Community and Urban Sociology

Derek Hyra, Professor of Public Administration and Policy and Founding Director of the Metropolitan Policy Center at American University, won the 2023 ASA Community and Urban Sociology section’s Publicly Engaged Scholar Award. Derek, an expert in neighborhood change, housing policy, urban politics, and race, served as board chair of the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority and Alexandria Planning Commissioner and is currently a member of the City of Falls Church Planning Commission. His research and advocacy have informed national legislative debates on the subprime lending crisis as well as secured greater affordable housing funds and improved mixed-income housing developments in Virginia. Thalia Tom reached out to him to discuss his research. Thanks to Derek for participating in our interview series!

What sparked your interest in the topics that you study?

It depends how far you want to go back, but my research interests–‒in urban areas, minority communities, and economically transitioning communities–‒ came from playing basketball in Harlem in high school. I grew up outside of New York City in a northern suburb, Somers, that was mainly white and relatively affluent.

I made the Somers varsity basketball team as a freshman, and my coaches said, “If you want to play in college, you need to get where the best players are, and they’re not in the suburbs; they’re in the city.” I got a tryout with the Riverside Church Hawks AAU team. This team is based in West Harlem, just north of Columbia University. I made the team and during my sophomore and junior high school years and commuted down to play in the springs and summers. Most of my teammates were from Harlem or the Bronx.

Harlem in the late eighties, early nineties, was very segregated and still coming off the crack epidemic. At the time, many of the brownstones, which now sell for millions, were boarded up, some were crack houses, and the city was trying to give them away to non-profit developers for a dollar. I didn’t perceive an intellectual difference between my teammates and myself but there was a big difference in our living environments. Harlem’s divested and segregated conditions were affecting my teammates and their life chances. I can’t say the notion of neighborhood effects was an idea that I understood in high school. At the time, I was concerned with which college coaches were watching me and I ended up attending and playing for Colgate University, majoring in psychology and sociology.

In college, I read Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid and William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged. I realized the difficult circumstances I witnessed in Harlem that were detrimental to my teammates were typical of urban America. NYC wasn’t an anomaly. Almost every city in America had a segregated Black community like Harlem, and this was related to our history of harmful and destructive public policies, redlining, urban renewal, and public housing high-rise concentration. My high school Harlem experience, combined with what I learned at Colgate, guides my urban research agenda and drives my passion to understand and address racial and spatial inequality.

What are the moments that have stood out to you as particularly surprising or exciting about your research?

Some people question why I, as a white person, study economically transitioning African American areas. And people have said to me, who either haven’t been in these areas or just feel like there’s so much racial animosity and conflict in our country, “How could you even pull off this research; are you accepted when you walk into these communities?”

And one of the things that sometimes shocks scholars, is that I’m usually accepted by most of the people I come across in communities of color. I mean, there are always people I talk with in these settings who say, “You’re here, and you’re just going to write a book and get a big salary. But nothing here will change,” or they just don’t want to talk to somebody who’s white because they don’t think white people can help their cause. I respect people with those positions but most individuals want to tell me their stories and perspectives once I’m able to gain their trust.

Trust and mutual respect are the keys to conducting ethnographic research in underserved areas. I’ve conducted fieldwork in Harlem, U Street in DC, on the south side of Chicago, and Sandtown in Baltimore. In these Black communities, I found that once I develop an initial level of trust and understanding and tell people where I’m coming from and why I’m doing research, I’m usually accepted by most people. We all have common understandings and have these similar goals and aspirations. And once you start talking to people about those human commonalities, you quickly realize we have a lot more in common than differences, regardless of where we live or our racial and ethnic backgrounds. But to understand this, one must walk over institutional barriers that prevent diverse populations from interacting across racial and class status differences in America’s segregated metropolitan environment. If you are willing to breakdown these barriers, beautiful and meaningful research and advocacy collaborations can flourish.

Who have been important mentors, or what have been salient examples of public sociology for you?

First, and foremost, is William Julius Wilson. His work has been foundational for my understandings of inner-city America. He’s a scholar who has been incredibly influential in academia but also in national policy debates. He was an advisor to President Clinton and his theories influenced the construction of the Empowerment Zone legislation and public housing reforms including the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) program. He also served as the lead campaign policy advisory to President Barack Obama. I always look to Wilson as a model public intellectual whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries and permeates beyond the ivy tower walls to guide major urban legislation. Secondarily, I look at Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist who dedicated his career to public service and public policy. He was an influential urban policy advisor to President Nixon and eventually became a Senator from New York. He used data and research to reform public policy.

It’s worth noting, both of my public sociology role models were controversial figures. Some people thought Moynihan’s theories of the Black family were conservative, and some have even said racist. Some have argued William Julius Wilson’s work is classist. Wilson advocated for the return of the Black middle class to bolster low-income, African American communities. Nonetheless, these influential sociologists developed new theories about critical circumstances in our country and used their sociologically-informed frameworks to profoundly shape America’s urban policy. I deeply respectful them and aspire to emulate their successes both within and beyond the academy.

What impact do you hope that your scholarship will have?

We have huge racial inequities–‒inequities in health, education, homeownership, and income and wealth, and these inequities are largely due to our history of discriminatory policies that have structured America’s highly uneven community landscapes. I hope my work highlights and addresses community processes that replicate social inequality and points policymakers in new directions to deploy resources to underserved areas in ways that uplift and benefit populations with low incomes. Typically, when we do place-based development, we develop the place and displace the people. We push poverty around metropolitan regions. We don’t alleviate it. I want my scholarship to shift our national, state, and local development policies from stimulating gentrification and displacement to equitable development, where we minimize displacement and maximizes the life chances of vulnerable populations.

While altering the structural inequality that has been baked into the fabric of America can be difficult, I believe my research has made some differences. My work on subprime lending and segregation was used in Congressional testimony concerning the Dodd-Frank Act, which alleviated some of the racist lending practices that devastated many communities of color. At the state level, my gentrification research has helped galvanize support for greater affordable housing funds in Virginia. When Amazon announced it was building its second headquarters in Northern Virginia, I was invited to testify to the Virginia Housing Commission about whether Amazon’s arrival would accelerate the gentrification and displacement of minority communities near the new headquarters. My testimony, along with advocacy from people across the state, helped to double Virginia’s affordable Housing Trust Fund. At the local level, my efforts as a public housing authority board chair helped to create an inclusive, mixed-income development where traditional public housing and concentrated poverty once stood. Moreover, my actions on the Falls Church City planning commission have led to reforms that increased the percentage of affordable housing units in the city’s mixed-use development deals.

How would you like to see either the Community and Urban Sociology section or the discipline as a whole evolve to do better, more community-engaged research?

This award means so much because it is an acknowledgement by my intellectual home, CUSS, of my community-informed scholarship. While many universities and disciplines talk the “community” game, many don’t do it well. Furthermore, universities often have goals of policy impact but rarely is public-facing work acknowledged in our professional performance reviews toward promotion and tenure. Whether it’s through congressional testimonies or testimonies to the state legislatures or work with public housing authorities or planning commissions–‒this type of effort typically isn’t formally recognized by universities. What’s recognized are publications, conference presentations, and service to professional associations. However, service to cities, states, and the federal government is important and critical, because the decisions that are being made by policymakers at different levels of government are distributing resources that impact people’s lives.

If we really are concerned with changing the landscape of inequality, we must, as a discipline, continue to venture beyond the academy. I hope more up-and-coming CUSS scholars try to move their influence outside the ivory tower, and get rewarded, not punished for that. Often you get punished because some scholars will say, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t be doing that. And you could have been more productive if you didn’t do that community or policy work.” And it’s hard to do it, because again, a lot of what I do to influence public policy, I don’t get paid for. I do it by working a “secondary” job that’s unpaid–‒basically, at night, attending different meetings, which takes me away from my scholarship and family.

There should be more incentives and rewards for community-engagement and public-facing intellectual work. I hope as mid-level scholars become full professors and start to advance to high-level administrative university positions, like chairs of promotion and tenure committees, chairs of departments and become deans and provosts, they start to formally recognize and reward the hard work of navigating in community spaces and influencing policymakers. Until the broader academic incentive structure is changed, we probably won’t have a flood of new scholars committed to public sociology. But will shall see. We know to change structural inequality we need to get out of the university and into political and community life. For me, the intellectual insights rise from residents, and we must collaborate with them on policy reforms to make our society more equitable and just.