Metropolitics

Education Myths, Black Self-Determination, and University Accountability to the City

Christopher R. Rogers & Laura Wolf-Powers — 2024-03-08T06:00:00Z

Laura Wolf-Powers interviews scholar and community organizer Chris Rogers about his extensive work in Philadelphia. They discuss his journey to Penn and activism against the University of Pennsylvania's “parasitic relationship to Black Philadelphia,” including policing on campus, housing struggles, and efforts for payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs).
---- Series: Black Power and Black Self-Determination in a New Time and New Spaces I'm Laura Wolf-Powers, a professor of urban planning at CUNY

- Interviews / Philadelphia, education, Black Lives Matter, Black politics, university, self-determination, housing, activism, Black Power, Movement for Black Lives

Reclaim Value Capture for Equitable Urban Development

Laura Wolf-Powers — 2019-05-28T05:00:00Z

Land-value capture (LVC) mechanisms have become a popular tool for fiscally constrained municipal policymakers. However, there is evidence that many such policies exacerbate existing patterns of urban inequality. Drawing from work with the Pratt Center for Community Development in New York City, Laura Wolf-Powers urges a four-step approach that centers equity and resource redistribution.
The term “value capture” describes policies intended to “secure societal benefits from increases in land

- Debates / Atlanta, New York, urban planning, urban policy, real estate, inequalities, urban inequality, value capture, Georgia

Restless Cities

Laura Wolf-Powers — 2016-10-25T05:00:00Z

The world of downtown real-estate development seems to have a life of its own, independent of demand for space and animated by financialization and public subsidy. Commenting on Rachel Weber's book From Boom to Bubble, Laura Wolf‑Powers wonders what the creation of 20 million square feet of office space and 34,000 housing units in downtown Chicago during the 2000s has to say about urban redevelopment more broadly.
Obscure news items like this one—“Aramark moving Schuylkill-side as downtown

- Reviews / Chicago, United States, urban development, real estate, asset bubbles

Food Deserts and Wage Deserts: The Importance of Metaphor in Policy and Activism

Laura Wolf-Powers — 2015-04-28T04:50:00Z

So-called “food deserts,” or neighborhoods deprived of businesses that sell healthy foods, are also poor neighborhoods, where even workers don't make enough for basic living, regardless of food options. Laura Wolf-Powers introduces the concept of “wage deserts” to shed light on these islands of poverty and advocate for economic and policy measures that go beyond access to food.
Since the early 2000s, food deserts—“low income neighborhoods, both urban and rural, that have limited access to

- From the Field / United States, food, poverty, food deserts, wage deserts, Philadelphia, activism