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An article in Metropolis magazine reports Stephanie Davidson, visiting assistant professor of architecture, and Georg Rafailidis, associate professor of architecture, have been named to the list of Emerging Voices awardees by the Architectural League of New York. Articles also appeared on ArchDaily and The Architect’s Newspaper.

A story on WIVB-TV reports students from UB’s Prosperity Scholars program traveled to the Michigan Avenue African-American Heritage Corridor Thursday to learn about the people who have lived in the neighborhoods and shaped the city, and interviews Kelley Mosher, a graduate student in urban planning. “One of the interesting things I learned from today’s panel is that some people might look, from the surface level, they have the same background but they all have different stories to tell,” she said.

A story on WIVB-TV about progress being made on the Bailey Green neighborhood improvement project notes that an urban planning team from UB has been involved in the efforts.

An article on Curbed, a real-estate blog network, about the increasing number of Americans who are experiencing eviction and the role that gentrification plays in the problem interviews Robert Silverman, professor of urban planning, who said market forces unchecked by government economic policies have combined to push up rental prices across the board, particularly in desirable metro areas like Washington, D.C. “Rents have been outpacing income growth, even in terms of other housing markets, like the mortgage market,” he said. “Landlords have been raising rents even though [household] income hasn’t kept up with costs.”

An opinion piece about the “new” Buffalo, which The New York Times recently named as one of its “52 Places to Go in 2018,” reports that 13 years ago the Buffalo Niagara Cultural Tourism Initiative released its strategy for attracting visitors to the region and notes the document was the result of nearly two years of community meetings, focus groups, interviews and data analysis by UB’s Regional Institute and its consultants.

An article on Realtor.com about the housing bargains that are available in the country’s most-affordable metropolitan areas interviews Robert Silverman, professor of urban planning. “There are a lot of people in that first-time home-buyer group looking for starter homes, and they can’t afford it in many top metros,” he said. "If they’re mobile, [they can move to] a smaller, affordable community with cheap homes and great amenities." The article also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

A story on WBFO-FM about the construction of the Kensington Expressway in the early 1960s and the impact it had on the African-American community it cut through interviews Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies, who said the expressway changed city neighborhoods. “They planned the design and construction of the 33, really before the African-American population got there. So they had not yet started construction until the 1960s," he said.  "So whites knew that the highway was coming through and they started to sell their houses to blacks.”

An article about the Bailey Green project, which pledges to bring new houses and apartments, a community garden, soccer pitches, greenhouses and other amenities to a seven-block East Side neighborhood reports the internationally acclaimed plan has had the involvement of UB and community organizations like Habitat for Humanity.

A story on KJZZ-FM in Phoenix interviews Nicolas Rajkovich, assistant professor of architecture in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, about a study he and a colleague from Arizona State University are conducting to learn how extreme weather impacts American cities – on both the hot and cold side of the spectrum. “When you look at the city of Buffalo, one of the things that we do well is to deal with things on the cold side. On the flip side, we don’t have a lot of houses with air conditioning, so as we look to the future with climate change, there’s a real concern that as we have higher heat days, days over 90 [degrees], how do we start to prepare for that?” he said.