In The Loop with CUPPA’s Research Centers – Fall 2024

Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED)

In collaboration with the UIC CUED, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network released, “Repaying the Debt: The Case for Extending “Pension Bienestar” to Older Adults from Mexico Living in the US,” by CUED director and Urban Planning and Policy professor, Nik Theodore. The report documents the hardships faced by undocumented immigrants from Mexico who are reaching retirement age, based on a survey of more than 1500 individuals.

WeCount, a Miami FL-based workers’ rights organization, collaborated with CUED on a new report, “Behind the Skyline, Labor Conditions in South Florida’s Commercial Construction Industry.” The report documents substandard working conditions in the Miami commercial construction industry.

Government Finance Research Center (GFRC)

GFRC released its first deliverable from the Water Rate Setting Study, commissioned by the Illinois General Assembly. The report, focusing on Northeast Illinois, examines the water rate setting practice, the components of water bills, the definition of water affordability, challenges with rate setting among economically disadvantaged communities, the role of government policy in rate setting, reasons for water rate increases, and opportunities for increased intergovernmental coordination for setting equitable water rates. Data used in the report are available on the GFRC website. Following the release of the report, the GFRC Director, Dr. Deborah A. Carroll provided testimony to the City of Chicago Committee on Finance, during a hearing focused on Resolution R2023-775. Ongoing work aims to understand the entire state’s drinking water landscape. The GFRC team continues to share study findings in academic venues and has recently presented papers at the Association for Budgeting & Financial Management Annual Conference.

Great Cities Institute (GCI)

The Great Cities Institute sponsored several events over the last few months that highlights the range of urban issues that it explores. In August 2024, GCI continued a partnership with Villa Albertine to host Olukemi Lijadu, who lives and works in London and Lagos and shared films representing her work on Memory, Music, and the Moving Image. Olukemi Lijadu is a visual artist, DJ and music producer who performs under the moniker KEM KEM. Lijadu engages with sound as a transcendent conduit of memory and reconnection for the fractured African diaspora and work as a form of accessing Atlantic memory.

In September, GCI held its Latino Research Initiative Summit 2024 that included attendees from over 180 organizations, agencies, and elected official offices and presentations from institute partners from the Illinois Latino Legislative Caucus Foundation, The Chicago History Museum, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, The Healthy Communities Foundation, the Consul General of Mexico in Chicago, the Chicago City Council Latino Caucus, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance, Nuestro Futuro, Latinos Progresando, Casa Norte, Greater Southwest Development Corporation, Erie Neighborhood House, and the Latino Arts and Culture Summit.

In October, GCI co-sponsored (with the Federation for Manufacturing Renaissance) a webinar on the Reempresa Model for Ownership Succession: A Crisis and an Opportunity. The baby boom generation is retiring from every position in companies including ownership. Small companies have no apparent successor or even a succession plan and are at risk of closing. In Barcelona Spain, leaders in the business community, with government support have confronted this challenge with the creation of Reempresa. This webinar served as an introduction to this model. Reempresa is based in Barcelona and represents best international practices in ownership succession challenges and acquisitions. Since 2011, they have had more than 11,210 enterprises for sale, more than 20,000 potential buyers and more than 4,800 acquisitions, saving more than 13,400 jobs.

In November, UIC Great Cities Institute Director Teresa Córdova interviewed UIC Professor Emeritus and former Chicago Alderman Dick Simpson about his new book, “Chicago’s Modern Mayors—From Harold Washington to Lori Lightfoot.” To contextualize the book discussion, Córdova and Simpson explored how the UIC University Library’s special collections of mayors Richard J. Daley and Richard M. Daley are fundamental to understanding the history of Chicago politics. This event was co-sponsored with UIC Libraries and The Newberry.

In December, GCI had the pleasure of hosting Professor Stephen Small, University of California Berkeley who spoked on Liverpool’s “unique Black community, its historical roots, systemic challenges, and how city policies contrast with London’s immigrant-focused approach to shaping Black British urban life.” Among the many questions that Dr. Small addressed, he asked, “how has the city government responded to the Black community in Liverpool? And how does an analysis of Liverpool deepen and broaden our understanding of urban areas in Black Britain?”

Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement Research (IPCE)

“Introduction to Community Engagement: Values and Key Principles” for New York State Attorney General Office.

IPCE presented their guiding principles and methodologies for community partnership for the State of New York General Attorney’s “Social Justice Training Series”. Joe Hoereth, IPCE director, and Norma Ramos, IPCE associate director, presented their guiding principles and methodologies for community partnership based on their 15 years of first-hand experience at IPCE. In 2018, IPCE partnered with the Illinois Attorney General’s Office to convene members of the Chicago community and gather their comments on the Chicago Police Consent Decree. They compiled and synthesized these public comments into a report that was presented to the Illinois Attorney General. A year later, they joined the Community Engagement Team for the Independent Monitoring Team for the Chicago Police Department Consent Decree and have been instrumental in engaging Chicago’s communities and ensuring their participation throughout the monitoring process.

“Building Community Engagement for Effective Community Relations” for 2024 NACOLE Webinar Series

IPCE presented “Building Community Engagement for Effective Community Relations” as part of the 2024 National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) webinar series. Hoereth and Ramos discussed encouraging law enforcement oversight agencies to explore and enhance community engagement best practices and methods. NACOLE is a non-profit organization that works to enhance accountability and transparency in policing and build community trust through civilian oversight.

Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP)

IRRPP’s commitment to building an intellectual community and increasing the capacity of UIC scholars to do transformative public policy work continues to guide the institute’s work. IRRPP welcomed fourteen 2024 – 2025 Faculty Fellows as a cohort and held a writing workshop “Unstuck: How to Uncover Your Process & Become the Writer You Already Are” with Michelle Boyd to support the writing of UIC scholars. IRRPP also continued the monthly Race/Ethnicity workshop series that brings together researchers from UIC and across Chicagoland to discuss cutting-edge research on racial inequities and featured UIC Marketing professor David Crockett, Loyola University Criminal Justice and Criminology professor Zhandarka Kurti, and UIC Public Health professor Tiffany Ford. IRRPP also held a virtual talk by Claire Jean Kim to discuss her latest book, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World.

Institute research projects and work with the Illinois Department of Human Services continues. Currently, IRRPP is researching Latine homelessness in the state of Illinois for the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness. IRRPP continues to disseminate the findings of the report on Black Homelessness in our state and, as part of this work, held a panel discussion event at Harold Washington Library in September to talk about the report, co-organized a panel with WTTW and All Chicago in November to discuss homelessness, and were part of a webinar with Funders Together to End Homelessness to talk about the findings and what philanthropy can do. As part of the State of Racial Justice in Chicago report series, IRRPP will soon release a report on education and are working on a report on the Latine population in Chicagoland.

Networks and Governance Lab (NGL)

Blending theories and frameworks from political science, public administration, economics, and public policy with inferential methods from network science, the NGL seeks to model and understand how network structure, composition, and processes shape our collective capacity to solve public problems. Research in the lab spans the study of informal human networks within public organizations and local public service delivery networks to the formation of global city networks to confront transnational challenges.

PROJECTS:

Public Service Networks
Local governments often collaborate through formal agreements to provide public services. NGL researchers study the creation, structure, and performance of these networks using a dataset of about 20,000 agreements archived by the state of Iowa since 1993. This research focuses on key service areas like economic development, emergency management, and law enforcement.

Tribal Reservation Adolescent Connections Study (TRACs)
This research, funding by an NIH R01 grant, focuses on the high rates of substance use among American Indian youth and its detrimental effects on their health. It highlights the significance of social networks in influencing behaviors related to substance use, suicide, and violence. By employing social network analysis and collaborating with community partners, the study aims to create culturally relevant interventions to reduce risks associated with substance use and health inequities.

Collective Action and Climate Change
This project examines climate-adaptive collective action in U.S. metropolitan areas, focusing on the challenges posed by climate change and the need for effective collaboration among organizations. It highlights how fragmented governance creates collective action dilemmas in areas like disaster recovery and clean energy transitions. Drawing from a national survey of local governments, this study aims to understand how organizational dynamics and external arrangements influence climate action efforts and shape regional partnerships over time.

Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs)
Governance in regions poses significant challenges, particularly when it comes to coordinating policies across local jurisdictional boundaries without a formal regional government. RIGOs facilitate collective action and address complex regional challenges through innovative governance structures. Despite their ubiquity in the US, little is known about how these critical cross-boundary organizations function. NGL research examines how RIGOs shape intergovernmental relations and regional policymaking.

Chicago Health Networks Research
NGL’s team of researchers has identified over 65 health and wellness groups in Chicago and Cook County, involving more than 800 organizations. The study looks at how these networks adjust their resource strategies over time to better meet the changing health needs of the community.

Urban Transportation Center (UTC)

The Urban Transportation Center has been charged with undertaking a research project to gain insight from employers and human resource managers to address the impact of working from home (WFH), a practice that has become more prevalent since the COVID 19 pandemic. The project includes an online survey and the opportunity for an interview with the project team. Key audiences sought are human resource directors or managers and individuals in managerial positions at private companies and public agencies across the nation. The findings are expected to cast a near-future vision of office work, commuting, and resulting travel and implications on multimodal urban transportation demand and supply.

There are two key goals for the study:

1) Analyzing the impact of transitioning from the traditional work schedules on-site to a hybrid work setting.
2) Determining the impacts of this change on: Employee performance; quality of work; job satisfaction; company culture; talent management; and financial outcomes

The study will examine remote-work and flexible schedule policies that are either planned or currently in effect, and types of measures envisioned or set in place to manage compliance. In addition, the study will explore employers’ opinions on operational and administrative feasibility of sustained hybrid work practices in the mid- to long-term.

Data collection will continue until end of January 2025, and if you have a leading role in your organization, you can still participate either by responding to the survey or by signing up for an interview.

Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement

The Voorhees Center worked on a series of projects on subjects ranging from green economic development to homelessness, including:
Untapped Talent and Green Economy Opportunities in the Chicago Region – a study that identifies populations underrepresented in the workforce and explores methods for connecting them to the Green Economy
Redeveloping Brownfields – a study examining the potential for the redevelopment of brownfield sites throughout the Chicago region.
2024 & 2025 Chicago Point in Time Homeless Counts – reporting on the number and demographics of both sheltered and unsheltered homeless in Chicago.
Economic Impact of NASA on the US, Fifty States, and DC – a study that looks at the impact of NASA’s spending by geography.
Economic Impact of McCormick Place on Chicago and Illinois – a study on the impact of this Chicago convention center on the economies of Chicago and Illinois.
American Disabilities Act’s Participation Action Research Consortium – a website featuring data analysis and visualization of the status of people with disabilities.
Gentrification Index – an update to a 2010 report on community change and gentrification trends in Chicago.

As coordinator and research arm of the Illinois Defense Manufacturing Consortium (ILDMC), the Voorhees Center:
• Completed an analysis of the casting and forging workforce in Central and Northern Illinois.
• Hosted a series of outreach events to support small casting, forging, and energy storage firms in the region.

An assessment of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation (PFT), a plan to ’transform’ the City’s public housing stock is also underway.