New York Governor Kathy Hochul put a halt to the hotly debated congestion pricing plan this week, indefinitely shelving the MTA’s plan to charge drivers up to $15 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. 

The governor said she feared the tolling program, slated to start June 30, would “create another obstacle to our economic recovery.”

Fordham Now checked in with Annika Hinze, Ph.D., associate professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program, about the impact of the 11th-hour decision. 

“Congestion pricing was always going to be an imperfect scheme, but it was also an attempt to reduce traffic in the city, as well as channel money to the MTA, which it desperately needs,” she said. 

“Now policymakers are signaling that the environmental implications of this aren’t as important as the economic implications. But in 25 years, they will have become the prime economic issues of the day.”

Shifting people from cars and trucks to public transportation is a key component to New York City’s economic health and livability, she said, as well as efforts to fight climate change. Doing that requires both a carrot—improved mass transit—as well as a stick—a tax for driving into the most congested areas of a city.

In New York City, the law that authorized congestion pricing requires it to generate $1 billion annually, which the MTA would use to finance transit construction projects. Governor Hochul said the state will pursue other ways to fund the MTA, possibly in the form of a tax on city businesses.

Hinze noted that the plan had some quirks that had not been addressed well (or at all), so there was some understandable frustration among residents. 

“A congestion pricing scheme would have been much more justifiable in a metro area with a sophisticated and broadly accessible public transit system with trains, light rail, and buses,” she said.

“But even [in a city]with such a transit system in place, like London, congestion pricing was always going to be unpopular with some. It is inconvenient for some commuters to have such a system in place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the ‘wrong’ thing to do,” she said.

“It would’ve been a big signal to say, ‘We’re going to prioritize this, even if it’s unpopular because it’s the right thing to do.”

“It would have signaled, ‘We’re going to invest in and expand public transit infrastructure.”

Many have criticized the governor’s sudden reversal, noting that as recently as two weeks ago she said congestion pricing was critical to “making cities more livable.” Hinze said she thinks Hochul’s motivations to end the program were political. 

“It’s an election year. I assume that she looked at the polling and said, ‘Look, this is not the right time to push for this,’” she said, noting that a Siena College poll from April found that 72% of New York suburban residents opposed congestion pricing. 

That includes House districts that Democrats lost in the 2022 elections. Shelving the plan potentially helps Democrats win those races and win back the House of Representatives in November. 

“In a lot of districts down-ballot, Republicans are doing quite well, in particular on Long Island where congestion pricing is particularly unpopular,” Hinze said.  

Hinze thinks the program may not be dead for good.  The program has already been authorized by the New York State Legislature, and the MTA has already spent $555 million on the infrastructure for the program.

“My hope is that maybe it will not be indefinitely postponed. After the election, we can revisit it; maybe there will be better proposals, and some of the snags will be resolved, so we can pass something that’s better,” she said.

Urban areas are currently home to 55% of the world’s population, according to the United Nations, and that’s predicted to increase to 68% by 2050.

Cities and Climate Change, a course being offered as part of Fordham’s M.A. in Urban Studies program, aims to provide students with the tools and knowledge to implement those solutions.

“It’s about how climate change is going to impact urban life, but also how cities can transform the crisis into something that’s really valuable in terms of sustaining existence,” said Rosemary Wakeman, Ph.D., who will teach the course again next spring.

Wakeman, a professor of history and the former director of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, created the course last year, knowing that students whose future work lies in government, urban planning, and architecture will need to take into account rising sea levels, utilities strained by extreme heat, and poor air quality during their careers.

“It’s very practical in trying to set out a framework to help people make decisions.”

New Yorkers learned during Super Storm Sandy how vulnerable cities along coastlines are, Wakeman said. In the class, Wakeman explores how these cities are coping with the problem, including Indonesia’s plan to move its rapidly sinking capital from Jakarta to the island of Borneo by 2045.

“If you look at cities and urban regions internationally, you find a whole range of solutions that are being tried. Some of them, like Jakarta, are very radical, and then you get possibilities that are much more a step-by-step approach,” she said. 

Cities’ vulnerability to storms and flooding has inspired their municipal governments to succeed where national governments have failed. 

“Most researchers have argued that looking at national governments for answers to climate change has been an unmitigated failure,” Wakeman said. 

“Despite the U.N. efforts and the various conferences that have been held, the carbon footprint is getting larger, and very little is being done in terms of coping with sea level rise. You have to look at cities in urban regions to find out how successful various strategies have been.”

Nisa Hafeez, GSAS ’23, an urban studies master’s graduate who took the class last spring, is now working on transportation issues as a mobility analyst for sustainable design, engineering, and consulting firm Arcadis IBI Group. 

She said the class resonated deeply with her, having experienced the effects of climate change personally. When she was a child growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, winter temperatures dropped into the 40s, but now they rarely drop below the 60s, and in the summers, there are noticeably longer stretches when the mercury tops 100 degrees. Pakistan is no anomaly either, as the past nine years have been the warmest years on the planet since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.

In some ways, the course gave Hafeez hope because she learned about how many governments are actively working to address the problem.

“It’s an important topic for young people because we are the ones who can actually have a voice in really promoting change,” she said. 

“People traditionally view Catholic art as enchanting, with statues, stained glass windows, and beautiful cathedrals. But there are other ways for Catholics to imagine their faith through art,” said Sullivan, a senior urban studies and theology double major at Fordham College at Rose Hill who has been working on the documentary since last summer and is planning to complete it by the end of the year. 

An Interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan 

Sullivan’s 20-minute documentary, “Questions on the Catholic Imagination(s),” offers unique perspectives from religious figures like Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York. In the film, Cardinal Dolan says that God communicates with people through whispers. And through those whispers—or hints—from the divine, Catholics create art. Some examples are the 2018 Met Gala, themed “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and the exhibit “Revelation” by artist Andy Warhol, whose Catholic upbringing is infused in some of his work, said Sullivan. 

Catholics Who Break the Mold

Sullivan, an aspiring filmmaker, was inspired to create his documentary after reading New York Times and Vox articles that offered new takes on Catholicism, targeted toward younger Catholics. (In his documentary, he also interviews the articles’ authors.) Sullivan started working on his film last summer, thanks to funding from Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and his 2022-2023 Duffy Fellowship. On May 22, he screened his work in progress at the Howard Gilman Theater. 

Coincidentally, his film premiere took place shortly before Pope Francis attended a conference on the Catholic imagination in Rome, which was attended by artist Andres Serrano and Fordham’s Angela Alaimo O’Donnell—two key people who were interviewed in Sullivan’s film.

Sullivan said he hopes his documentary, which includes some controversial perspectives, will expand the minds of his audience. 

“I want to show that there is a rainbow of Catholics out there who don’t quite fit into the perfect mold that the church might make us feel like we need to fit into,” he said, citing an example that Fordham’s Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., mentions in the film. “Father Massingale talks about how the church often tries to make mathematical equations about human morality. What it doesn’t take into account are the complexities of humanity.”

‘New York Is My Campus’

Sullivan has been familiar with the Jesuits since birth. He was born in Georgetown University’s hospital to an Irish-Catholic family, and graduated from Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. 

“Attending a Jesuit high school, which emphasized social justice, was infectious for me,” Sullivan said. “I wanted more of it. That’s what propelled me to another Jesuit school—Fordham.” 

During his first year at Fordham, he often rolled his eyes at the phrase “Fordham is my school, New York is my campus” because it felt cheesy, said Sullivan. But this year, he realized the phrase was right: 

“From seeing Andy Warhol’s exhibit sign in the Fordham subway station, to conducting all my interviews in New York City and then showing my film at Lincoln Center—that was ‘New York is my campus’ on full display.”

But on that day, German leadership agreed to double its defense budget, to 84 billion Euros (roughly $91 billion), and it also authorized a one-time expenditure of 100 billion Euros to modernize its armed forces, signifying that if NATO countries were to get involved in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Germany would be ready.

In another first, the country also sent weapons to Ukraine and authorized other countries to send German-made weapons there as well.

For Annika Hinze, Ph.D. an associate professor of political science, the director of Fordham’s Urban Studies program, and a native of Germany, the change of heart couldn’t come soon enough.

Q: Were you surprised that Putin decided to invade Ukraine?

A: No, I don’t think I was. Especially in the last few weeks leading up to it, I think the West was completely asleep and quite frankly, I was really angry. I was angry to see the way that especially German foreign policy was dealing with this. There’s a German phrase Wandel durch Handel, which means “peace through trade.” It’s based on this old but very flawed theory that countries that are engaged in trade relations don’t go to war with each other. But I think all of that is out of the window now.

The German foreign minister said on Thursday, when Putin marched into Ukraine with a full-scale invasion, that she was outraged that Putin had lied to her face and had lied to the face of the German chancellor. Really, are you really surprised? How many times has he lied before?

Q: Do you think Europeans want Germany to get involved?

A: It’s the largest scale conflict on European soil since the end of World War II. All of European policy has tried to work toward preventing any sort of conflict in the European theater again, especially on that scale.

This is different because it’s a full-scale invasion by a former superpower of a sovereign, outspokenly pro-Western democracy. But when we talk about countries like Hungary and Poland, there’s that old ghost of Russia. There are still people alive who remember the Soviets very forcefully overthrowing uprisings for democracy in Eastern bloc countries and, suppressing public opinion and freedom of expression.

As someone from a former aggressor nation, I know my grandma’s stories about World War II. It’s something that’s very vivid still in a lot of Europeans, and especially for Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians, who were invaded by the Nazis, then invaded by the Soviets. And now they’re once again being invaded, by the Russians.

Q: Why do you think Germany has been slow to respond, and what impact does that have on Europe and NATO countries?

A: It’s been very frustrating to see German silence on so many issues. It doesn’t just concern Russia; it’s so many conflicts around the world, or in front of the German doorstep. I think that the European Union should have spoken more forcefully toward violations of human rights and freedom of expression in Hungary, for instance, where we’ve seen a rapid progression towards authoritarianism.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated, [the magazine]Foreign Policy had an article on whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel could replace any American leader as the leader of the free world. It became quite clear that Germany could not fill that position, even though it’s one of the strongest economies in the world. It could not fill that void because the German military is basically defunct right now. They have a lot of work to do before they get back to even a basic defense army.

This was for good reason, of course. The Western allies and the Soviets really didn’t want a strong Germany at the center of Europe again [after World War II], and Germany had to prove its peaceful intentions. But Germans have been too successfully taught not to be aggressors anymore.

Q: How deeply embedded in the German psyche is this importance of not getting involved in war or military conflict?

A: It’s part of our school system. We talk about the Holocaust, we visit concentration camps. There’s been a serious effort to confront in the collective memory what has happened and what Germany did specifically, not just in terms of two wars of aggression, but also in terms of mass genocide at the heart of Europe. That’s allowed a lot of Germans to say, ‘OK, we’re smarter than that now. We’ll never go to war anymore because war is unnecessary and we’re all pacifists.’ But you can’t really be a pacifist without weapons. And that sounds horrible, but I think in today’s world, that is just the truth. If you don’t have any weapons for collective defense, then you can’t keep the peace, especially not against aggressors like Putin.

Q: Do you feel like Putin’s aggression has spurred Germany to take on a leadership role in the world militarily?

A: It’s really too early to say where it will go. But I think the fact that they will then sit on a military that is going to be considerable on a world scale will put them in a position where they’re going to have to make decisions like that. It’s quite amazing that the German Bundestag made its announcement last Sunday, and in response, almost 500,000 people staged a protest against Putin in downtown Berlin. They did it to say we support what has just been decided.

That was really mind-blowing because very suddenly, there’s not just been a turn just in politics, but a turn in public opinion. Suddenly German political leadership has public opinion behind it on this, which has really never had happened since the end of World War II.

“Jonathon was a caring and compassionate educator who had the kind of multilayered career that one can only marvel at,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in an email to the University community. “He was thoughtful and creative, with a talent for drawing connections among disciplines.” 

Appels taught in Fordham’s English, African and African American studies, anthropology, dance, history, communication and media studies, Middle East studies, theology, and visual arts departments, as well as the religious studies, comparative literature, and urban studies programs, from 1996 to 2002 and 2009 to 2021. He offered a colorful mix of courses, including “Madness and Literature” and “LGBT Arts and Spirituality: Mystics and Creators,” mostly at the Lincoln Center campus. 

“His mind was eclectic and his education and curiosity was unmatched,” said Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies. “Endlessly curious, he always had a new story of the latest lecture or performance he had attended. He was a wonderful storyteller, with a rich laugh. He took me out to a vegan restaurant once, hoping to encourage me in more healthy habits. He was always cold and wandered the halls draped in wonderful scarves.”

Appels was a scholar, poet, musician, sculptor, and art critic who conducted research in 20 countries, largely in Europe; he was also a member of nine humanities associations. 

“He had a very probing mind, and he was very good at connecting the dots between various disciplines and departments,” said his husband, David LaMarche. “He was a very animated and inquisitive person with strong opinions, but not rigid … a free spirit and sort of counterculture, since the time that we were born in, the early sixties, and a sensitive man who loved every branch of the arts.”

His First Love

But what most academics weren’t aware of, said his husband, was his love for dance.  

“He loved teaching, but his first love was probably choreography,” LaMarche said. 

Appels was a dancer and choreographer who founded his own dance company, Company Appels, in 1979. He performed across the country and the world, from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to international stages in France, Germany, and Portugal. He choreographed modern dances for scores of performers, principally graduates of the Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, and North Carolina School of the Arts. One of his favorite courses he taught at Fordham was part of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance, run jointly with the Ailey School, said his husband. Even off stage at more casual venues, you could find him dancing.

“He loved disco dancing and he loved to dance, even into his sixties. If we ever went to a gala party or something like that, he’d always be on the dance floor, wild,” said LaMarche, a pianist who first met Appels at a dance class in San Francisco. 

Appels’ passion for the arts was recognized worldwide. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright to teach modern dance at the National Dance Academy in Hungary. (He received another Fulbright to study the archives of a famous philosopher in Belgium in 1991.) In addition, he received an artist fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and a William Como Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. 

In a 2014 reflection, a Fordham alumnus praised Appels for showing him the beauty of dancing through his course called Lincoln Center Arts. 

“I never considered dance to be very interesting, running the other way when friends would suggest going to the ballet … I now found myself discussing Balanchine, Paul Taylor, and Dance Theater of Harlem with anyone who would listen,” wrote Jason McDonald, who took the course as a Ph.D. student.

‘Now Keep That Big Smile’ 

Appels was a thoughtful instructor who wanted his students to take away something meaningful from his classes, said Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., co-chair of Fordham’s comparative literature program and associate professor of English and medieval studies. 

“Jon really wanted his students to become exposed to very different ideas. He was a very curious and open-minded person, and it seemed that his lessons as a result were full of that same spirit,” O’Donnell said. “He cared about his students very deeply. For every student that I would talk to him about, he had some story or insight about their biography and who they were. He really wanted to get to know the students so he could help them better.”

He loved speaking with students about their work over the phone, said LaMarche. Before their calls ended, he left them with a unique message. 

“He ended almost every phone call with a student by saying, ‘Now keep that big smile,’ which I thought was so cute,” LaMarche said, chuckling. “You can’t see someone smile over the phone, but he would always say that to them.” 

An ‘Off-the-Grid Educational Experience’ 

Appels was born on May 17, 1954, in Falfurrias, Texas. His father, Robert C. Robinson, was a sales executive for oil companies and a financial planner; his mother, Patricia Robinson, neé Hosley, was an elementary school teacher. When he was a child, his family frequently moved because of the nature of his father’s job, said LaMarche. He lived in Nigeria and Libya and later settled in California. 

“He was exposed to a lot of different cultures as a youngster … He got his B.A. at Western Washington University at a college called Fairhaven College, which was a very experimental educational institution at that time,” said LaMarche. “That started his off-the grid educational experience.”

Appels earned a bachelor’s degree in art and society from Western Washington University, a master’s degree in music from Mills College, a master’s degree in poetry from Antioch University, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York. 

Outside of Fordham, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and his alma mater Western Washington University. He enjoyed yoga, pilates, gyrotonics, acupuncture, and other forms of Eastern medicine and healing. Instead of ironing his shirts and wearing a suit jacket like many professors, he preferred a loose and casual style, LaMarche said. He was a spiritual man who loved nature, especially walks through the woods and summers spent with LaMarche in Ithaca, where they swam in waterfalls, gorges, and lakes. He disliked technology, especially computers—in fact, he never owned one, said LaMarche, who managed his husband’s online accounts.  

In addition to LaMarche, Appels is survived by his father, Robert; brother, Robert H. Robinson and his partner, Ilona Robinson; and his sister, Carol House, her husband Roger House, and their son Josiah. A memorial service will be held for Appels sometime early next year, said LaMarche.

With that, the issue of housing in American suburbs became an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.

To explore why that is, and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta Ph.D., a recently retired professor of history and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb (Fordham University Press, 2006) and The Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb (The Historical Society of Rockland County, 2010). He also co-wrote Kingston: The IBM Years (Black Dome Press, 2014).

Full Transcript Below:
Roger Panetta: How have I, as a white suburban resident, a former white suburban resident, contributed to this at the same time I espouse very liberal ideas about redistributive justice, about economic opportunity, about integration?

Patrick Verel: On July 29th of this year, President Trump shared this message with the world on Twitter, “I am happy to inform all the people living in their suburban lifestyle dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood. Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH rule. Enjoy.”

And just like that, the issue of housing in American suburbs shifted to the foreground of the 2020 presidential campaign. And although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie-cutter predecessors like Levittown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change.

To explore why that is and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta, a recently retired professor of history at Fordham and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb, and the Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb. He also wrote Kingston: The IBM Years, which came out in 2014. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

What is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing or AFFH rule? And why is Trump so eager to advertise that he’s getting rid of it?

RP: Your opening statement about Trump saying how happy we should be because he is eliminating this rule is a wonderful example of his political genius. Fact-checking his statement, of course, gives us the general pattern of a pile of errors. The rule does not enforce any construction, any zoning law changes. In fact, the Fair Housing Assessment rule simply implies study. And it was meant to be a tool in order to enable the Fair Housing and the Affirmative Furthering Program to find ways to know and assess, by community, whether or not they were complying with fair housing rules. And deliberately and specifically, it required no actions by communities without public approval. So it did not threaten to build public housing, it did not threaten to build multiunit housing. In fact, it promised no change. It simply required an assessment of whether or not that community was complying with the fair housing regulations. That’s all it did.

So he very cleverly has escalated that. I think what he has done is struck a nerve, and a very important nerve, and that nerve is my house, my home, my community where I live. And that’s why it’s incredibly politically shrewd. He’s cut to the chase. Right to the heart of what it means to live in the suburbs, to own your house, your principal lifetime economic investment. And he has promised not to endanger that.

PV: As I understand that this Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which just really rolls right off the tongue, this came out of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which made it illegal to discriminate against people in housing. So this was an update to that 1968 act. Why would that be necessary? Why would there need to be an update?

RP: I think for about 40 to 50 years, the Fair Housing Act has not been able to successfully grapple with the issues of suburban housing and the segregation of suburban housing. So in order to try to give it some teeth without legislating the construction or the planning of those units, what it did is decided, let’s have communities do an inventory, assess where they are on the fair housing continuum, and tell us where they are and then suggest to us remedies they would make, that they would take, in order to create a more fair housing community where they were residing. So that’s all. And Obama was very careful, specifically implied there would be no imposed housing construction. So Trump’s saying there’s going to be public housing because of this action is absolutely inaccurate. I don’t think that matters. And I think to quarrel with him over the inaccuracies over this or whether or not the statements are fair misses the point. He’s striking a nerve.

PV: Besides legalized discrimination, which is what the 1968 act was meant to prevent, what were some of the other ways that suburbs were historically kept segregated?

RP: Now what Scarsdale and other communities had been doing for years is using restricted covenants. That is a group of community homeowners would agree, in writing sometimes, by specificity, naming the group, no Jews allowed, who could buy and purchase a home in that community. Some of those covenants actually got legal standing. It took a long time for the courts to overturn them, so community residents had formal written documents prescribing who could buy a home in that suburban community. And that expresses a fundamental problem here that people living in the suburbs want to live in a community of sameness. And that’s sameness is broad-based, it’s class, it’s ethnicity, it’s race, it’s probably political preference. It’s all of those things. And that they define as both comfort and safety. Those are the hallmarks of the suburb. And I think they’re very powerful and deeply embedded in the popular culture. Very hard to remove that.

And the long battle of Westchester, which Trump points to as ground zero, is very interesting. For almost a decade, they resisted the requirements of the Fair Housing Act to create more dense, racially mixed housing units throughout Westchester. And that was a bloodbath. It’s recently that they have conformed to that. And they’ve gone to introduce some community construction, but that bow is very interesting as a telltale marker about the way in which suburban communities resisted, politically, the notion of equal distribution of fair housing.

PV: Did you see the movie that they did on the guy in Yonkers? It’s like We Need a Hero, or something like that?

RP: Yes, so for a while I lived in Yonkers and there was a great diversity. And I remember a terrible, terrible story in my life. I lived in an apartment building that was racially integrated, 50% black, 50% white, and my wife were very committed to staying. And you could see it beginning to tip. You could see whites leaving in faster numbers. And there was a fire in the building one day and I had a two-year-old child and a fireman came up to me in the hallway. The fire was in our hall in the incinerators. And he said, “You know, those fires are caused by the super. He’s throwing paint rags down the incinerator, and you’re going to have an explosion.” And then he grabbed me by the throat and he said, “When are you getting out of this building?”

PV: Oh my God, really?

RP: Yes, he said, “When are you getting out of this building? What are you doing here? Why are you still here?” And he never said, of course, he meant, “Why are you as a white person are still here?”

PV: Wow.

RP: And that stayed in my head. And then we moved to Hastings. And when we moved to Hastings, my five-year-old daughter at that point said, “Where have all the black people gone?”

PV: I read that a 2018 survey experiment found that even politically liberal homeowners tend to oppose increasing development in their communities, even when they’re told that such development helps the disadvantaged. Any thoughts on how to counter that?

RP: Patrick, I thought that’s why your opening quote and the whole idea of this was so on target. It really gets to the very core of this issue we’re in now with Black Lives Matter. I wrote a letter to the president of the university and to the Bishop of the Episcopal church where I’m a member. And I said, “Really, I think what’s called upon now is for me to acknowledge my role in the patterns of racism. The blind privilege I have, and the advantages I have had as a white, professional, educated person.” I need to acknowledge those. And I think before I do anything else, I must create consciousness of how I fit in this in ways I do not see.

That’s exactly what you’re asking me here. How have I, as a white suburban resident, a former white suburban resident, contributed to this at the same time I espouse very liberal ideas about redistributive justice, about economic opportunity, about integration. But when it comes near my house, when you want to put multiple units in my community, when you want to put low-income housing, or fair housing in my community, you threaten the cost and the value of my primary life investment.

And when you do that, all of my political liberalism goes out the window. We need to confront that. And the studies you talk about raise another interesting issue, how and why do we not as a public know that about ourselves? So part of this question you’re asking is our sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness, do I understand what’s going on here? And I know what I feel. And it doesn’t matter to me if one black professional person moves next door to me, because that person somehow seems like me in some ways. It’s the notion of multiple units. It’s the notion of people I don’t know. So we’re prepared to allow slow accretions of blacks in the suburbs, but we’re not prepared for an open acknowledgment that the fundamental imbalance of that racially, and building the kind of multiple units in the centers, that we need to correct that. It’s a remarkable area of blindness, if not self-delusion.

PV: Do you think about this when you think about the ways that you… You were just telling me about how you moved from Yonkers to Hastings, which are very different places within Westchester. Do you think about that much now?

RP: Yes, I don’t know why. I think that was an important experience at Yonkers for my wife and I. I think we were very committed to that integrated living. We had terrific pangs of guilt when we left about what we had done. It was a matter of conscience, but that fireman shaking me by the neck, scared the wits out of me. And he pointed to my child and he said, “How could you be living here with your child? Are you a responsible father?” And I thought, “Gulp.” So it was a blow. It was a belly blow. And we continued to think about that. And so now, wherever I am, I tend to look around and see whether this place is white or black. Is this a mixed community? I can go four or five days and not see a black person? And that question always comes to my mind. I never want to let that go.

PV: Are there any suburbs that you’ve come across that have really embraced housing pattern changes that can be looked to as a model?

RP: There was a book recently done in 2019 by Amanda Hurley called Radical Suburbs. And what she did is she went back to the thirties and fifties and found experimental community developments in the suburbs that were based on more communitarian values, that were racially integrated, that had fair housing, inexpensive housing units, that really attempted to create and live up to the fair housing law before there was a Fair Housing Act. And that we have a history of that. That’s the irony. It’s not something we just need to look at places like Portland, where they have done a good deal of work creating more fair residential communities in the suburbs, but we have a history of it. And, again, it’s my deep feeling about our needing to come into contact with that information to realize about what were they trying to do, who were these places?

And, by the way, this also raises for me the other issue of the need to begin to study in our curriculums at the university level, the real estate history of the state, and the city, if not the country. Because in that real estate history, we have one of the fundamental issues of civil rights. American historians have been negligent in examining the place of real estate. And we live in a city that is governed and held by real estate. And we have a president whose reputation and power is rooted in real estate.

PV: Do you think we’re painting suburbanites with too broad a brush? Are there more progressives in the suburbs than we realize when it comes to this particular thing?

RP: Yes, and I think too broad a brush and really tells us about the power of popular culture in shaping our views of the world. I think we need to take a much more critical posture to how we know what we know and whether we think we know that. And so if I look at the white picket fence, the sort of house with a little backyard, all those images that really… The community of common people sharing common views. All of those very powerful images are stuck in our minds as what the suburb looks like. Tom Sugrue at NYU has done a lot of work in the last couple of years in trying to show us that the suburb is much more diversified than we think. And he has outlined a kind of phases of suburbs. For me, the easiest way to manage that, and for your audience, is to think of a series of concentric circles.

That series of concentric circles was first used in the 1920s at the University of Chicago to describe the development of cities. You can still use that now, and it’s very helpful to understand the suburbs. The suburbs have a series of concentric circles, not exactly, but it’s a helpful visualization. At the center of that may be the diverse suburb. And there are increasing numbers of those that Sugrue points out. Places like Yonkers, and the communities around Yonkers in lower Westchester. Indeed, lower Westchester is a good example of a diverse community that has a balance between, and the numbers fluctuate, between blacks, whites, and brown or Latinos. Those numbers also use the older housing stock to attract whites. So whites looking to buy houses find some of the old houses in Yonkers extremely attractive and affordable. So they buy them.

The end result of that process is to create a mixed suburban community. Now, the difficulties are those communities, those mixed communities, is they have a hard time holding the line. They slowly slide into segregated communities, which is a second form of suburban community. And that’s very old. We have black suburbs going back to the 19th century. And then in the third phase of the third circle of our concentric circles, we have communities that are mostly white. And then in the fourth circle, what we call the ex-urb, we have almost fundamentally white communities. That’s the Trump stronghold. So the profile is much more mixed than we tend to look and really has a much more politically diverse looking model for us.

PV: Yeah, it’s interesting. He should have been pitching not to suburban voters, but to ex-urban voters. It’s a whole different class.

RP: The point he’s also trying to make is that, and I’m fascinated by it, and I don’t know an answer to this, is this tipping point. When those diverse suburbs get too black or brown, and I don’t know what that number is, whites begin to leave and eventually diverse suburbs become segregated suburbs. It’s hard to hold on to them, their diversity. Now the question is why? What makes whites think, “This is going. I can feel it, and I have to flee?” And is there a way that we could subsidize those home values to stabilize those communities? We do not, I do not, you do not, we do not have experience of living with, working with African-Americans and browns the way we should. They remain, in our minds, the creatures of popular culture. So when my neighborhood increasingly becomes black, I think, “What do I know?” I go back to popular culture and it tells me what’s going to happen. Can we counter that? If we can’t, diverse suburbs all will eventually evolve or devolve into segregated suburbs.

PV: Why does red lining matter so much when it comes to the racial makeup of places like the New York metropolitan area?

RP: It’s a very good question because it gets behind the issue. It asks, what is the process by which these communities have been segregated and the way in which communities are shaped? And redlining is also a very good word, because it’s the actual red line that you would see on real estate maps. It’s the actual redline. And in historic documents, when we found those maps from banks, or communities, and you saw the red line, people said, “What was that?” And slowly they figured out it was used by banks to determine the value of property and where they would and would not grant mortgages. So redlining meant, if you were inside that red line, you were not going to get a mortgage. Indeed, the value difference between redlining and outside the red lining is about one half. So houses redlined were devalued by one-half houses not redlined.

PV: Wow, is that dramatic.

RP: Very dramatic. And then of course the difficulty is the banks think, “You’re asking for $150,000, but I valued your house only at $25,000. I can’t do that.” But I’ve made that number because I’ve redlined. And redlining is… And this is a word I want to hold on to. This is so pernicious. It’s hidden. People don’t see it, it’s subtle. It took a very long time from the 1930s to the 1970s to really outlaw the practice. And it still goes on. It goes on in other kinds of loans, it goes on and other kinds of banking procedures, it goes on in credit cards. It goes on in a whole series of things because I use those measures to determine whether you’re loan worthy.

PV: It reminds me of the conversations that you hear about race in the sense that racism hasn’t gone away, per se, it’s just that we’re better about using euphemisms to cloak it. So like when you think about a neighborhood you’re not talking about, “Okay, we’re not going to come out and say, ‘We don’t want a multiple dwelling apartment building because we don’t want poor people.'” You’ll say things like, “It’s going to ruin the character of the town.”

RP: What you’re talking about is the subtlety and sophistication of racism now. In a lot of communities where there have been proposals for multiunit housing, the very liberal community members respond to that by pointing to the environmental impact. So, “We’re not arguing about the unit, the numbers, or who. That building is going to damage our environment. And that has nothing to do with the race.”

PV: What gives you hope that things will change for the better?

RP: I don’t want to be a Pollyanna. And I don’t want to say I’m filled with hope. Because my first feeling about this problem is there’s something about it that’s intransigent. The government, political leaders, have had a crack at it for several decades and we have not moved the needle very far. It’s a problem that I think the public has found ways to dodge, to hide. And I think the word I keep coming back to how insidious this is. There is a battle here about whether this is a class or race issue, and suburbanites like to say, “I’ll let you into the suburb if you can really meet the economic level of life here.” So that’s a class issue. I don’t object to you based on race. We know from recent studies that the black incomes in the United States are going up, black professional incomes are going up.

The number of blacks with advanced degrees is going up. And the general economic condition, and the number of blacks in suburbs is going up. So all of those hallmarks tend to show that they’re beginning to have the badges that we have required for entrance into the suburb. So I tend to think that may be a method of change more readily than the way in which we tried to do this through the law.

As a matter of fact, this is a very good question, that people will qualify for what you think is the standard. And, again, “I’m going to let you in one by one, not in 25 units.” So the pace of this is abhorrent, but that’s where the change is coming. It’s very difficult, based on all the evidence and what you’ve said, to get communities to openly acknowledge, “We have been wrong here. We have to figure out a way how to change this.” I have a hard time seeing that change of consciousness unless I admit that I am part of the problem. And the first way the response, for me, to Black Lives Matter is to think, how have I contributed to this, and how do I change? I need to find ways to publicly say to my community, we need to open this up now. No matter what the danger is to what we think is our primary asset, our home value.

“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.”

Such is the crux of the urban experience, circa 2019, according to speakers at “The Global Metropolis: Power and Policy in the 21st Century,” a panel held at Fordham’s School of Law on Feb. 6.

The discussion, part of the Maloney Library’s Behind the Book series, featured the Urban Law Center’s faculty director, Nestor Davidson, and associate director, Geeta Tewari, co-editors of Global Perspectives in Urban Law: The Legal Power of Cities (Routledge, 2018), as well as Annika Hinze, Ph.D., director of the Urban Studies program and co-author of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America, 10th Edition (Routledge, 2018). David J. Goodwin, GSAS’ 12, the author of Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street (Fordham University Press, 2017), creator of the three-year-old series, and assistant director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, moderated the panel.

Small But Significant Victories

An issue that often brings this divide to light is immigration. One way that cities can assert their positions, said Davidson, is through the courts. Municipalities that had declared themselves sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants have gained a small degree of power through recent legal victories, he said. The court battles came as the Trump administration has tried to punish cities for refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents by withholding unrelated funds.

“The targeting of the current administration so specifically against cities was such an indefensible overreach from a legal perspective. Whatever you think of the policy, half a dozen courts have looked at it and struck it down as unconstitutional,” said Davidson, who is also the Albert A. Walsh Chair in Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law at the Law School.

“So that has given cities a toehold, legally, for a certain level of more political power.”

He also noted that although it’s been nearly a generation since the mayor of a major city has ascended to a level of national elected office, they have influenced major policy areas nonetheless.

“Think about what Bloomberg did here in New York when it comes to public health. The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has adopted a lot of the measures that were pioneered here with obesity and sugary drinks. We were that classic laboratory of experimentalism,” he said.

Where Partisanship is Unwelcome

That experimentalism cuts across ideological lines. Tewari, who also publishes fiction, said that when she and Davidson edited Global Perspectives, they were careful to give the eleven papers included in the book an unbiased take.

“In my fiction, my characters are partisan, and have certain political and social views [they express], whereas in our work at the urban law center and in our volumes, we strive to take into account all sides of arguments. Our goal is to get to the heart of the issue in a focused way,” she said.

The notion that urban politics in the United States is constantly evolving as a dynamic interaction between governmental power, private actors, and a politics of identity, is a key aspect of City Politics, which was originally published in 1994. For Hinze, an associate professor of political science, editing the latest edition had extra resonance. The first author, Dennis R. Judd, Ph.D., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a mentor of hers in graduate school. In addition to revising data, she added sections related to the 2016 presidential election, race, and violence.

“It was certainly different because I knew there was another name on the cover that was carrying half the reputation of this book, so it was some extra pressure not to screw up. At first, it was intimidating, but then there was a lot of freedom to say ‘Well, this is something I really want to bring out,’” she said.

Tackling Big Problems Together

During the Q&A part of the discussion, one audience member wondered if, perhaps the federal government had an interest in preventing cities from defying it on big issues. Hinze said she thought it did, but noted it would be difficult to do so without undermining local democracy. And in any case, she said, cities are actually well suited to tackle big problems through groups like the Global Parliament of Mayors, a coalition of mayors from around the globe. Immigration becomes a more pressing concern for mayors, for instance, when members of immigrant communities fear they may be deported and are thus less likely to work with the police to solve crimes.

“Cities are not in a legal position to rival federal or national governments, but at the same time, they can have this really useful cross-fertilization process, where mayors get together and they talk. We’re seeing the bike share program right now that’s taking off in cities all over the world. That was a Dutch program that just took off just by being disseminated and shared by mayors.”

Davidson said a bigger cause for concern is that urban dwellers forget their suburban and rural brethren who are not benefitting from the renaissance that cities are experiencing today.

“We’re at a point in globalization where people who live in Singapore and Johannesburg and London have more in common with people who live in Manhattan than perhaps people who live in Manhattan have with people who live in upstate, rural New York,” he said.

These divides can be seen on a global scale as well. Both Brexit and the 2016 United States presidential election exposed stark ideological differences along geographical lines within one nation.

“There is a risk of exacerbating the traditional urban/rural conflict,” he said.

“When that goes global, there are some real challenges.”

The discussion, which was held at Fordham School of Law, featured David Goodwin, author of Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street, (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Patrick Verel, author of Graffiti Murals: Exploring the Impacts of Street Art. (Schiffer Press, 2015) Geeta Tewari LAW ’05, associate director of the Urban Law Center, who served as moderator for the event.

Read the full story at Fordham Law News.

This past May, Fordham took a big step toward embracing this new world, as 14 members of the faculty and administration traveled to Sophia University in Japan as part of the first Fordham Faculty Research Abroad program.

The delegation, which was led by Fordham’s provost, the late Stephen M. Freedman, Ph.D., hailed from fields as varied as political science, economics, biological sciences, education, social service, and art history. The theme of the trip was comparative urban studies.

George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs, said the trip was the result of Fordham’s Continuous University Strategic Planning (CUSP) process, which the University began in 2015.

In the CUSP process, four areas were given high priority: Interdisciplinary research, sponsored research, global research, and faculty-student research collaborations. This trip fulfilled all of those priorities by bringing Fordham researchers into contact with peers in Japan who are pursuing research on many topics within that field. It also established an exchange program for faculty and students between the two schools.

Collaborating on Food Justice

One of those connections was between Garrett Broad, Ph.D., assistant professor of Communication and Media Studies and James Farrer, Ph.D., a professor of sociology and global studies at Sophia University. Farrer has been researching food entrepreneurship in Tokyo and the role that small vendors play in local economies, a topic of interest to Broad, who penned More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change (University of California Press, 2016).

“We’re talking about setting up a workshop here in New York at some point next year where we bring together a group of scholars who are exploring issues related to food, society, globalization and local food economies,” Broad said.

“The hope for this enterprise is it’s not a one off, where we had this nice trip to Tokyo, made some friends and that’s that. We want to continue and build some partnerships, and since there’s only so much you can do in just a few days, a workshop is a way we can keep the momentum going.”

Broad also took the opportunity to visit and interview scientists at a Tokyo organization that is experimenting with “cellular agriculture.” The technology, which Broad had already been researching for an upcoming project, involves growing meat in a laboratory, negating the need to slaughter animals. To help him overcome language and cultural barriers, he recruited Sophia University undergraduate students to accompany him.

Making Personal Connections in the Field

Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of Fordham’s urban studies program, came away from the trip deeply affected by potential collaborations. While one group from Fordham was given a tour related to sustainability and environmental issues, she attended a tour centered on social issues that was led by Nanako Inaba, a professor in Sophia’s department of global studies.

Of particular interest to Hinze was a public park that had recently been partially sold to private interests, including Nike. A sizable homeless population still calls the park home, and Hinze interviewed one of them to get a sense of how his presence was actually a form of protest.

“I’m a field researcher first and foremost, and in order to understand places, it’s vital to actually visit them and get to know them a little bit. The initial connections you make with people can be the jumping point for creating meaningful research partnerships,” she said.

“The walking tours were amazing, because they were done by people who are academics who are researching social or sustainability issues and who really know the environment.”

Global Partnerships Critical to Funded Research

Connections such as these are crucial to solving challenges, Hong said. They’re also often a prerequisite for researchers who wants to get their projects funded by some external sources.

“More and more American foundations are requiring global partnership as precondition for applications. If you don’t have an international partner, you are out,” he said.

On that front, the trip was also a success, as Fordham faculty identified 27 researchers in Japan who are ready to collaborate on joint grant proposals, research projects, and research papers. Hong and his team also identified more than 40 funding opportunities to support these research projects. Several faculty members are working on joint proposals, he said, and one has already submitted one. He expects that there will be opportunities for Fordham students to assist in future studies as well.

Hong noted that a byproduct of Fordham faculty traveling together was also an increase in collaborations amongst themselves. Next summer, a group of them will travel to Europe, where the theme will be “digital scholarship.”

“They immediately picked up some ideas and learned from each other. It was the same subject, urban studies, but different disciplines, education, social service, the sciences, history, social sciences, humanities, natural science,” he said.

In addition to prearranged meetings, there were serendipitous meetings at Sophia University as well. Takehiro Watanabe, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology at Sophia whose research touches on participatory community environmental processes, led the Fordham contingent on a tour of a river revitalization project and chaired a panel discussion that Broad participated in.

“Afterward, he saw some things in my presentation that connected to some of the subjects that he’s interested in, such as participatory science and citizen science,” Broad said.

“The more time you’re able to spend, and the more people you’re able to meet, you realize you have more in common.”

That was one of the conclusions of “Global Migration and Cities: Urban Governance, Migration, and the Refugee Crisis,” a panel discussion held Friday, Feb. 9 at the Lincoln Center campus.

The panel, which was part of conference organized by the Fordham Urban Consortium, featured

-Els de Graauw, P.D., associate professor of political science, at Baruch College

-Jennifer Gordon, professor of law at Fordham Law School

-Annika Hinze, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies program at Fordham

Judy Benjamin, Ph.D, the Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow at the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, moderated the panel, which touched upon everything from the plight of Syrian war refugees to the estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants living in New York City.

Hinze noted that although refugees are no longer confined to camps, and immigrants in the United States no longer only settle in “gateway” cities such as New York City, cities still offer a level of integration that a nation states can’t offer.

“There are already communities in place that provide immigrants with an intermediary, rather than being plunged into a new national context with different customs,” she said.

She said it’s also important to remember that immigrants are also settling in places like Alabama and North Carolina.

“This is an important conversation to have, because in a way, it takes away this dichotomy between the large metropolis and rural areas, because rural areas are increasingly feeding immigration,” she said.

De Graauw agreed, noting that immigrant affairs offices are springing up around the country.

“Ten to 15 years ago, you could probably count on one or maybe two hands how many cities had those offices. Today, we have over 40 of them, and they’re not just in the expected places like New York City. They’re also found in much smaller places, like Memphis,” she said.

“Cities are trying to figure out what they can do, because they are responsible for creating productive, healthy and stable communities. They know all too well that if you alienate or drive underground big segments of your population, it’s going to have ripple effects in many different ways.”

Local context is still important, as a place like Detroit is more amenable to the notion that immigrants are a demographic lifeline than say Atlanta, which de Graauw said is seeing greater immigrant population growth in the suburbs. But issues such as municipal I.D. cards, which New Haven first unveiled in 2007, bring together cities into groups such as Cities for Action, which a coalition of over 150 mayors and municipal leaders.

Gordon said Amman, Jordan, is a good example of how a city can ally itself with an international non-governmental organization to push its national government in a progressive direction. The European Union and the United Nations promised aid to Jordan if it agreed to make it possible for 200,000 Syrian refugees to work legally. In August, the national government agreed, but it restricted that employment to specific work, such as that in garment factories, and it set aside 20 desirable occupations to Jordanians. Amman officials have pushed back hard though, and have tentatively received exceptions for jobs in construction.

“That to me is a potential positive story about cities, and international human rights organizations combining to successfully put pressure on the national government,” Gordon said.