Ingrid Gould Ellen has just finished a late lunch: salad with homemade dressing. She’s still sipping a can of plain seltzer water, which she rests on the ground next to her chair as we sit down. Ingrid wears a mask loosely around her neck, the ear straps bound to a long chain that, in brighter times, held reading glasses, not personal protective equipment. Late afternoon light slants between buildings, cutting the crisp, yet warm, fall air.
The terrace at the Furman Center should be the envy of every New York City office. The building, caddy corner from Washington Square Park, is nothing special aside from its location. But the second floor terrace, contained within the block, is secluded, green, and peaceful – a great place to sit, read, and reflect. Street noise doesn’t penetrate the ring of buildings. The small courtyard has a canopy of decades-old thick-trunked oaks, leaves just starting to turn.
This is Ingrid’s domain. She, along with a team of faculty members and some full time executives, directs the Furman Center, NYU’s prestigious housing research center. Running a research center might seem a demanding gig, but it’s far from Ingrid’s only commitment. She’s also NYU’s Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning. This semester she’s teaching a course, serving as the director for the NYU Wagner doctoral and urban planning programs, writing, researching, and serving on affordable housing committees and nonprofit boards.
This fall day, she cleared time in her busy schedule to have coffee and tea with some of her new graduate student colleagues at the Furman Center. And she brought cookies. As the young researchers dispersed, I sat down with Ingrid to chat about her career in housing, New York City, social media, and how to prepare the next generation of housers.
Brooklyn Roots
Before Ingrid was a titan of the housing field, she was a New Yorker and a reluctant PhD candidate.
Her interest in housing took root early. The ‘70s, she said, was a “challenging time for cities.” Growing up in Brooklyn, the color line was stark. “Brooklyn Heights was all white at this point and Downtown Brooklyn was all black.” She got hooked on housing with her first job out of college working at NYC’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). That early experience with segregation would launch a career where Ingrid would become one of the nation’s preeminent experts on housing segregation, dedicating her career to studying how neighborhoods change, why, and what we can do to create opportunities for all.
She would go on to get a PhD from Harvard, work for all the major think tanks a DC policy wonk could name off the top of their head, and hold positions with MIT, NYU, Harvard, and Yale. You’d need to set aside an hour to read through the long list of her accomplishments. Her work has influenced policy at the federal and local level and she’s served in advisory roles on the Obama campaign and at HUD. Under her leadership, the Furman Center won a MacArthur award for Creative & Effective Institutions and leadership awards in affordable housing.
A Rising Star
Right before becoming a prominent academic, she got cold feet. After working at HPD in New York she applied, and then deferred acceptance, to her Harvard PhD to keep working at Abt Associates, a prominent DC think tank. But Harvard waited for her. And only after she served as an assistant teacher in graduate school did she find one of her true callings. “I really thought I would probably go back to an Abt or Urban Institute but when I went back to finish my coursework I taught and realized that I love teaching.”
That would stick. Academia, she realized, would enable her to both do research and teach. She found teaching more immediately gratifying. Research gave her time to work on big problems.
Interest in the housing field, Ingrid thinks, is growing. Academia won’t be for everyone. But for young people who want to do this work, she assured me, “there’s no one way in.” For Ingrid, it took patience and knowing herself to find the right role.
Ingrid flirted with a move to government as she rose in prominence in the field. In 2008, she chaired the Obama campaign’s housing policy committee and, after they won, served on the transition team. For six months, she was a policy advisor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
She described the work as “putting out fires.” And in 2008, the housing world was aflame: a financial crisis, a foreclosure crisis, and an economic recession. The work was demanding, and it meant spending a lot of time away from her family and her kids. But Ingrid also missed what she charmingly calls her “research cave,” where she can think and write.
At HUD, Ingrid “felt like we were dealing with all of the urgent issues and there wasn’t time to deal with the sort of evolving important issues. There just wasn’t very much time for reflection.” There’s some irony in one of the busiest people in academia emphasizing time to reflect. But she does. Ingrid set those boundaries for herself. She blocks off her mornings, when she’s sharpest, to write and reflect. On some weekends she escapes with her family to Cornwall, Connecticut, where her parents have had a house since she was young. ” She picks projects that will move the needle on housing policy, but also “selfishly” picks projects that are intellectually interesting to her.
Her work is anything but selfish. And for all she’s accomplished, she carries a confident humility. Where some careerists might work their whole lives for a HUD appointment, Ingrid isn’t regretful of turning back to teaching. As much as she loves the research cave, she emphasizes what a privileged position she finds herself in, being a policy advisor working from the outside. “I have connections in government, so I can reach the right people.” Bashfully, she adds, “I don’t know how to say that in a not obnoxious way.”
The State of the Field
If you went to any housing policy conference, you’d inevitably hear some iteration of a common houser trope, “it’s not about the buildings, it’s about the people.” But Ingrid takes it a step further: “it’s not just about the people that are currently living in a building or a neighborhood, it’s also about people moving in.” That idea drives two of the major intellectual focuses of her work on neighborhoods: opening up the doors to opportunity and locking in long term economic diversity. Cities flow and change, and policymakers need to think not just about the people there now or the people who left, but the flow of people in and out of buildings through time.
She picked out four housing priorities for me that she thinks can make a big impact: a federal emergency rental assistance program, automatic economic stabilizers for the housing market, expansion and reform for housing choice vouchers, and capital improvements to public housing. Ingrid’s recommendations though, are not only about making the biggest difference, they are also about what can actually get done. She’s, at the heart of it, a pragmatist.
Pragmatism and incrementalism are hardly new to housing debates. Ingrid emphasizes understanding political realities. For example, she’d love congress to be funding public housing, but she thinks it’s unlikely. In light of that, she recommends a compromise: craft a feasible strategy using existing tools that can improve the lives of public housing residents now. That shouldn’t preclude housers from building a political constituency for the long term. But she wants to get things done in the meantime. Ingrid emphasizes understanding change, its inevitability, and designing policies that find a balance. Vibrant, healthy cities have to change – and people don’t always like when that happens in their neighborhood. Often, that means engaging with people who disagree with you and finding compromise.
Ingrid isn’t on social media, but it’s rapidly changing how young people and residents are engaging with housing issues. She worries about its divisiveness. “I hear a lot more about opposition to new developments and housing and battles over zoning. Is that because there is actually more opposition happening or is it because we’re hearing about it? Does it actually just fan the flames?” Face to face, she says, it’s much more likely you are going to connect with someone and find some common ground.
For young housers, that openness to new ideas can be formative. To get a baseline, Ingrid wants young housers to understand the realities of the field: how does housing finance work, what is the legacy of racial segregation, and how do communities organize to accomplish goals. In addition, she wants them to be willing to get a little uncomfortable – engage with people who disagree, compromise, and don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. To follow her example, housers might also want to carve out time for reflection.
Sometimes Ingrid’s busy-ness compromises her time to reflect. Even in small-town Connecticut, where she’s supposedly taking time to think, she’s serving on the town’s affordable housing committee. She lightheartedly called it a “case study.”
So while Ingrid thinks of herself as a reflective person, her dedication stands out. She meets all the new students working part time at the Furman Center, dozens of them who’ve come and gone over the years, staying only a few short semesters. She hosts coffee and tea chats with the planning student body. She even sits down with eager first semester students who want to interview her. She deeply cares about her communities, now and into the future. Because to Ingrid, just as housing isn’t just about the current residents, teaching isn’t just about the current students.
As we leave the peace of the Furman Center terrace, Ingrid rushes off to her next appointment. Tonight: she moderates a Zoom community meeting for Cornwall. Her reflections on today will have to wait until tomorrow morning.
Cover Image Source: Furman Center