CitySCOPE Podcast

What are Opportunity Zones? What is at stake? Allie Yee, MBA (SOM) and Professor Kate Cooney introduce the opportunity zone policy passed as part of the Jobs and Tax Cuts Act of 2017, the problems it is trying to solve and the incentives it creates to solve them. Dramatic explication of the mechanisms of the OZ incentives performed by guest hosts Sarah Harrari, graduate of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and SOM and Dan Bitner, MBA (SOM). To explore what is at stake for the OZ program, podcast hosts Allie Yee and Professor Kate Cooney present audio snippets from a selection of the guests interviewed for the eight episodes of CitySCOPE podcast, Season 1.

Affordable Housing and the OZ policy, Lauren Harper ’20, and Christian Rodriguez ’19 examine the roots of the affordable housing crisis in the United States and explore the challenges and opportunities for addressing it with CitySCOPE podcast guests: Karen Dubois Walton, President of Elm City Communities in New Haven and Brandon Weiss, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. We ask our guests their perspectives on the potential of the OZ policy for addressing the need for affordable housing. Topics covered include: the history of public housing and redlining, current regional dynamics inherited from redlining era, key issues of how to boost supply of affordable housing and where to build it, current trends in providing affordable housing such as mixed-income, mixed-use models, inclusionary zoning, community land trusts, and rent control.

Community Land Trusts, Gentrification and the OZ, Dan Bitner, MBA speaks with Julius Kimbrough from the Crescent City Community Land Trust in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Val Orseli from Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association in NYC’s Lower East Side.  In this episode, we explore gentrification pressures and how CLTs can act as a bulwark for affordability in rapidly changing neighborhoods.  Dan Bitner leads listeners through the basics of how CLTs operate and learns about innovations on the CLT model from our guests. These innovations include: the scattered site CLT in the Lower East Side which now encompasses over 20 buildings, and the use of predial servitude and deed restrictions in mixed income, mixed use buildings such as the newly restored Pythian building in New Orleans.  We end by asking our guests for their insights into the current opportunities and challenges for the CLT model.  

Investing in Businesses in Opportunity Zones, Professor Kate Cooney explains the current status of OZ regulation related to business investment and highlights the key questions about these regulations that have slowed down investor action in this area and also the tensions in play around community benefit.  Dr. Cooney leads listeners through a series of models for supporting local entrepreneurs in OZs, including mixed use housing developments with ground floor commercial that might be both amenable to OZ investments and supportive of the growth of local entrepreneurs, a corner store Bodega economic development program yielding real results, impact investment funds focused on helping small and medium size businesses grow along with the regional economy in gentrifying neighborhoods, and an arts based economic development project with business and neighborhood development in its sights. Guests include: Greg Reaves from Mosaic Development Partners in Philadelphia, Joe Evans from The Kresge Foundation, James Johnson-Piett from Urbane Development, Aliana Pineiro from the Boston Impact Initiative, Lucas Turner-Owens from the Boston Ujima Project and Jason Price from NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. 

The Food Hall Trend and Inclusive Growth, podcast hosts Sara Harari, recent graduate of the Yale SOM and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Dan Bitner, MBA from Yale SOM help listeners understand just what is the difference between a food hall and a food court, the evolution of food halls over the last 10-15 years, and the economics of how they work both from the developer and the food entrepreneur’s perspectives.  With Guests James Johnson-Piett from Urbane Development in Brooklyn, NYC and Nancy Halpern Ibrahim from the Mercado de Paloma in South Central Los Angeles, Sara and Dan explore the ways that Food Halls can be anchors for cultural exchange and celebration, for cross class interaction, and, in the case of the Flatbush Caton Market redevelopment underway at Urbane, even cater to a global diaspora while remaining firmly rooted in a local community.  The episode also features a short cutaway to hearing about the role of the Food Hall at the Pythian Market in New Orleans and the work of Julius Kimbrough at the Crescent City Community Land Trust.

Fab Labs and Maker Spaces in the New Economy, Liam Grace Flood, MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management speaks with two guests on the origins and potential of the Fab Lab and Maker Space movement: Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Professor from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and Jerry Davis, Associate Dean for Business and Impact at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Topics covered include: the third digital revolution, the potential for Fab Labs and Maker Spaces to create opportunities for self-sufficient production, the future of fabrication technologies and local versus corporate control of them, fabrication and implications for the future of work, and emerging practices for local governance and stakeholder control of Fab Lab networks.  Before coming to Yale, Liam Grace-Flood, the podcast host for episode 6, spent a year exploring makerspaces and their broader context across Europe, South Asia, and South and East Africa as a Watson Fellow.  Many of his learnings were published in an often-weekly column for Make: Magazine called Open World.

Creative Financing for Community Inclusion, podcast hosts Nina Crook, graduate of Yale SOM with a Masters in Global Business and Society and Camilo Monge, MBA guide listeners through a series of conversations exploring different models of creative financing to build inclusive models for economic development and make possible investments in innovation that maximize community benefit.  Guest interviews with: Joe Evans from The Kresge Foundation, Aliana Pineiro from Boston Impact Initiative, Greg Reaves from Mosaic Development Partners and Eric Letsinger from Quantified Ventures. Topics covered include: use of impact covenants for Opportunity Funds to differentiate funds with community benefit commitments, crowdfunding and other strategies to share the wealth potential of OZ projects with community members, and environmental impact bonds as another arrow in the quiver for municipalities layering OZ projects alongside other investments as part of a broader OZ development planning process.

Opportunity Zones in New Haven and Final Reflections, podcast hosts Song Kim, MBA candidate and Professor Kate Cooney begin by reviewing the work done in the Spring 2019 Inclusive Economic Development Lab class, where teams of students learned about 4 neighborhoods in New Haven that contain OZ tracts and made suggestions about how the models we studied (Food Halls, Fab Labs, CLTs) might be deployed in each neighborhood.  The neighborhoods are: Hill South, Dixwell, Newhallville and Fair Haven.  Next, Song and Kate review some of the key insights from the interviews with the guests we met over Season 1 of CitySCOPE podcast and highlight some general takeaways about the challenges and opportunities in inclusive economic development work. We finish with some general reflections of our own.  Thanks for taking this journey with us, we hope it is useful in sparking your imagination about how to make Opportunity Zone investment create real opportunities for the communities currently living in the zones.

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

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!

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

On episode 4 of the CitySCOPE Podcast, Arianna Blanco and Naomi Shachter, co-hosts from episode 3, continue the conversation about race and place focusing this week on education.  We speak with Barbara Biasi of the Yale School of Management on the role of finance in shaping racial and class based inequities in public schools and efforts to remediate them. Biasi describes the highly decentralized nature of public education in the United States, resulting in a trade-off between local control and inter-district funding equity. We also interview Sarah Medina Camiscoli, founder and former executive director of IntegrateNYC, a youth-led organization seeking integration and equity in New York public schools, on their efforts to integrate the largest, and also one of the most segregated, public school districts in the country. Join us for this week's episode! Show Notes: 1. Supreme Inequality by Adam Cohen, Penguin Press 2020, mentioned in the podcast can be ordered online; listen to a book talk with Adam Cohen at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. here. 2. Learn more about Professor Rucker C. Johnson's research on school desegregation. 3. IntegrateNYC 4. UCLA Civil Rights Project report on NY school segregation, released in 2014, mentioned in the podcast here, see recent report from UCLA Civil Rights Project on NY, published in 2019, showing decline in segregation in gentrifying neighborhoods here. Photo credit: Sarah Medina Camiscoli, IntegrateNYC

We commonly hear calls for government to operate more efficiently from legislators, oversight groups, and government executives alike. While public sector efficiency may be valuable for functions like street repair, permitting, and waste collection, can it also raise barriers to meaningful civic engagement between residents and their governments? This week on the CitySCOPE Podcast, our co-hosts Uzma Amin and Tessa Ruben speak with Eric Gordon, director of the Engagement Lab and professor at Emerson College about creating meaningful inefficiencies that allow people to engage with government systems. Gordon draws a parallel between civic engagement and play: games are full of inefficiencies, it is games' intentionally cultivated difficulty within a clear rules structure that make them fun and meaningful. At a time when trust in government in the United States is at an all-time low, Gordon challenges us to ask: how might we create opportunities for a play-like sense of engagement in civic processes to connect communities to public systems, and to each other, in meaningful ways? Listen to find out more! Photo credit: Courtesy of Craig Walker / Boston Globe Staff

What is your mental model of an ideal worker? Is your mindset creating blind spots about talent development? In this week's episode of the CitySCOPE podcast, our co-hosts Norbert Cichon and Brice Eidson speak with leaders of two workforce intermediaries that have developed creative strategies for regional workforce development. David Dodson, past President of MDC Inc., (and Yale SOM graduate!) highlights the importance of connecting young people to work and learning opportunities early in their education-to-career trajectory, both for the young people and for their employers. His experience with the Made in Durham effort in Durham, North Carolina illustrates both the opportunities and the challenges in this work, even in an economically strong region, home to innovative, globally competitive companies. Jerry Rubin of Jewish Vocational Services in Boston, shares lessons from his decades of work developing smart and responsive initiatives building bridges to career opportunities in the healthcare sector. At a time when the American economy is producing both highly paid jobs for those with higher levels of education and large numbers of low wage jobs, Jerry shares what he's learned about how to direct supply side training toward demand-side needs and the importance of pairing those initiatives with strategic efforts to address job quality at the sector level. Join us for a great conversation! Photo credit: Made in Durham

In the U.S. political economy, some economic regions grow and gain in prosperity in sustained ways while other cities' fortunes rise and fall over time. How do cities come together to shape these trajectories? In this week's episode, our co-hosts Evan Oleson and Stephen Henriques speak with Prabal Chakrabarti from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston about the lessons learned from the Working Cities Challenge aimed at supporting catalytic cross-sector initiatives to reimagine economic paths forward in smaller, post-industrial cities. We also speak with James Johnson-Piett from Urbane Development about his work on the Sunnyside Yard Master Plan where multiple communities came together to envision the way a major public development project could support future visions of the city. James shares how this envisioning process can also be used at the neighborhood level, using an example from Philadelphia to illuminate different development pathways for a neighborhood as it evolves alongside broader strategic initiatives at the city level. Photo credit: Urbane Development

Join us for episode 8 as hosts Alexandra Sing, Marisa Berry and Kate Cooney wrap up Season 2 of the CitySCOPE podcast rethinking community engagement and the role of narratives in inclusive economic development. In this episode, we reflect on how the lessons learned from other cities might apply in New Haven, the city where we live!

Welcome to Season 3 of the CitySCOPE podcast! In episode 1, we introduce our theme–Supporting and Scaling Black -owned and Black -led businesses.  To kick things off, Kate Cooney from the Yale School of Management and James Johnson-Piett from Urbane discuss the importance of the current moment and the surge of attention and support for Black businesses.  As always, we conclude with a sneak peek of the conversations to come over the future episodes of the 2021 season.  We have some great guests lined up and we can’t wait to share our conversations with you!

On episode 2 of the CitySCOPE podcast, we explore the research on ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurship and the American Dream and how it relates to the literature on Black business.  This episode features conversations with Zulema Valdez, Associate Vice Provost for the Faculty and Professor in Sociology at the University of California, Merced  and Gerald Jaynes, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, African American Studies, and Urban Studies as well as Tim Bates, Professor emeritus at Wayne State University.   *Photo credit: The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.  

Episode 3 of the CitySCOPE podcast features Professor Gerald Jaynes, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, African American Studies, and Urban Studies with lead in commentary from Tim Bates, Professor emeritus at Wayne State University and Fred McKinney,  former Carlton Highsmith Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac University and the past Director of the People’s United Bank Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship also at Quinnipiac University.  This week we look at some stories of 19th and 20th century Black entrepreneurs who made it big, despite the odds.    *Photo credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File. 

Join us for Episode 4 of the CitySCOPE podcast where we continue our exploration into the history of initiatives to support Black owned businesses in the United States.  In this episode we feature conversations about the policy side of the story with Tim Bates, Professor emeritus at Wayne State University and Fred McKinney, recently retired Carlton Highsmith Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Quinnipiac University and the past Director of the People’s United Bank Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship also at Quinnipiac University.