cities,” said Davidson, a professor of law at Fordham Law School. “What does it mean to think of the city as a place where areas of law such as land use, policing, or public health interact, and do so with all the questions of legal authority?”

In addition to his own research, which focuses primarily on housing, Davidson runs the Fordham Urban Law Center, which opened in 2012. In March, the center helped organize a symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of the student-run Urban Law Journal. Davidson said that the existence of the journal—the only one of its kind in the nation—factored into his decision to come to Fordham three years ago.

“If you do civil procedure, everyone knows within a broad range what you’re doing,” he said. “[But] in urban law, there are no clear red lines.”

“Here at Fordham we have this incredible faculty that are probably the best in the country at thinking across silos…about the interaction between law and cities.”

Smart Law for Smart Cities: Regulation and the Transformation of Urban Technology, a conference the center is sponsoring in February 2014 with the Law School’s Center on Law and Information Policy, the Schools of Business’ Center for Digital Tranformation, and the University’s Urban Studies Program, is a good example of the interdisciplinary nature of the center. The conference will examine the roles of law and regulation with regard to technological advances affecting cities.

The fact that the MTA can give you real-time information about subway availability on your iPhone, for example, represents a radical change in the way government interacts with the public and collects the public’s data. Some cities even allow residents to report a pothole by texting a photo of it to their buildings department— where the geo-location data reveals its whereabouts.

“There are a lot of really creative, interesting things that are happening, some of which could be even more transformative if we could figure out the right regulatory structure,” he said.

“There are also some genuine concerns that have been raised about privacy and security with the embedding of technology,” said Davidson.

Based upon his research, Davidson has advocated for a conversation about affordable housing that is not limited to understanding housing as just a poverty policy, income transfer, or land use policy, but also as a real estate transaction. Affordable housing in New York is currently created through partnerships between private developers and government agencies. In an arena that is both highly regulated and highly subsidized that brings together such disparate entities, lawyers have a unique opportunity to be a bridge, he said.

“Lawyers can talk to officials about legal requirements and read complex parts of the tax code, and they can also talk to the finance people and the developers and the people doing the construction,” he said.

“I think that’s underappreciated and it raises some real challenges, but is also really interesting if you think about how the institutional design of most of our delivery systems for affordable housing is this public/private partnership.”

The internal structures of local governments are another research area for Davidson. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed capping the size of soda sold in New York City, for instance, Davidson was surprised that New York state’s courts struck the caps down, because, he said, courts normally show deference to the expertise of government regulatory agencies.

“Thinking about the portion cap, how do we think about the administrative agency involved? How do we understand the relationship between mayors and city councils? Is it the same as the presidency and Congress, or is it different?” he said.

“I think there are some very interesting questions that you can ask when you start to unpack what are sometimes very complex, very large governmental organizations that happen to exist on the local level.”

Considering the recent paralysis of the federal government, Davidson said it is a great time to give cities their due. He noted that there are municipal governments effectively tackling issues such as climate change, economic development, and public health.

“Mayors are really taking the lead on areas of public policy that we might once have thought you really needed to get some big federal agency to do. All of these questions of policy implicate the law,” he said.