Senior Research Scientist Marcus Sarofim has joined the Health, Environment, and Policy program, where he will contribute to environmental economics issues. Previously, Sarofim spent seventeen years at the EPA’s Climate Change Division, where he contributed to and helped defend the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding, led climate impacts assessment work, was part of the climate website and indicators team, and developed the FrEDI model for estimating US damages from greenhouse gas emissions at the state level.

Nolan Hicks has transitioned from Fellow to Research Scholar within the Transportation and Land Use program, where he will continue to work on case studies about intercity rail electrification. He’s spent a decade reporting on and writing about New York City government and politics, including authoring investigative pieces that examined how the MTA designs subway stations and why city services frequently fail to reach the needy and mentally ill. His stories across his career have prompted reforms and helped lead to federal prosecutions.

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Transportation and Land Use Fellow Jonathan English’s recent output:

“Canada Must Develop Its Own Trusted-Traveller Program,” an op-ed for the Globe and Mail: “A Canada-only trusted-traveller program is long overdue. It is feasible with minimal new policy or infrastructure, supportive of Canada’s global economic diversification, and entirely consistent with maintaining strong border security. Most of all, it reflects the basic principle that access to Canadian services should be governed, first and foremost, by Canada.”

Making the Grade: Recommendations for Addressing the High Cost of Canada’s Transit Infrastructure, published by the Canadian Standards Association Group and authored by English’s Infrastory Insights (summarized in Canadian Consulting Engineer): “A major investment in rail and transit infrastructure also promises to help counter Canada’s productivity challenges. By connecting workers to jobs, employers to labour pools, and businesses to supply chains, high-quality transit and intercity rail projects can dramatically improve economic efficiency.”

CP24 interview and coverage in “Free Service Kicks Off Opening Day for Long-Delayed Eglinton Crosstown LRT”: “It’s the biggest single opening in terms of kilometers in history in Toronto. Even if you just take the underground section, it’s pretty close to as long as the blue Danforth line when it first opened, from Keele to Woodbine in 1966.”

Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, co-hosted a multi-agency webinar organized by the World Meteorological Organization’s Vegetation Fire Smoke Pollution Warning Advisory and Assessment System (VFSP-WAS) North America Center, in partnership with NASA’s Wildland Fire Program, the University of Texas at Arlington, and George Mason University. The event introduced upgraded wildfire smoke forecast products designed to support health-relevant applications.

The webinar brought together more than one hundred participants from a wide range of backgrounds, including government agencies, academic researchers, international organizations, and private-sector stakeholders. Presentations highlighted advances in the Hazardous Air Quality Ensemble System (HAQES), which integrates forecasts from multiple US and Canadian agencies to generate consensus smoke predictions and probabilities of extreme PM_2.5 events.

This work is part of ongoing NASA-funded research aimed at improving the accuracy and usability of smoke forecasting during wildfire events. Speakers emphasized how enhanced smoke forecasts can strengthen early warning systems and health risk communication. The discussion underscored the importance of cross-agency collaboration and operational forecasting tools in addressing the growing public health challenges associated with wildfire smoke.

Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, joined survivor leaders, funders, workforce development providers, and educators as a panelist for “Prevention and Intervention: Building Sustainable Pathways to Safety,” a panel session that examined where prevention and intervention intersect and how power and resources can be shifted to create lasting change.

The panel was part of Interrupting Economies of Harm: Coordinating NYC’s Response to Human Trafficking, a conference convened by the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence.

New York University’s Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law and the Civic Analytics program released a new report supported by the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, The Implementation of Local Building Performance Standards: An Analysis of Progress to Date and Guide for Future Policy, which provides a retrospective analysis of the implementation of local building performance standards (BPS) laws using qualitative and quantitative methods. Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, led a team that analyzed building energy and other data in four cities (Boston, Denver, New York City, and Washington, DC).

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Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud delivered the keynote address at the inaugural program to mark seventy-five years of the making of Chandigarh, India. Hosted by the Chandigarh Citizens Foundation, the event brought together urban planners, architects, academics, and citizens to hear Bertaud’s remarks, which included his observations from his experience in 1963 working there under Pierre Jeanneret:

Recalling Chandigarh as a small, walkable city with minimal vehicular traffic during his early years, Bertaud noted how its scale and spatial footprint have expanded over the decades. He underscored the importance of accessibility and transport coordination, cautioning against viewing only the central sectors as the city’s core. Instead, he argued for treating Chandigarh as an integrated urban system, where mobility networks connect people to jobs, services, and opportunities efficiently.

The event was covered by the Times of India, the Tribune, the Indian Express, and Hindustan Times.

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At the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in New Orleans, Health, Environment, and Policy Research Scientist Noussair Lazrak presented a poster on ongoing NYU–NASA collaborative research exploring methods to improve PM_2.5 air quality forecasts. The project examines how machine-learning models used in forecasting systems can experience performance changes over time as atmospheric conditions and data relationships evolve.

The work evaluates whether scheduled model retraining can help sustain forecast accuracy. Results indicate that structured annual retraining may provide meaningful improvements relative to static approaches, while more frequent updates appear to offer smaller incremental benefits.

Funded by NASA’s Satellite Needs Working Group, the research contributes to continuing efforts to develop robust, maintainable approaches for AI-enhanced air quality prediction.

Urban Expansion Visiting Scholar Simon De Boeck has published “From Superislands to Green Axes. The Conceptual Iteration of Barcelona’s Superblocks,” along with Maarten Van Acker and Thomas Vanoutrive from the University of Antwerp:

. . . Yet this study demonstrates that transformative urban concepts cannot be reduced to blueprints or exported as ready-made solutions. Instead, they evolve through conceptual and contextual iteration, shaped by sociopolitical negotiation and local morphology. Therefore, rather than offering a template to replicate, the superblock example urges cities to reflect not only on what inspires them but also on how and why they adapt transformative planning ideas.

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In recognition of Human Trafficking Prevention Month, the Human Exploitation and Resilience program co-hosted “Supporting Survivors of Exploitation and Sex Trafficking” in partnership with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

The event brought together researchers, practitioners, service providers, clinical services, and legal advocates to explore how their fields can better collaborate in support of survivors. Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, moderated a panel of experts whose work spans the full continuum of survivor support—from prosecution and clinical care to legal defense.

Writing in the New Zealand Initiative, Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud outlines the limited role of urban planners in “Let Cities Find Their Own Order”:

Planners should instead focus on what they can genuinely control and design well: streets, parks, and public spaces. That is where planning adds real value. 

The rest should be left to the people who build, inhabit, and enliven our cities. They understand their needs better than any master plan ever could.

Bertaud was in New Zealand for an event, “Making Cities Work,” hosted by the New Zealand Initiative; the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Te Waihanga; and the Victoria University of Wellington School of Government.

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When the New York State Legislature passed a bill (with only two votes against it) requiring subways to have at least two operators, the Transportation and Land Use program assembled a dataset of more than 400 transit lines around the world in the report, How Many People Does It Take to Operate a Train?, showing that only 6 percent of the lines in their dataset had two operators. The remaining 94 percent either had one operator or zero operators. This provided the MTA and Governor Hochul with a credible counternarrative to the one being pushed by proponents of the legislation.

The research was profiled in the New York Times, New York Daily News, and Spectrum News; advocates Citizens Budget Commission, Partnership for New York City, Regional Plan Association, and Reinvent Albany issued a letter supporting the report. Governor Hochul vetoed the bill before the close of 2025. Media coverage appeared in the New York Times, Gothamist, the New York Post, Railway Supply, Reason, and others; there has been no attempt to override the governor’s veto.

Read the Report

Read the Letter of Support

NYU News featured the NYU Gallatin course, “Applied Research to Solve Urban Problems,” taught by Marron researchers, in its “Cool Course” series. Students had the option to collaborate with NASA to collect air pollution data from sensors to train global satellite models for air quality forecasting, create a compendium of rules and regulations for road widths in densely populated cities throughout sub-Saharan Africa with an eye toward responsible urban expansion, and track locomotive emissions across the United States to create resources for parties interested in regulatory recommendations.

“We want to provide undergraduates with an opportunity to engage in mentored research in ways that typically wouldn’t be available to them until they went to graduate school,” says course organizer Kevin Ryan Cromar, director of the Health, Environment, and Policy Program at the Marron Institute.

Cromar took inspiration for the course from undergraduate experiences he remembers teaching him critical thinking, focus, and perseverance—skills he views as critical for solving complex, modern problems and competing in today’s job market. Cromar needed to partner with a school to establish the course, and worked with NYU’s Ethan Youngerman, director of undergraduate research in the Office of the Provost, and Professor Hallie Franks to establish the class at Gallatin.

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The Transportation and Land Use program has released A Better Billion: Expanding Transit & Housing for a More Affordable New York, a report developed as a long-term vision to combat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s affordability crisis via subway expansions and housing development:

A Better Billion is an ambitious plan to realize the mayor’s promise of a more affordable New York through sustained investment in 41 miles of subway extensions across 12 projects over a 40-year period. We estimate that delivering new subway service to these neighborhoods has the potential to add 167,064 units of new housing around the 64 new stations in our program with no additional upzoning required.

Highlights from the report’s release include:

The report was profiled in the New York Times’ “Free Buses? How About Expanding the Subway by 41 Miles Instead?”

The report received additional coverage in Bloomberg CityLab, Streetsblog, PoliticsNY, amNY, Spectrum News, The City, The Broadsheet, NYU News, and Washington Square News. 

An opinion piece in WBUR and and reporting in National Today applied the report’s findings to a free-bus proposal in Boston.

Director Eric Goldwyn, Research Scholar Nolan Hicks, and Assistant Research Scholar Franklin Tang provided an in-depth look at specific projects (recording and slides).

Read the Report

Read the Annual Letter

Below are highlights from the Director's Office Labs initiatives:

Economic Mobility: In 2025, the Economic Mobility Initiative advanced major efforts in public scholarship, workforce research, and new media formats while strengthening partnerships and securing new philanthropic support. Key achievements include contracting with the New Press for The Small-Dollar Solution—the culmination of research supported by the ECMC Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and Lumina Foundation—and launching a Lumina Foundation-funded campaign  with a publicist and digital marketer to expand the book’s reach. In parallel, the initiative conducted qualitative research in Appalachia on adult workforce reskilling in communities confronting obsolete industries. This work produced an op-ed in the Financial Times selected for its “One Must-Read” newsletter, a long-form feature in The American Prospect, and a local op-ed. With new support from Ascendium Philanthropy, the initiative began expanding the project into additional media and moved forward with a multimedia website that will stimulate public discussion about the complexity of twenty-first-century economic development in Appalachia and in other regions adapting from older, dirtier industries to cleaner ones. The site will feature best practices that help workers and their children pursue dignified, stable, and equitable employment, grounded in interviews with workers, employers, training providers, apprenticeship staff, workforce advisors, labor representatives, and local development leaders. Additionally, the initiative advanced an offshoot podcast project on one West Virginia community’s fight for clean water following mining-related contamination and began securing new funding for the podcast.

Order Without Design: Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud traveled extensively in 2025, promoting the principles of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities through global advisory missions. Across Brazil, Czechia, India, Morocco, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, he gave interviews, advised practitioners and government officials, delivered speeches on housing and urban land management, and taught the masterclass “How Markets and Planning Shape Cities.” His writing appeared in CapX (“How to Build a City”) and Discourse (“Why Casablanca Is the Quintessential City Movie”), with additional coverage in The Economist  (and here) and the Hindustan Times. Finally, the Institute of Town Planners India honored Bertaud for his “outstanding contributions to urban planning, shaping our understanding of cities and inspiring urban planners worldwide.”

Sustaining Places: In 2025, the Sustaining Places Initiative continued to inform and shape a burgeoning global movement focused on a place-centered approach to improving cities and lives. After an article he co-authored was featured as the lead story in the Brookings Metro January 2026 newsletter, Fellow Tim Tompkins gave keynote speeches elaborating on this approach at events as divergent as the Global Placemaking Summit in Toronto, Canada, and the Public Design Forum in Gwangju, Korea. Whether facilitating a “Place Governance” session among peers from around the globe in Toronto or discussing different value capture mechanisms around the country at the “Making Missing Markets” and “Flourishing Neighborhoods” conferences at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he shared preliminary findings about the governance and finance mechanisms that sustain multi-sector partnerships at the hyperlocal level. And at two Marron events featuring Tokyo-based authors, one focused on “area management” mechanisms and the other focused on “Designing the Spontaneous City,” the Institute explored one global city’s perspective on how to nurture vibrant and authentic places.

Other Programming: In collaboration with the NYU Office of the Provost, we hosted twenty undergraduates for a week of research-methods training. This led to a new four-credit course offered through the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, offering mentored research projects with our faculty starting in spring 2026. We hope to continue to provide experiential learning opportunities to students and to collaborate across the university.

Behavioral Health Emergency Response Initiative (BHERi): In 2025, the SCALE + Lab, led by Senior Fellow and Research Professor Mindy Tarlow, secured a three-year funding commitment from Blue Meridian Partners for the Behavioral Health Emergency Response Initiative (BHERi). The Pew Charitable Trusts has also extended its support for BHERi into 2026. BHERi seeks to reduce the frequency with which calls to 911 involving people experiencing mental health and/or substance use emergencies result in arrest or transport to the emergency department. The goal is to increase the likelihood people in crisis are instead connected to community-based care.

Launched in 2024, BHERi is a collaboration between the SCALE + Lab and three implementing partners: the Center for Behavioral Health and Justice at Wayne State University in Michigan, Clear Pathways at Peg’s Foundation in Ohio, and Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute in Texas. BHERi is concentrating initially on making significant, measurable progress in these three states, with a long-term vision for making a major impact on this issue nationally.

911 Workforce Convening: As an outgrowth of our Behavioral Health Emergency Response Initiative, the SCALE + Lab is leading a national effort focused on advancing and supporting the 911 workforce. Despite their critical role in public safety, 911 professionals—comprising call takers, dispatchers, telecommunicators, and behavioral health professionals—remain under-recognized in both public discourse and policy investment. This critical workforce faces multiple challenges, including staff shortages, attrition, burnout, and trauma, and a dearth of career supports.

The Lab is currently designing an invitation-only convening to be held in March 2026 that will gather information, test ideas, and shape priorities that will help advance the 911 workforce. The convening will bring together subject matter experts, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Perspectives from workforce development, the public sector workforce, and 911 operations and policy will help identify promising practices as well as gaps and shed insights on key questions, including how solutions could be scaled across the nation’s nearly 9,000 Emergency Communications Centers.

Inequality + Opportunity Initiative: Tarlow engaged with NYU’s Inequality + Opportunity initiative in multiple ways in 2025: representing Marron in a leadership role as co-chair of the Research, Policy, and Practice committee; participating with a cross-section of NYU faculty to advance youth opportunity and well-being; and receiving a grant targeted to youth in crisis as a complement to the SCALE + Lab’s Behavioral Health Emergency Response Initiative. The Inequality + Opportunity Initiative is housed in the NYU Office of the Provost under the leadership of Vice Provost Elise Cappella.

The Human Exploitation and Resilience program (HERP) faced a difficult 2025. The team began the year with interventions focused on forced labor and human trafficking in five countries—India, Thailand, Kenya, Tanzania, and Costa Rica—all showing promising results. However, in the first quarter, our U.S. Department of State-funded projects in Thailand, India, and Kenya were terminated. HERP pivoted to secure new funding, but the landscape for international intervention work remains limited. Despite the losses, HERP received continuation funding from the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Office for its intervention work with the Tanzanian NGO, Community Health and Social Welfare Africa (COMHESWA), to provide pre-departure and vocational training to Tanzanian domestic workers. Additionally, HERP’s partner in Costa Rica, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), began training the Costa Rican Coast Guard to identify victims of forced labor in the fishing industry; this work will continue into 2026. Finally, Director of HERP Meredith Dank presented at the United Nations High-Level Plenary Meeting to Appraise the Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons. In 2026, the program hopes to expand its efforts domestically, continuing to elevate the voices of exploited and vulnerable populations and highlight their resilience through rigorous empirical research.

Domestic Servitude in Tanzania: With the continuation of funding received from the TIP Office, HERP, along with local implementing partner COMHESWA, will be expanding their labor trafficking research in Tanzania. The new funding will support additional participants, an expanded site in Zanzibar, and enhanced capacity building with government and community partners. This project has already succeeded in providing more sustainable livelihood opportunities for individuals who decide to remain in Tanzania and pursue in-country employment, in addition to valuable educational training for those who go abroad. As part of the project, the team developed a project brief on the use of digital peer networks to empower Ethiopian domestic workers who travel abroad for employment opportunities. And, Dank published an article in the Journal of Human Trafficking: “Estimating the Prevalence of Domestic Servitude among Tanzanian Women Who Have Returned from Working Overseas: A Direct Comparison of Stratified Simple Random Sampling and Vincent Link-Tracing Sampling Strategies.”

Forced Labor in the Fishing Industry in Costa Rica: In late 2025, local partner International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched the first training for coast guards to identify victims of forced labor in the fishing industry, with additional trainings planned for 2026. Through this work, those involved in the fishing industry show an increased understanding of the markers of exploitative labor and human trafficking in their industry. This project uses innovative participatory methods to deliver the educational program, which has found great success. Dank’s prevalence research, “Estimating the Prevalence of Forced Labor in the Fishing Industry in Puntarenas, Costa Rica: A Direct Comparison of Conventional Sampling and Vincent Link-Tracing Sampling Strategies,” was also published in the Journal of Human Trafficking.

Nature and Scope of Forced Criminality in the US: Dank and her team deployed the first-of-its-kind screening tool in four public defender’s offices across the US to understand the commonality of forced criminality and the nature by which it manifests. This project also includes interviewing legal stakeholders and their clients, alongside comprehensive reviews of human trafficking vacatur cases, filling a significant gap in our understanding of this form of exploitation.

Other Research, Presentations, and Media: Dank served as a panelist at the United Nations High-Level Plenary Meeting to Appraise the Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons. She also participated in EUROCRIM 2025, where she discussed her project, “Developing Domestic Economic Opportunities to Reduce Trafficking Risks in Overseas Migration: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Tanzania.” She and her co-authors published Labor Trafficking in Construction and Hospitality Topical Brief: Barriers to Help-Seeking, a report produced with funding from their National Institute of Justice (NIJ) project, “Labor Trafficking in Construction and Hospitality: Analyzing Victim Recruitment, Exploitation, and Service Needs to Identify Strategies for Prevention and Intervention.” Lastly, she was interviewed by NYU News on her recent study, “Understanding the Needs of Unstably Housed Youth in New York City.”

2025 was an extremely busy year for the Transportation and Land Use program. The team published six new reports detailing how to improve transit project delivery and operations across the United States. Researchers also traveled globally to deliver invited talks, attend industry events and conferences, and brief officials on their research. The team has also grown over the last year, adding a full-time employee and two researchers. The team has continued to write op-eds, speak to the media, and shape public policy as it unfolds. Finally, Director of Transportation and Land Use Eric Goldwyn hosted two book talks at 370 Jay Street.

New Reports: In 2025, we published new reports about ridership estimation for the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard Subway in Philadelphia, how to speed up trains on the Northeast Corridor without spending more than $100 billion, the merits of intercity passenger rail electrification and how electric trains can meaningfully compete with driving and flying over intermediate distances, a short review of global train operations, an analysis of the FTA’s Capital Cost Database, and a visionary plan detailing how Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can begin a subway-building renaissance that would undergird his affordability agenda. Additionally, Elif Ensari also published a paper in Cities about using artificial intelligence to monitor police response to illegal parking complaints.

Talks, Conferences, Industry Events, and Leadership: Eric Goldwyn led off the year, delivering a lecture at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Municipal Finance & Governance on the high cost of transit projects. Eric was also named to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s Transition Committee. Alon Levy attended InnoTrans, one of the largest transport trade fairs in the world. Marco Chitti addressed the Canadian Urban Transit Association in Montreal about ongoing research on the high costs of transit construction. Elif Ensari presented a paper at the Vision Zero Cities Conference on Turkey’s subway-building boom.

New Hires: This year we hired Zhexuan “Franklin” Tang as a junior research scholar. Franklin has supported our work developing a rolling stock database, mastering ridership estimation software, contributing to our train operations research, and spearheading our A Better Billion report. We brought in Matthew Bornholt to carry out an in-depth case study on London’s transit costs. Bornholt has also provided data on Japanese construction costs and contributed to our train operations research. Finally, we brought in Ilya Petoushkoff to lead our Moscow case study.

Media: We wrote op-eds, recorded podcasts, and even did some old-fashioned radio and television interviews this year. We were quoted or cited in a range of media publications, including the Austin Free Press, Sacramento Bee, CityLab, Bloomberg, Daily News, Newsday, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Mass Transit, Crain’s New York Business, and the New York Times. Our research was picked up by a handful of books, too: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Dan Wang’s Breakneck, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, and Benjamin Schneider’s The Unfinished City. 

Events: For the first time in our program’s history, we held public-facing events with authors we admire. Over the summer we hosted Marc Dunkelman and Jerusalem Demsas for a discussion about Dunkelman’s book, Why Nothing Works. In December, Eric Goldwyn and Benjamin Schneider sat down to discuss Schneider’s new book, The Unfinished Metropolis.

The Civic Analytics program continued its work using data and computation for social impact through applied and fundamental research. In addition to progressing projects supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Klingenstein Philanthropies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Land Economics Foundation, the program received new funding from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, and Klingenstein Philanthropies. The program’s research this year put a renewed emphasis on using artificial intelligence to drive climate action, enabling community-led data analytics, and addressing issues of fairness and bias in algorithmic decision-making. Collaborators included the New York City Department of Buildings, the Guarini Center at the NYU School of Law, the Red Hook Initiative, the University of Pennsylvania, and the City University of New York (CUNY), among others. Research Scientist and PhD candidate Bartosz Bończak and PhD candidate Callie Clark are finishing their dissertations, and Director of Civic Analytics Constantine Kontokosta was promoted to full professor of urban science and planning. 

Data-driven climate action – research and impact: The Civic Analytics program’s longstanding work on bringing machine learning to climate policy continued to expand in 2025. New grants from Klingenstein Philanthropies and the NYC Department of Environmental Protection and the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (through the Town and Gown Consortium) focus on building decarbonization through building performance standards and the phase-out of fossil fuels. Working in partnership with the NYU School of Law’s Guarini Center, and non-profit and industry collaborators, the Civic Analytics program co-organized a convening of city climate policy leaders from Boston, New York City, Washington, DC, Denver, and other cities to discuss recommendations for the future of building performance standards. The final report from this work will be released in early 2026. Kontokosta also continued his research collaboration with the NYC Department of Buildings to understand affordability issues around NYC’s Local Law 97 and its goal to reduce carbon emissions in buildings over 25,000 square feet.

The importance of community connectedness through neighborhood network analysis: Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (through the Sociology, HEGS, and HNDS-R programs), principal investigator Kontokosta and Professor Lance Freeman from the University of Pennsylvania are using large-scale mobility data to demonstrate how community connectedness can be used to understand patterns of neighborhood change and create early-warning indicators of gentrification. Kontokosta and Freeman organized a special session on this topic at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning annual conference, featuring research from Kontokosta, Freeman, and PhD candidates Bończak and Clark, as well as researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions. 

Driving change through community-led data analytics and partnerships: We completed our on-the-ground research with the Red Hook Initiative to enable community air quality and pollution monitoring and analytics in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Funded by a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and working together with researchers from CUNY, Kontokosta and the Civic Analytics team developed a new data pipeline to stream real-time data from a combination of high-quality air quality monitors and low-cost community-deployed sensors and to process and analyze these data through an interactive, accessible visualization platform. 

Commuting loss during COVID-19 and its aftermath: Supported by grants from the Land Economics Foundation and NYU CUSP, Kontokosta, Bończak, and Marron Director of Urban Exansion, Solly Angel, completed a study that examines changing commute patterns to employment centers across American cities. Using data from over 40 million devices over five years, the team identified the characteristics associated with the resilience of employment centers within cities, arguing that while the spatial structure of cities has changed, the city remains a critical locus of economic activity. The final paper will be released in early 2026. 

Improving the fairness of algorithmic decision-making in the public sector: Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Amazon Science, Kontokosta and Research Fellow Boyeong Hong, together with PhD candidate Kate Boxer and Professor Daniel Neill, published their work on reporting bias in the Annals of Applied Statistics. The research, a result of a collaboration with NYC311 and NYC HPD, identifies reporting bias in complaints around heating and hot water problems in NYC’s multi-family buildings. Ongoing work by the Civic Analytics team is bringing together 311 data from 50 North American cities to make these data more accessible and to create generalizable bias-aware data tools for service delivery in cities.

Student mentorship and Civic Analytics researcher updates: Bończak and Clark have had a productive year and will be defending their dissertations in the Urban Systems PhD program at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in 2026. Bończak was also an advisor for the New York Hall of Science “CityWorks” exhibit (and here), which opened in May. In the spring semester, we will welcome a new researcher through the university’s Sustainability Undergraduate Research Assistant initiative. Civic Analytics research affiliate and former PhD student of Kontokosta, Yuan Lai, has been promoted to associate professor at Tsinghua University. Former PhD student Sokratis Papadopoulos joined Meta as a senior data scientist. Professor Constantine Kontokosta, director of the Civic Analytics program, was promoted to full professor of urban science and planning. The Civic Analytics team was active in outreach and dissemination of its work, with talks and invited presentations at the ACSP Urban Planning AI workshop, Toronto Metropolitan University, NYU GIS Day, and the Land Economics Foundation, among others.

In 2025, the Health, Environment, and Policy program advanced initiatives in health research, air quality forecasting, environmental economics, and regulatory policy, while expanding international partnerships and securing new funding. Key accomplishments include: launching a multicenter asthma intervention with the Children’s Environmental Health Research and Translation Center (CEHRT) network and Kaiser Permanente; improving wildfire and global air quality forecasting through NASA-supported model development; contributing economic assessments to inform the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases; supporting federal rulemaking and litigation via scientific and legal analysis; and strengthening capacity building in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The program, led by Director of Health, Environment, and Policy Kevin Cromar, also received new funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), NASA’s Satellite Needs Working Group (NASA SNWG), and the NYU CEHRT Center while maintaining a strong publication record.

Health Research: Cromar established and serves as the overall project PI for a multi-center collaboration between the NIEHS Collaborative Centers in Children’s Environmental Health Research and Translation (CEHRT) and the Kaiser Permanente (KP) medical network to implement health-focused interventions for families with children with asthma. The project includes a home-based intervention model and an integrated risk communication system that alerts households to heat waves, outdoor air pollution, and exceptional pollution events. The initial intervention was launched in northern California in 2025, with a nationwide scale-up across the KP network and geographically matched CEHRT institutions planned for 2026.

Geoscience Research and Translation: The program continued work on improving forecasts of air pollution from wildland fires through a NASA-funded effort to develop and disseminate the Hazardous Air Quality Ensemble System (HAQES). Cromar and his team advanced the ensemble model to reduce false positives and strengthen probabilistic predictions of smoke exposure for use by air quality agencies and health networks. This work was featured at a special wildland fire symposium at the annual International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and International Society of Exposure Science (ISES) conference. The team also collaborated with NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office to provide bias-corrected air quality forecasts for US Department of State locations and other partners worldwide using the GEOS-CF model and Pandora network.

Environmental Economics: The program remained deeply engaged in the economic assessment of environmental risks to inform policy analysis. Cromar collaborated with members of the economics chapter of the discontinued sixth National Climate Assessment (NCA6) to synthesize current evidence on the economic impacts of climate change in the United States. He also continued his role as PI for a multi-institutional project funded by the Wellcome Trust to integrate the health impacts of outdoor air pollution, including climate-driven increases in wildland fire risk, into economic models used to estimate the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG). Cromar hosted the annual Wellcome Climate and Health conference at NYU and participated in a Resources for the Future workshop focused on strengthening SC-GHG estimates.

Policy and Law: Cromar and his team provided extensive support for policy and legal actions involving environmental regulations. The program contributed written and oral comments on numerous federal rulemakings and supported the preparation of amicus briefs for major litigation. Topics included delays and the proposed repeal of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants, reconsideration of the endangerment finding and greenhouse gas vehicle standards, revisions to methane standards for oil and gas sources, and state efforts to restrict public access to environmental information.

International Capacity Building: The program expanded its global partnerships in 2025. Cromar and his team continued to advise government leaders in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; strengthened collaboration with UNICEF to reduce air pollution health risks in Quito, Ecuador; and provided training and technical guidance to government officials in Mexico, including serving as a keynote speaker at an air quality conference convened by the Inter-American Development Bank. Additional work supported ongoing environmental health research in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

New Research Funding and Publications: Pilot awards from the NYU School of Medicine CEHRT Center were received by Gina Gonzales, Noussair Lazrak, and Kevin Park. New NASA Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG) funding was awarded to further the development of GEOS-CF bias-correction tools, and NIEHS funding was secured to expand health interventions within the KP network. While translational impact remains the keystone of the program, the team also remained active in peer-reviewed scientific publishing, contributing five new articles in 2025.

During the past year, the Urban Expansion program, under the leadership of Shlomo ("Solly") Angel, continued to work on its three central missions:

(1) Developing, analyzing, and disseminating global datasets on urban expansion and densification;

(2) Providing policy advice on these topics to governments and international organizations; and

(3) Working on the ground with municipalities and local landholders on preparing the urban periphery for settlement.

To advance the first mission, the program worked on The Atlas of Urban Growth in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI). This project includes maps and metrics for all cities with populations of 100,000 or more in 2020. The universe of cities is now identified, decadal maps from 1980–2020 are drawn, and associated metrics have been calculated. The work is now being finalized in preparation for creating a website to host the data. The program previously collaborated with WRI in creating a set of global intra-urban land use maps showing irregular settlements, informal land subdivisions, and formal land subdivisions. We are now collaborating with WRI and the World Bank to create a training set and a machine learning algorithm for identifying these land uses in all cities in Sub-Saharan Africa on an annual basis. This year's work also included the publication of Angel et al.’s Measuring Change in Urban Land Consumption: A Global Analysis which supports the measurement of a key indicator in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We also finalized a study, “Four Complementary Processes for Accommodating Urban Population Growth in the European Union, 1980-2020.” 

Progress on the second mission involved policy-oriented work on urban expansion and densification with national governments and international organizations.  The Inter-American Development Bank published Angel et al.’s Accommodating Urban Growth in Latin American and Caribbean Cities to disseminate and promote our policy proposals to a wide audience across the region. We also recorded a lecture by Angel at a 2024 World Bank Urbanization and Poverty conference, “Twelve Guidelines for Action on Urban Expansion.” Angel has advised the government of Uzbekistan on territorial planning, under contract with the World Bank, and delivered the keynote address at a national conference in Tashkent, “Urban Expansion and Densification in Uzbekistan: Diagnosis and Guidelines for Action.” Angel also delivered the keynote address at a seminar in Santiago, Chile, “Reflections on the Prospects of Urban Densification in Chile” and gave a talk, “Accommodating Urban Growth in the Global South: An Urban Planning Perspective” to a World Bank Technical Deep Dive in October 2025. Additionally, Angel co-authored the chapter, “Mobilizing Land for Rapid Expansion of City Peripheries in Sub-Saharan Africa” for a forthcoming World Bank flagship report on urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa.

Progress on the third mission was documented in Ethiopia Urban Expansion Initiative (UEI) Evaluation, Final Report, an impact evaluation, funded by Open Philanthropy, regarding the program’s work with Ethiopian secondary cities in 2013-2016. Our on-the-ground work stalled when our project, funded by USAID, was terminated. That project focused on a citywide urban expansion plan for Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, and on empowering local landholders and their traditional chiefs on the periphery of the city to subdivide their lands before selling them to informal settlers. We have since engaged in seeking new funding to revive this project. Lastly, we are discussing the incorporation of urban expansion planning into the portfolios of numerous World Bank officials involved in urban projects in the Global South.

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• Director of Transportation and Land Use, Eric Goldwyn: Committee on Transportation, Climate, and Infrastructure
• Senior Research Scholar Justine Olderman: Committee on Community Safety

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The brief highlights how WhatsApp has been successfully utilized in this context and includes a how-to guide for practitioners interested in adapting this digital peer support model within their own programs: 

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Director of Land Use and Transportation, Eric Goldwyn, and his team have released “How Many People Does It Take to Operate a Train?”:

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Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, presented at the Urban Planning AI Workshop at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning annual meeting in Minneapolis. His talk, titled "Computational Urban Science: Lessons, Limitations, and New Directions for AI in Planning," defined a future roadmap for AI in urban planning based on Kontokosta's work bridging data, computation, and cities.

Marron researchers presented lightning talks at NYU GIS Day:

• Civic Analytics Research Scientist and Lab Manager Bartosz Bończak presented on the Civic Analytics program’s geospatial and geoAI-based research. The talk included the NYC Energy & Water Performance Map, which shows energy, water, and carbon emissions data for NYC larger buildings, and NSF-funded work on community networks and neighborhood change.
• Transportation and Land Use Research Scholar Elif Ensari presented her program’s Transit Oriented Development study of the Interborough Express Corridor. Their research looked into the development potential around the proposed IBX stations with the aim to promote strategic land-use changes and street redesigns necessary to maximize the investment that will be made to build the line.

Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, was an invited speaker for the Toronto Metropolitan University and REALPAC Commercial Real Estate Research Symposium. His presentation focused on the evolution of building performance standards for urban climate adaptation and the use of AI tools to reduce the costs of achieving greater energy efficiency and carbon reductions.

The Transit Costs Project released their Northeast Corridor project website:

We published a report a few months back, but we wanted to improve our design so that the ideas underpinning the report would be easier to understand. This process has been super helpful, especially as we think about different ways to describe ideas we take for granted, from diesel versus electric acceleration to schedule padding to the takt.

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Meredith Dank has published three articles in the Journal of Human Trafficking related to projects in Tanzania, Costa Rica, and Tunisia:

• “Estimating the Prevalence of Domestic Servitude among Tanzanian Women Who Have Returned from Working Overseas: A Direct Comparison of Stratified Simple Random Sampling and Vincent Link-Tracing Sampling Strategies”
• “Estimating the Prevalence of Forced Labor in the Fishing Industry in Puntarenas, Costa Rica: A Direct Comparison of Conventional Sampling and Vincent Link-Tracing Sampling Strategies”
• “Estimating the Prevalence of Forced Labor among Domestic Workers in Tunis, Tunisia: A Direct Comparison of Time-Location Sampling and Mark-Recapture Strategies”

Director of Urban Expansion, Solly Angel, recently gave two presentations:

• “Accommodating Urban Growth in the Global South: An Urban Planning Perspective” at the World Bank's “Technical Deep Dive on Urban Planning and Land for Growth” in Kyoto

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• “City Planning for Engineers in the Global South: A Short Introduction” at the conclave, “Urban Planning and Land-Use Science: A Civil Engineering Perspective,” hosted by MIT World Peace University, Pune and AUM-Lambda Alpha International, Chapter Pune

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The Marron Institute has established a new four-credit course offered through the Gallatin School of Individualized Study that will allow undergraduate students an opportunity to work on mentored research projects with Marron faculty. Starting in spring 2026, students can enroll in RSRCH-UG 1004, "Applied Research to Solve Urban Problems," in order to gain practical research skills while exploring the interplay between scientific research and public decision-making. This is an ongoing step, following the success of the Marron Methods Week earlier in the year, to provide undergraduate research opportunities at NYU in partnership with the Office of the Provost's director of undergraduate research, Ethan Youngerman. Students or faculty members with additional questions should contact Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, for more information on undergraduate research at Marron. 

Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, participated in the High-Level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Appraisal of the United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons as a panelist addressing the theme “The Global Plan of Action and Enduring Trafficking Issues and Gaps Which Should, Inter Alia, Address the Current Challenges, Gaps and Opportunities in Implementation of the Global Plan of Action, Including Child Trafficking, Trafficking for Forced Labour and the Link between Trafficking in Persons and Organized Crime Groups.” In a summary of the discussion:

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Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, in collaboration with the Guarini Center at the NYU School of Law, the Urban Green Council, and Cadmus Group, was awarded a grant from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice through the Town & Gown Consortium. The grant will support a fossil fuel phase-out study for NYC’s buildings, focusing on those under 25,000 square feet, as part of the city’s broader energy and climate policy.

The Health, Environment, and Policy program has received new extramural funding from NASA’s Satellite Needs Working Group (SNWG) to expand its work on improving real-time air quality forecasting for domestic and international partners. Led by Director Kevin Cromar and Research Scientist Noussair Lazrak, the project applies machine learning bias correction to NASA’s GEOS-CF model and integrates observations from the global Pandora network to generate localized, more accurate forecasts. This effort will strengthen the ability of government agencies, health networks, and community partners to anticipate unhealthy air quality conditions and respond more effectively. Over the next several years, the team will build an integrated forecasting platform that provides near-real-time outputs, user-friendly public interfaces, and a scalable foundation for new monitoring sites.

The SCALE + Lab, led by Senior Fellow and Research Professor Mindy Tarlow, has secured a three-year funding commitment from Blue Meridian Partners for the Behavioral Health Emergency Response Initiative (BHERi). The Pew Charitable Trusts has also extended its support for BHERi into 2026. BHERi seeks to reduce the frequency with which calls to 911 involving people experiencing mental health and/or substance use emergencies result in arrest or transport to the emergency department. The goal is to increase the likelihood people in crisis are instead connected to community-based care.
 
Launched in 2024, BHERi is a collaboration between the SCALE + Lab and three implementing partners: the Center for Behavioral Health and Justice at Wayne State University in Michigan, Clear Pathways at Peg’s Foundation in Ohio, and Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute in Texas. BHERi is concentrating initially on making significant, measurable progress in these three states, with a long-term vision for making a major impact on this issue nationally.

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Sustaining Places Fellow Tim Tompkins hosted Taichi Goto of Region Works LLC and the Japan Area Management Network for a discussion of his newly published book Place Management in Regional Strategies: Practices, Frameworks, and Methodologies in Japan. He was later joined by Ryuzo Hasegawa of the Japan Area Management Network and their colleagues from Japan for an informal conversation about the evolving nature of place management in Japan, the United States, and beyond.

Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, provided oral testimony at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s hearing on the interim final rule extending compliance deadlines under the 2024 oil and gas methane standards. He emphasized that the EPA’s core mandate under the Clean Air Act is to protect public health and welfare, not to maximize short-term economic gains. Drawing on his experience on the Utah Air Quality Board, Cromar underscored that timely implementation of methane controls offers the most cost-effective way to reduce climate and health impacts from the oil and gas sector.

Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, attended EUROCRIM 2025 in Athens, Greece, where she participated in the session “Interventions and Measurement to Combat Human Trafficking.” She discussed her project “Developing Domestic Economic Opportunities to Reduce Trafficking Risks in Overseas Migration: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Tanzania.”

Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar took part in a workshop on climate economics supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and hosted by Resources for the Future in Washington, DC. The event convened leading economists, scientists, and policy experts to assess advances in estimating the social cost of greenhouse gases (SC-GHG) since the 2017 National Academies report Valuing Climate Damages: Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide. Cromar contributed insights on incorporating health impacts into SC-GHG calculations, emphasizing how climate-economic models capture adaptation through the treatment of temperature-related mortality risks. The workshop’s conclusions will help guide future research and policy to ensure SC-GHG estimates remain rigorous, transparent, and policy-relevant.

Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, was an invited speaker in the session “Wildfire Smoke Exposure and Health Effects in a Warming World: Epidemiological Insights, Health Equity, and Policy Responses” at the joint annual meeting of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) and the International Society of Exposure Science (ISES) in Atlanta. His presentation drew on projects with NASA and Kaiser Permanente to advance exposure estimates and risk communication strategies for wildfire smoke. Cromar highlighted the need for accurate exposure assessment, the importance of accounting for emissions from structural fires in addition to biomass burning, and the scientific challenges of evaluating wildfire smoke health impacts through approaches distinct from those used for traditional criteria pollutants. 

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• Onward: “How to Fix Britain’s Housing Crisis”
• Pembroke College, University of Cambridge
• Labour YIMBY
• Adam Smith Institute

In addition, he wrote “How to Build a City” in the Centre for Policy Studies’ CapX, where he notes: 

The location of jobs is decided by the market. In order to respond as efficiently as possible to maintain this spontaneous order, the location of housing should be too. Urban planning has a place but it’s in responding to what infrastructure people say they need—not breaking ground where planners think housing ‘should’ be built. In short, planners should respond to the labour market, and not try to shape it themselves. 

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• Invisible Warriors: Veterans in State Prisons: This study examines the methods used by state prison systems to identify veterans in their custody. It presents a national scan of these methods and uses two states with available data as case studies to compare two veteran-identification methods, self-report and verification through a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs database. The authors derived a total count of veterans known to be in state prisons, noting that this number is certainly an undercount of the true number of incarcerated veterans and recommending action to improve and standardize identification methods nationally to ensure that veteran-specific services reach all who are eligible to receive them.
• Falling Through the Cracks: Gaps in Identifying Veterans on Community Supervision: This brief explores how community-supervision agencies, primarily probation and parole, identify veterans on their caseloads in order to make referrals to services tailored to this population. While findings are not nationally representative, they offer preliminary insights into common practices and challenges across supervision systems. Due to the variations in state systems of supervision, the authors recommend state-level action to identify gaps and make improvements to increase accurate identification and verification.
• Outcomes from a Jail-Based Veterans Housing Unit: Veterans housing units have not been evaluated for long-term effectiveness in helping participants succeed during reentry and avoid further criminal behavior. This report seeks to partially fill that gap by comparing data on veterans who participated in the Veterans Housing Unit (VHU) in a large county jail, and veterans who were booked into the jail but not referred for VHU participation.

• “Divided Communities: How Transit Access Impacts Neighborhood Connectivity and Isolation,” presented by Student Fellow Callie Clark 
• “Neighborhood Identification Using Large-Scale Mobility Data and Network Analysis,” presented by Research Scientist and Lab Manager Bartosz Bończak
• “Mobility Networks, Spatial Segregation, and the Social Dynamics of Neighborhoods,” presented by Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta

Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, has been leading a series of conversations with medical professional societies to strengthen the role of health research in shaping U.S. climate policy. He has delivered talks at the American Psychological Association, the American Thoracic Society’s international conference, and the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health (MSCCH), which brings together over 50 national medical societies, representing more than 700,000 health professionals.

These talks have focused on how research documenting the health impacts of climate change can be more effectively used in federal decisionmaking. Cromar is working with MSCCH and other societies to identify key climate-sensitive health endpoints, establish global baseline estimates, develop justifiable damage functions with uncertainty bounds, and identify valuation metrics that capture the economic costs of these health outcomes. This effort is part of a broader initiative led by NYU to improve how health impacts are integrated into estimates of the social cost of greenhouse gases and, more broadly, into U.S. climate benefit-cost analyses.

Director of Urban Expansion, Solly Angel, gave the keynote lecture, “Reflections on the Prospects for Urban Densification in Chile,” at a seminar, “Anatomies of Verticalization and Policies of Residential Densification in Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción: Towards More Integrated and Sustainable Metropolitan Areas,” at the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. Researchers at the university studying “verticalization” in Chilean cities have been using the methodology Angel developed at the Marron Institute on the Anatomy of Density.

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Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud taught a masterclass, “How Markets and Planning Shape Cities,” to professionals, academics, and government officials in New Delhi. The two-day workshop, which examined the interplay between market forces and urban-planning strategies in city development, was organized and hosted by several entities affiliated with CEPT University.

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The Transportation and Land Use program hosted a discussion of Marc Dunkelman’s new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back. Dunkelman was in discussion with Jerusalem Demsas, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy. Why Nothing Works is a natural starting point for a discussion that is sure to address the current political discourse around permitting reform; housing, energy, and transportation policy; American history; and electoral politics.

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Director of Urban Expansion, Solly Angel, moderated a session on “Revisiting Sites and Services for the 21st Century” at the World Bank Land Conference 2025 in Washington, D.C. The session focused on addressing the affordable housing problem at scale by providing serviced sites on which people could build their homes by themselves. In preparation for the session, Angel interviewed Michael Cohen (The New School), who worked at the World Bank on the first sites and services project in Dakar, Senegal, in 1972. Angel also gave a talk, “Empowering Rural Landholders on the Urban Periphery to Deliver Sites and Services at Scale,” which focused on a pilot project in Lilongwe, Malawi, where traditional authorities organize their communities to pool and subdivide land before disposing it in the market.

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• Slate: “Why Free Buses in NYC Could End up Backfiring Horribly” quotes Director of Transportation and Land Use, Eric Goldwyn: “‘Funding for things like fare-free transit has to come from somewhere, and funding is fragile,’ said Goldwyn. ‘Just look at what’s happening 100 miles to the south,’ he added, referencing the dire situation in Philadelphia, where SEPTA, the regional transit agency, is facing a 45 percent service reduction because the state of Pennsylvania has not extended the financial lifeline that it did a year ago.”
• Vital City: “An Expert Panel Weighs in on the Paper of Record’s Mayoral Endorsement Process” includes Fellow Tim Tompkins as panelist: “Exhausted by The Times’ often-unsubtle and intrusive framing of political issues by reporters, I found the direct thoughts of very different people about the candidates to be incredibly refreshing and clarifying.”
• 2025 ASFS-AFHVS Conference: Food Cultures & Social Justice: Civic Analytics Student Fellow Callie Clark’s work was presented by her collaborator, Alice Reznickova, in “Novel Approaches to Food Access: Constructing an Emergency Food Access Index in New York City.”
• Event: “In Conversation with Prof Alain Bertaud”: Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud was hosted by Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge in conjunction with the YIMBY Initiative.

• Marron researchers visited the new CityWorks exhibit at the New York Hall of Science, where they received a behind-the-scenes introduction and tour from the museum’s leadership. Research Scientist and Lab Manager Bartosz Bończak served on the Advisory Council for this exhibition.
• Civic Analytics Student Fellow Callie Clark was accepted to the Oxford Summer School in Economic Networks, hosted by the Mathematical Institute and the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School. The summer school explores social networks, economic complexity, urban systems and innovation with professors and students from universities around the world. This program is funded through the NYU Urban Doctoral Fellowship Program.
• Civic Analytics Student Fellow Callie Clark served as a mentor for the NYU Summer Undergraduate Research Incubator (SURI), where she instructed undergraduate students on creating an original research proposal on her research topic, “How do cities shape access to resources across different populations? How can we quantify access from a multidimensional perspective?”
• Yichun Zhou, a student mentored by Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, successfully defended his dissertation, “Investigating Urban Green Space Engagement Through Mobility Patterns and Visual Perceptions in High-Density Metropolitan Areas,” for his PhD in Urban Systems at NYU Tandon.

The Transportation and Land Use program, working with the Eno Center for Transportation, has released, Analysis of the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Cost Database, which analyzes 65 bus-rapid-transit, commuter-rail, light-rail, heavy-rail, and trolley projects and highlights the database’s uses, potential, and limitations. Director of Transportation and Land Use, Eric Goldwyn, notes:

“We spend billions of public dollars on these projects. There should be good, unambiguous accounting so that we can compare and learn from past projects. The FTA Capital Cost Database is an attempt at this. It isn’t perfect, but it is a tool that can help project sponsors baseline projects and understand which components drive costs.”

An additional set of interactive graphs is included in the analysis, and the research was profiled in Railway Age. 

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The Transportation and Land Use program’s Transit Cost Project released How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor (NEC), contending that it can be done for under $20 billion, multiples below the cost of existing proposals. The report focuses on total integration of scheduling, planning, and infrastructure investments. By coordinating all passenger services on the NEC, not just Amtrak, current delays can be reduced by reforming current schedule padding and service pattern-variations practices, which hold back the NEC back from reaching its full potential. The report has been widely profiled, in:

• Slow Boring: “At Last, a Workable Plan for High-Speed Rail”
• Slate: “High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor—on a Budget”
• City Journal: “Why Northeast Rail Travel Is Such a Mess”
• Smart Cities Dive: “Amtrak Could Modernize Northeast Corridor for Less: NYU Study”
• The Bulwark: “A Real Plan to Get The U.S. High-Speed Rail—for 10% of the Cost”
• NYU News: “Slashing Northeast Corridor Rail Travel Time Can Be Achieved for Much Less, NYU Report Finds”

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The NYU Marron Institute would like to express a fond farewell and best wishes to former Marron Director and Professor of Public Policy, Angela Hawken, who has begun a new position as founding faculty member at The Johns Hopkins University School of Government and Policy. Hawken served as Director for five years and as a Marron faculty member and Director of the Litmus program for nine. During her tenure as Marron Director, research expenditures from externally funded awards doubled. Two new programs—Transportation and Land Use, and Human Exploitation and Resilience—were launched, along with a new initiative, the SCALE + Lab. Partnerships with practitioners and urban leaders were expanded, extending Marron’s programmatic reach to 40 U.S. states and 20 countries.

Kari Kohn will lead the institute as interim Director. Kohn has been with Marron since its founding over a decade ago, helping to execute the vision developed by Nobel laureate Paul Romer as part of an initial team of three. She most recently served as Deputy Director, where she was responsible for operations and finance and worked with the Director on strategy. Kohn is committed to growing the institute and supporting its faculty and researchers as they continue to solve pressing urban challenges and improve the opportunities available to urban residents worldwide.

Marron Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud was honored by the Institute of Town Planners India for his “outstanding contributions to urban planning, shaping our understanding of cities and inspiring urban planners worldwide.”

Director of Transportation and Land Use, Eric Goldwyn, joined the Talking Headways Podcast hosted by Seamless Bay Area to discuss the California State Rail Plan:

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Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, was interviewed by NYU News on her recent study, “Understanding the Needs of Unstably Housed Youth in New York City”:

Dank’s study was also profiled in Washington Square News.

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With support from the U.S. State Department, researchers in the Human Exploitation and Resilience program have published “A Public Health Community Health Worker-Delivered Intervention to Reduce Human Trafficking Among Denotified Tribes in India: A Protocol Paper,” in PLOS One:

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Writing in Discourse, Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud argues “Why ‘Casablanca’ Is the Quintessential City Movie”:

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Director of Health, Environment, and Policy, Kevin Cromar, was the primary speaker for a featured session at the WHO Second Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health, held in Cartagena, Colombia. The conference, co-organized by the World Health Organization and the Government of Colombia, with the support of the Government of Spain, UN agencies, and the World Bank, brought together more than 750 invited stakeholders from national ministries, intergovernmental and development agencies, local governments, and academia and civil society. In Cromar’s session focused on air-quality alerts and indexes in protecting public health, he addressed how these tools can move beyond public awareness to deliver measurable health outcomes.

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The Health, Environment, and Policy Program, led by Director Kevin Cromar, is collaborating on a newly funded NASA research project, “Enhancing Multi-Agency Wildfire Ensemble Forecasts for Health and Air Quality Decision Support in the U.S. and Beyond.” The project brings together Yunyao Li (University of Texas at Arlington), Daniel Tong (George Mason University), Laura Myers (Kaiser Permanente), and Cromar to advance the utility of wildfire-ensemble forecasts for public-health and air quality decisionmaking.

Cromar will contribute to efforts to align forecast improvements with the needs of health and risk-communication communities, engage with technical staff and collaborators at the U.S. EPA to support integration into the AirNow-Tech platform, and participate in model validation through comparisons with monitoring networks and existing forecasting tools. The team will also work with Kaiser Permanente Northern California to apply best practices in risk communication for informing patient populations.

On May 3, CityWorks will open at the New York Hall of Science. Civic Analytics Research Scientist and Lab Manager Bartosz Bończak served on the Advisory Council for this exhibition:

In a feature, the New York Times notes:

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The Transportation and Land Use program, led by Director Eric Goldwyn, has released two reports:

1. Momentum: Fellow Nolan Hick pairs electrification and other components to develop a high-throughput infrastructure framework, which slashes time off of existing commuter and intercity rail services. This report is profiled in Bloomberg CityLab and Newsday.
2. MTA Capital Investments Analysis: The team analyzes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s [MTA] capital investments between 2000 and 2024, in collaboration with Reinvent Albany. They found that in the five capital plans, the MTA has spent or will spend $194 billion. As expected, they also found that capital spending is far higher per commuter-rail rider than NYC subway or bus rider. Reinvent Albany provided testimony to the MTA board. The study is featured in Newsday (and here) and Streetsblog NYC.

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At the Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion (CSSI) at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud gave the inaugural address for the “2nd Edition of Inclusive Development Conference: Housing and Urban Land Management in an Unequal World.”

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Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, gave a talk, “Understanding Shifts in Commuting Behavior and Mobility Networks in American Cities,” hosted by Lambda Alpha International’s Land Economics Foundation. Kontokosta spoke about research he conducted with Director of Urban Expansion, Solly Angel, and Research Scientist and Lab Manager Bartosz Bończak, which analyzed the shift in commute patterns from 2019 to 2022 and the effects on work-related activity in employment centers in cities across the United States as a measure of local and regional economic resilience. This programming was supported by the Land Economics Foundation.

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Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, and her co-authors have published Labor Trafficking in Construction and Hospitality Topical Brief: Barriers to Help-Seeking, a report produced with funding from their National Institute of Justice project, “Labor Trafficking in Construction and Hospitality: Analyzing Victim Recruitment, Exploitation, and Service Needs to Identify Strategies for Prevention and Intervention”:

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Director of Marron Angela Hawken appeared on Brave New World, NYU Professor Vasant Dhar’s podcast, to discuss “her work as both a thinker in academia and a doer with government” and Marron programming:

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“Estimating Reporting Bias in 311 Compliant Data,” by PhD Candidate Kate Boxer (NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences); Civic Analytics Fellow Boyeong Hong; Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta; and Daniel Neill (NYU Center for Urban Science + Progress) has been accepted for publication in Annals of Applied Statistics. The research was supported by two NSF grants (here and here):

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Director of Human Exploitation and Resilience, Meredith Dank, and her co-authors have published Understanding the Needs of Unstably Housed Youth in New York City, a white paper produced with funding from their National Science Foundation project, “Disrupting Human Trafficking via Needs Matching and Capacity Expansion”: 

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“Energy Cost Burdens for Low-Income and Minority Households: Evidence from Energy Benchmarking and Audit Data in Five U.S. Cities,” an award winning article by Director of Civic Analytics, Constantine Kontokosta, Vincent Reina (UPenn), and Research Scientist and Lab Manager Bartosz Bończak is featured in NY S2488: An Act to Amend the Social Services Law, in Relation to Establishing an Emergency Heating Assistance Program Benefit.

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Senior Fellow and Research Professor Mindy Tarlow was profiled by the NYU Center for Faculty Advancement, highlighting her role leading the SCALE + Lab with an initial project on transforming behavioral health emergency response systems:

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The Human Exploitation and Resilience program presented their research at the 2024 American Society of Criminology conference. Senior Research Associate Lauren Moton presented on their project’s 100 interviews, “Ethiopian Domestic Workers and Exploitative Work in the Middle East: The Role of Familial and Community-Based Social Networks.” Postdoctoral Associate Stephen Abeyta presented on two sampling methods, “Measuring and Understanding Labor Exploitation on a Sample of Workers in the Costa Rican Fishing Industry.”

Director of Transportation and Land Use, Eric Goldwyn, joined the University of Toronto’s Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance (IMFG) and the Infrastructure Institute to discuss his program’s Transit Costs Project.

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In cooperation with the NYU Office of the Provost, the Marron Institute hosted 20 NYU undergraduate students, from a broad range of academic disciplines and selected from a pool of applicants, at the Marron offices for a week of research-methods training. Each day, a member of the Marron faculty presented a method and how it is used in their research, followed by a research task for the students using the method. Topics included statistical analysis, using the Transit Costs Project dataset; global-trends analysis, using World Bank Open Data; learning about Participatory Action Research; and data processing and analytical methods, using the NYU Open Data platform. Beyond methods training, the students gained insight into the careers of applied researchers.