Turning 10, Urban Matters Looks Back – and Ahead
On Sept. 22, 2015, two days before Pope Francis’s scheduled arrival at JFK Airport, a brief essay landed in email inboxes around New York City. Written by Rev. Rubén Austria, a Bronx minister involved in creating alternatives to incarceration, it praised Francis’s decision to visit Pennsylvania prison inmates during his American stay.
It was the first Urban Matters, a weekly publication from the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.
Urban Matters was conceived by Kristin Morse, CNYCA’s then-new executive director, as a way to regularly showcase the work of a broad range of thinkers and doers, all committed to creating communities of security, achievement, and dignity.
The journalistic timeliness and large-spirited decency and compassion of that inaugural piece have, we hope, continued to animate Urban Matters.
Chronologically, its ensuing hundreds of op-eds, interviews, book and video excerpts, and photo essays divide into three distinct parts.
It’s rather astonishing now to rediscover the optimism that runs through so much of the first part – the roughly four and a half years that immediately followed our launch.
Because while hardly ignoring the city’s challenges, those Urban Matters also regularly described successes in meeting them.
As economist James Parrott, who established CNYCA’s economic and fiscal policies unit in 2017, has often stressed, it was a time in our city marked by rising employment, declining poverty, and flattening income inequality. They were, in short, years of hope for thousands of working-class New Yorkers.
Progressive public policies – a higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and a fair workweek scheduling law – played key roles in that story. Together, they were, as a 2018 Urban Matters described them, elements of the “most ambitious package of labor standards reforms since the New Deal.”
Winds of change were also blowing through the justice system, fanning efforts described in Urban Matters to replace the city’s notorious Rikers Island corrections facilities, end the criminal justice system’s routine treatment of 16-year-olds as adults, and institute other reforms.
It was a hopeful spirit that also found expression in CNYCA’s Institute for Transformative Mentoring. Established in 2017, it has provided professional guidance to hundreds of “credible messengers” doing highly effective community-based anti-violence work, often featured in Urban Matters.
In those early years, CNYCA’s Insideschools team also produced Urban Matters pieces finding “reasons for hope” in integrating New York’s public schools and proposing ways to improve diversity and educational quality in our schools.
Then came March 2020 and Covid-19. For the next roughly two-plus years – its second phase – Urban Matters mapped the pandemic’s seismic impact on families and neighborhoods, hospitals and schools, businesses and jobs, government services and finances, and on our social interactions and inner lives.
Undoubtedly, some of Urban Matters’ earlier optimism dimmed in the process. How could it not? We were immersed in describing the deadly toll of health care inequities – the strains that remote learning and the stop-and-start reopening of schools put on students – and a sudden reversal of hard-won economic progress, as the well-off prospered while the working poor lost ground in a skewed post-pandemic recovery.
Across those perilous months, however, on topics ranging from economic development to child care to environmental justice, we also looked ahead to a better, “reopened” city.
For example, during the Covid lockdown – and defying predictions to the contrary – child abuse and neglect reports fell sharply, while temporary pandemic financial relief improved family wellbeing. Those dual trends encouraged a growing legal and political movement, embraced by CNYCA and highlighted in Urban Matters, to provide support to distressed families while drastically reducing their punitive, intrusive, and counter-productive surveillance by governmental child protective services.
Throughout its history, New York has regularly remade itself – and the challenges of doing so again have, beginning in late 2022, set the tone for Urban Matters’ third, current, post-pandemic chapter.
Today, we confront rising poverty and income inequality, a shrinking middle class, an increase in contingent and often exploitative working arrangements, and a private sector seemingly stuck in low gear.
In response, one 2024 Urban Matters suggested how a fairer deal might emerge from this reshuffled economic deck. Addressing the crushing costs of New York life, other entries have described policies designed to make housing and child care both more available and affordable.
And even in the face of aggressively harsh immigration enforcement, Urban Matters has described how the Insideschools team and New Yorkers of good will have reached out to the recent wave of asylum seekers in our city, and, in Pope Francis’s memorable words, sought to “build bridges, not walls.”
Speaking personally, being part of this process has been immensely stimulating and gratifying – not least because of the collaborations it has produced.
They’ve included fruitful partnerships with a range of organizations, including the Community Service Society, Feet in 2 Worlds, Measure of America, the Building Movement Project, the Education Trust-New York, Just Action, the New Economy Project, Women Creating Change, NYU Press, and Cornell University Press.
Frequent individual contributors, including but not limited to, Jennifer Jones Austin, Barbara Caress, Julia Davis, Ruth Messinger, Elizabeth Powers, Robert Snyder, and Justin Wood have generously shared their insights on a range of important issues.
So have current and former New School scholars, including Ana Baptista, Adam Brown, Bridget Fisher, Julia Foulkes, Mindy Fullilove, Teresa Ghilarducci, Darrick Hamilton, Joseph Heathcott, Rick McGahey, Rachel Meltzer, Honor Moore, Alex Schwartz, Lisa Servon, Jeff Smith, Maya Wiley, and Tanisha Lavette Williams.
We’ve benefitted deeply from the perceptive and timely research, reporting, and writing of current and former CNYCA colleagues, including Angela Butel, William Evans, Clara Hemphill, Talib Hudson, Kendra Hurley, Audrey Jenkins, Abigail Kramer, Lauren Leiker, Flávia Leite, Sierra Lewandowski, Tom Liam Lynch, Nicole Mader, Courtnie McMillan, Joyce McMillan, Lauren Melodia, Lina Moe, Kristin Morse, Five Maulimm-ak, Kim Nauer, Mohamed Obaidy, James Parrott, Natasha Quiroga, Lydie Raschka, John Rudolph, Tamara Oyala-Santiago, George Sweeting, Cincere Wilson, and Laura Zingmond.
Urban Matters has been enriched by the photography of Kamille Vargas and Matias Campa, the design talents of Isabella Wang, Milan Gary, Ana Holsuch, and Alexander Brydon.
We’re also grateful to you, our readers. We’ve tried to inform, stimulate, and entertain you for the past 10 years. And we hope you’ll stay with us in the months and years ahead.
Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. He has managed Urban Matters since its inception.