Housing insecurity is life-altering no matter the macroeconomic or public health context. Recessions exacerbate this. How can we change policies to fight housing insecurity during times of economic security as well as times of economic turmoil? How can we structure policies not just to provide housing, but also to create healthy and just communities? Panelists Akira Drake Rodriguez and Marcela Mitaynes discussed this and more with moderators Jamila Michener and Giancarlo Valdetaro.
This event is in collaboration with the Cornell Political Union (CPU).
Panelists
Yolanda Cadore is the Acting Executive Director NYS Tenants & Neighbors. From 2010 to 2015, she was the Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Drug Policy Alliance. She currently serves as a volunteer coordinator of strategic partnerships for the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race (TRRR) and as the US coordinator for the #MLK Global Initiative. She has spent the last fifteen years working with grassroots organizations in New York City, nationally and internationally.
Akira Drake Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research examines the politics of urban planning, or the ways that disenfranchised groups re-appropriate their marginalized spaces in the city to gain access to and sustain urban political power. Using an interdisciplinary and multiple method approach, her research engages scholarship across fields, using both qualitative and quantitative data and methods.
Marcela Mitaynes is a New York State Assembly Representative, representing Red Hook, Sunset Park, and northern Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, New York. After her own eviction from a rent-stabilized apartment she had lived in for 30 years, Assemblywoman Mitaynes became involved in local tenant advocacy, including helping pass the landmark Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, before running and winning elected office herself in 2020.
Moderators
Jamila Michener is an associate professor in the department of Government at Cornell University. She studies poverty, race, and public policy in the United States. She is author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press). Her current research examines the ways that civil legal institutions affect democratic citizenship in marginalized communities. She is co-director of the Cornell Center of Health Equity and chair of the advisory board for the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP).
Giancarlo Valdetaro is a junior studying Government and History at Cornell University. He took a year off from school last year to work on state legislative elections for the Democratic Party of Georgia in 2020. He is interested in the impact of race and class on the history of U.S. democracy, as well as the politics of space, transportation, and housing in the United States. Giancarlo is an active member of the Cornell Political Union (CPU).