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Book Launch

Book Talk | Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing

09/15 Thursday | 5pm

UPDATED 9/8/2022:

Due to NYU’s COVID visitor policy, from this point forward (9/8/22), individuals who wish to register to attend in person must have active NYU IDs and be able to show the Violet Go pass prior to entry. All other audience members are invited to join the event via Zoom. Please RSVP HERE for Zoom and RSVP above for in-person. If you already registered to join in-person and do not have an active NYU ID, be sure to follow the instructions that are emailed to you through NYU.

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to a book talk on Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing, featuring the author Max Holleran in conversation with Sharon Zukin and Ingrid Gould Ellen.

The exorbitant costs of urban housing and the widening gap in income inequality are fueling a combative new movement in cities around the world. A growing number of influential activists aren’t waiting for new public housing to be built. Instead, they’re calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability. Yes to the City offers an in-depth look at the “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement. From its origins in San Francisco to its current cadre of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Max Holleran explores how urban density, once maligned for its association with overpopulated slums, has become a rallying cry for millennial activists locked out of housing markets and unable to pay high rents.

Max Holleran is Lecturer of Social Policy at the University of Melbourne. His work focuses on the politics of urban development in the US, EU, and Australia, particularly post-socialist privatization, tourism economies, and gentrification. His work has appeared in The New Republic, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, Places, Slate, and Aeon. He is the author of Tourism, Urbanization, and the Evolving Periphery of the European Union (2019) and Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing (2022).

Sharon Zukin is professor emerita of sociology and of earth and environmental sciences at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.  She has written extensively about New York, from Loft Living (1982) and Naked City (2010) to The Innovation Complex (2020), a critical examination of the city’s tech economy.  With the film maker Alice Arnold, she is developing a video project on SoHo, zoning, and the YIMBY/NIMBY conflict.

Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a Faculty Director at the NYU Furman Center.  Professor Ellen’s research interests center on housing and urban policy.  She is author of Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press), co-editor of How to House the Homeless (Russell Sage Foundation) and more recently co-editor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity (Columbia University Press).  She has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters related to housing policy, community development, and school and neighborhood segregation. Professor Ellen has held visiting positions at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.

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