Academic Year 2013-14     

· Winter-Spring 2014 · 
Garshick-Kleit  ·  Walsh  ·  Galster  ·  Kurland & Wallace

"The Changing Role of Public Housing Authorities in the Affordable Housing Delivery System"

Rachel Garshick Kleit, PhD
Friday, January 24, 2014
Noon to 1:15pm, 1st Floor Conference Room, 3343 Forbes Ave

Flyer  •   Slides

Rachel is Head of the City and Regional Planning Section at the Knowlton School. Previously, she was Associate Professor in the Evans School of Public Affairs and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. She received a Bachelor of Art, from Brandeis University, a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include housing mobility and location choice, affordable housing policy, housing as a poverty alleviation strategy, equity impacts of economic development, urban and regional disparity. She teaches courses on affordable housing policy, metropolitan policy, social equity, and advanced planning theory.

Public housing authorities (PHAs) in the U.S. have transformed from entirely public endeavors to public-private hybrids that must respond to market forces. As the recession began, PHAs were just beginning to experience the full effects of this transition. Using 13 cases studies of the largest PHAs in the Pacific Northwest, she will outline activities PHAs undertake in this devolved, market-based context. The different responses by PHAs point to the under-valued attribute of public housing authorities as local organizations with diverse mandates. Dependence on HUD, local charter, and the degree of integration with local government contributed to PHAs’ propensity to develop non-HUD-assisted affordable housing. Even with this creativity, adequate resources are needed to meet the demand for affordable housing for the poorest households as market conditions change.

"Race, Ethnicity, and Zoning in Chicago"

Randall Walsh, PhD
Friday, February 7, 2014
Noon to 1:15pm, 1st Floor Conference Room, 3343 Forbes Ave

Flyer

Randall Walsh, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include public economics, urban economics, environmental economics, and racial disparities. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Duke, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Walsh also serves as a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and is also Co-Editor of the journal Economic Inquiry. Dr. Walsh serves on the Advisory Board of the Center for Race and Social Problems at the University of Pittsburgh, and on the Faculty Advisory Board with the University’s Urban Studies Program. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Walsh was an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado. 

In 1923, one of the nation’s first comprehensive zoning ordinances was adopted in Chicago, Illinois. The ordinance did not provide the City with the ability to explicitly use race or ethnicity in the zoning code. Dr. Walsh will discuss to what degree racial and ethnic discrimination was evident through differential application of the zoning code, and the impacts of zoning on current land use patterns.

"Driving Detroit:  The Quest for Respect in the Motor City"

George Galster, PhD
Friday, February 21, 2014
Noon to 1:15pm, NOTE:  William Pitt Union, Lower Lounge

Flyer

George Galster, Ph.D. is the Clarence B. Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. with undergraduate degrees from Wittenberg and Case Western Reserve. He has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles and 30 book chapters on topics ranging from metropolitan housing markets, racial discrimination and segregation, neighborhood dynamics, residential reinvestment, community lending and insurance patterns, neighborhood effects, and urban poverty, and has authored, co-authored, and edited eight books. Dr. Galster also provides a wealth of experience in academic, governmental, non-profit, and for-profit circles, and has held positions at the Universities of: Harvard, Berkeley, and North Carolina among others. He served as Director of Housing Research at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC before coming to Wayne State in 1996. 

Please join us as George Galster discusses his book Driving Detroit and Detroit’s bankruptcy crisis:

“For most of the twentieth century, Detroit was a symbol of American industrial might, a place of entrepreneurial and technical ingenuity where the latest consumer inventions were made available to everyone through the genius of mass production. Today, Detroit is better known for its dwindling population, moribund automobile industry, and alarmingly high murder rate. In Driving Detroit, author George Galster, a fifth-generation Detroiter and internationally known urbanist, sets out to understand how the city has come to represent both the best and worst of what cities can be, all within the span of a half century.” (University of Pennsylvania Press).

"Health and Geographic Information Systems"

Kristen Kurland  &  David Wallace, MD, MPH
  Friday, February 28, 2014
Noon to 1:15pm, 1st Floor Conference Room, 3343 Forbes Ave

Flyer

Kristen Kurland has a joint faculty appointment in CMU's School of Architecture and the H. John Heinz III College, and is a nationally and internationally known expert on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), particularly as they relate to health. Kurland’s research focuses on community design, its influence on health, and how public policy can improve public health through thoughtful design decisions. Her recent work includes studies of how the built environment affects patterns of childhood obesity, pedestrian injuries, and other health conditions. She actively collaborates with physicians, public health officials, city planners, and others interested in health and the built environment. Kurland is the co-author of best-selling GIS books, has won numerous teaching awards, as well as the Esri 2012 Health Communications Award. She serves this year as president-elect of the Andrew Carnegie Society, a donor society at Carnegie Mellon.

David Wallace, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Critical Care Medicine and Emergency Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He was awarded a Master's of Public Health in epidemiology from Emory University and worked staff epidemiologist in the Emerging Infections Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He earned his medical degree from the State University of New York Downstate and completed his residency training in combined emergency medicine and internal medicine at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. He completed a critical care medicine fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh and then spent an additional year as a post-doctoral scholar through the National Institutes of Health’s National Research Service Award training program. Dr. Wallace is currently funded the National Institutes of Health to study health care geography. His research interests relate to the structural organization of critical care and regional health care quality