THE FURMAN CENTER FOR REAL ESTATE AND URBAN POLICY NOW A JOINT RESEARCH CENTER IN NYU LAW AND WAGNER SCHOOLS

John Sexton, president-designate of New York University, recently announced that The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at NYU, one of the nation’s most innovative teaching and research programs on real estate and urban policy issues, is now a joint research center in the NYU School of Law and The Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

Professor Michael Schill, who will continue to serve as the Center’s director and a faculty member with joint appointments at the Law School and Wagner, founded the Center in 1995.

The Furman Center, the first joint research center between the Law School and Wagner, is named in honor of NYU Law School alumnus Jay Furman, class of ’71, who is a member of NYU School of Law Foundation Board of Trustees and a member of the NYU Board of Trustees.

Mr. Furman, an international real estate investor and developer, provided generous financial support to endow the Center.

“Issues of housing, land use and the built environment are more important in New York than anywhere else in the nation,” said Mr. Furman. “The joint center will create huge synergies among the faculties, students and alumni of the two schools and generate solutions to many of the pressing housing and land-use issues of our generation.”

“This designation formalizes an already existing, but informal working relationship between the schools,” said Professor Schill. “Greater cooperation will allow more opportunities for joint academic programming for students, increased research opportunities for the faculty and Wagner’s other research centers, and greater ability to serve the needs of our schools’ alumni in the real estate and housing fields.”

Professor Schill also expressed the desire that the Center would enable the schools to increase the prominence of their joint JD/MPA program.

The Law School and the Wagner School already cross list several classes – in Land Use; Housing, and the Law; and Economics and Politics of Urban Affairs, which are taught by members of each faculty and are open to students from both schools. Further, Wagner professors who are expert in issues of housing and public finance, such as Ingrid Ellen, Amy Schwartz and Dick Netzer, have been conducting major research projects with the Furman Center. For example, Professors Netzer and Schill recently completed a study for the City of New York on the effect of water metering on affordable housing, which was just published in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

“The aim is to make housing and real estate policy an even more visible part of Wagner’s already premier urban planning program,” said Schill. To that end, the Furman Center has joined Wagner’s Taub Center For Urban Policy Research in co-sponsoring a monthly breakfast series on housing as well as a research effort on preserving federally assisted housing in New York.

03/15/02