The Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) is pleased to announce the competition for the 2021–2022 Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs, and invites interested faculty from across the University of Minnesota to apply for this award.

The Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs provides one year of support for the research activities of a University of Minnesota faculty member on a project related to urban and regional affairs in Minnesota. 

Funds may be used to obtain release time or other support for the project and may be used for either new or current…

The Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) invites proposals for our Faculty Interactive Research Program (FIRP). University of Minnesota faculty are critical resources in exploring issues and concerns important to Minnesota, such as the criminal justice system, demography, state or local economic development, education, employment, energy, the environment, health, housing, state and local government, welfare and poverty, human and social services, transportation, or land use and development.

The FIRP encourages University faculty to carry out…

Program Time Frame: January 2021 - January 2022

Desired Start Date: Late December 2020 to early January 2021

Compensation: Negotiable

Proposal due date: December 18, 2020 on or before 10:00 a.m. Closing date for all questions: December 04, 2020 before 10:00 a.m.

Pre-proposal conference: if Applicable

For more information, questions, or concerns, please contact Laurel Lilligren (llilligren@peopleservingpeople.org; 612-252-4027).

RFP Background

People Serving People,…

A team of researchers from CURA will produce a study of the potential impacts of a rent stabilization policy for the City of Minneapolis. The study will examine market trends and existing conditions in the city's rental housing stock, population and income trends over the past 20 years, and the city's rent affordability gap. The CURA team will also produce an analysis of the potential economic impact of different types of rent stabilization policies.  CURA will provide a summary of the experience of other cities who have enacted rent stabilization. The research team is led by Edward G. Goetz, and includes Tony Damiano, Jeff Matson, Peter Brown, and Patrick Alcorn. The report will be…

CURA senior research associate Dr. Brittany Lewis and graduate research assistant Molly Calhoun’s North Minneapolis evictions research was recently published in “Collaborations: A Journal of Community-Based Research and Practice.” 

Abstract: Single Black mothers face the highest risk of eviction in the United States. In North Minneapolis, a community manufactured to contain undesirable populations through housing discrimination, decades of urban disinvestment, and unfair lending practices, the situation has become further exacerbated by the rise in distressed-property investment and disproportionate…

The City of Minneapolis is moving to initiate a “community preference” policy, to give residents residing within certain neighborhoods preference to receive assistance for specific city affordable housing programs or projects. Such preference policies have been adopted by other cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle in order to mitigate the displacement of residents from neighborhoods experiencing rapid increases in housing costs. 

CURA researchers Edward G. Goetz and Aaron Sepulveda modeled several different kinds of preference policies for the City of Minneapolis to estimate the impacts of different policy choices available to the city. The…

The vocabulary of neighborhood policymaking in the U.S. generally contrasts neighborhoods of concentrated poverty on the one hand with opportunity neighborhoods on the other. Policymakers target “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and researchers write about the disadvantage and dysfunction of these neighborhoods. For decades, U.S. housing policy has been oriented toward moving lower-income households out of those neighborhoods and into what policymakers regard as better environments where the families will have access to greater opportunities in education and employment. In many cities, however, residents of low-wealth neighborhoods are resisting the stigmatizing of their…

People Serving People, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), Research in Action, and Hennepin County, are pursuing a pilot program to grow family stability by demonstrating sustainable alternatives to self-pay for families experiencing homelessness. We are further pursuing the goal to build family financial power and make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.

Families directly impacted by homelessness and self-pay know what is best for themselves, and we must center their experience, voices, and choices. As people impacted by system decisions, they should inform and influence them.

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