About

James DeFilippis, Ph.D., is a professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy at Rutgers University. His research focuses on the politics and economics of cities and communities, with particular interest in social change processes, power, and justice in urban settings. He strives to make connections between disciplines, linking academic theory with grounded political practice. DeFilippis has published extensively, including authoring or editing six books and more than 40 articles and book chapters, along with applied monographs and reports. His work extends beyond academia into practical political work and policy analysis. His research interests encompass urban political economy and political philosophy, community development theory and practice, unregulated work and the informal economy, and immigration. Through his scholarly activities, DeFilippis contributes to understanding community development, housing, land use, political institutions, social policy, and urban planning, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these fields in addressing urban issues.

Research topics

• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Market economy
• Econometrics
• Finance
• Agricultural economics

Selected publications

• “I don't think anybody’s ever been to scale:” the imperative for growth and the implications of scale for Community Land Trusts in Minnesota, USA

  Urban Geography · 2024-04-26 · 2 citations

  article

  This paper examines the scalar logics of Community Land Trusts, nonprofits that work to facilitate affordable housing and promote community control of local development. Like many nonprofits, CLTs face a tension between assumed efficiencies that come with larger size on one hand, and the assumed responsiveness to community stakeholders that comes with smaller size on the other. Through an examination of CLTs in Minnesota, USA that included over 100 interviews with CLT stakeholders, we explore how CLTs understand and operationalize scale as they attempt to grow. Various CLT stakeholders adopt distinct (sometimes implicit) functional scalar logics for CLTs. This leads to growth strategies which are articulated as scalar but which are not clear about which registers of scale will be altered. In particular, we identify four key registers of scale for CLTs: organizational, jurisdictional, service area, and community identity. These do not always shift in lock-step; but because CLTs are trusts that own portfolio properties in perpetuity, we suggest that changes in the relationships between these registers pose larger risks for CLTs than for many other kinds of nonprofit service organizations.

  PublisherDOI

• <scp>PUBLIC</scp>‐<scp>MAKING IN HYPER</scp>‐<scp>DIVERSITY</scp>: Politics, Elections and the Democratic Party in Queens, New York

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2024-08-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Queens is the most diverse county in the country and much of its diversity comes from relatively recent immigration. It is therefore exactly the kind of place that a variety of theorists have argued cannot have ‘a public’ through which questions of politics, plans and policies can be discussed and debated. In this article we explore the potential for a public in such spaces of hyper‐diversity and do so through the lens of electoral politics and the state. A set of findings emerges from this research. First, the hyper‐diversity in Queens does not change the reality that much of what is happening is the very typical and mundane ‘drama’ of power politics in a city. Secondly, in that mundane competition for power, racial and ethnic differentiation are not preexisting forces of nature that determine political behavior, but are co‐constituted with political, economic and social processes that often play out in ideology and geography (neighborhood). Finally, this leads us away from views of ‘the public’ that implicitly accept or assume either a fixity of its identity or an essential set of characteristics in its constitution.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Making a scene: Urban landscapes, gentrification, and social movements in Sweden</i> , by Kimberly Ceasap <b> <i>Making a scene: Urban landscapes, gentrification, and social movements in Sweden</i> </b> , by Kimberly Ceasap, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 2022

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2023-05-31

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 31‐3: Multi‐Primary Wide‐Gamut Color Systems

  SID Symposium Digest of Technical Papers · 2022-06-01 · 1 citations

  article

  Use of a Yxy encoding system is explained, demonstrating that a multi‐primary system can leverage existing standards/practices and not only coexist with RGB, but also enable a variety of types of multi‐primary displays without locking display manufacturers into a display standard. We call this approach the Full Color Range (FCR) system.

  PublisherDOI

• W(h)ither the community in community land trusts?

  2022-05-25 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Community land trusts (CLTs) began as a model for community control over land in the late 1960s. The model allows for individual ownership of improvements to land while the land is owned by the CLT. This effectively removes the land from the speculative market and allows for less marketable uses that might benefit disadvantaged communities. As the CLT model has grown and proliferated, it has evolved over time to become primarily a means to provide affordable housing, with a corresponding reduced emphasis on community control. This article explores the history of the CLT movement, provides evidence of the loss of community in CLTs, and discusses why this loss of community from CLTs is important to the potential of the CLT model.

  PublisherDOI

• Working-Class Institutions, Amazon and The Politics of Local Economic Development in Western Queens

  Urban Affairs Review · 2022-05-17 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In November 2018 Amazon announced that they had selected Long Island City, Queens (LIC) as one of two locations for their second headquarters. While there had certainly been criticism and organizing against the proposed deal, given that it had the vocal support of both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, most New Yorkers had assumed that the deal would be implemented. Then, rather surprisingly, on February 14th, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the deal and its decision not to come to LIC. This article uses the case of Amazon and other large scale developments in western Queens to discuss the conflictual and often messy politics of local economic development (LED) in working class communities. It argues that urban studies pays too little attention to how and why working class organizations participate in the politics of LED; and often thereby shape the enacted policies of LED.

  PublisherDOI

• Mastering and Distributing Immersive Sound

  Focal Press eBooks · 2022-05-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  As a broadcast sound designer, I’ve spent my career trying to figure out how to achieve the perfect live broadcast sound mix and distribute it to the consumer. But the fact is that no matter how good the mix is, it’s going to sound different from one home viewer to the next.

  PublisherDOI

• Ownership is a habit of mind: how community land trusts expose key consensual fictions of urban property

  Urban Geography · 2021-04-28 · 5 citations

  article

  Community land trusts (“CLTs”) have garnered attention as a novel, non-state organizational mechanism for enabling permanently affordable homeownership. In canonical form, they separate a home from the land upon which it sits, holding the land in trust and selling the home for its value without the land. Additionally, CLTs use ground lease restrictions to constrain the resale process and enforce long-term reproduction of affordability. Herein, we argue that given the “actually existing” character of CLT practices, the legal vocabulary CLTs use is not most directly nor most accurately descriptive. The nature of the present intervention is emphatically not to say that CLTs have acted in bad faith; rather, we identify a set of fictions about land and rights encoded into the law regarding real property. Our intervention highlights how the nature of these fictions theoretically constrains the power of canonical community land trusts to transform society and forces critical reflection on specific financial strategies CLTs may attempt.

  PublisherDOI

• A radical belief in all of us: an invitation to collective moral inquiry as democratic conversation

  Urban Geography · 2021-06-16 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  In this introductory essay we discuss Professor Bob Lake’s writing over the last several decades. While the substantive foci of that work have evolved over the years, a core concern for Lake has always been about moral inquiry as a democratic practice of knowledge production. We discuss the role that pragmatism has played in Lake’s work and the ways in which pragmatist ways of thinking and doing were evident in Lake’s writings even before his explicit engagement with the pragmatist tradition. We also introduce the other essays in this special section, and discuss how the authors engage with different parts of Lake’s body of work.

  PublisherDOI

• The Commodity Effects of Decommodification: Community Land Trusts and Neighborhood Property Values

  Housing Policy Debate · 2020 · 17 citations

  • Economics
  • Agricultural economics
  • Econometrics

  This article explores the impacts of community land trust (CLT) properties on the real estate prices of nearby homes through a case study of a relatively large CLT in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We use hedonic regression and a difference-in-difference estimation with spatial error correction to measure price effects. The number of developments citywide is insufficient to yield significant results. However, we find evidence that clustering CLTs stemmed the decline in sales prices during the foreclosure crisis. The introduction of the first nearby CLT had no measurable price impact, but each additional CLT was associated with a 5% higher sales price in North Minneapolis, and 3% higher in Central Minneapolis. In the postrecession period, we estimate that the introduction of CLTs in North Minneapolis was associated with a 10.9% increase in nearby sales prices. These results suggest that, contrary to common assumptions, price effects are strongest when affordable properties are spatially clustered.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Max Rousseau

  Forests and Societies

  34 shared

• Richard E. Ocejo

  16 shared

• Vincent Béal

  Triangle

  16 shared

• Anaïs Collet

  Université de Strasbourg

  16 shared

• Éric Shragge

  11 shared

• Annette Bernhardt

  11 shared

• Robert J. Fisher

  University of Alberta

  10 shared

• Olivia R. Williams

  9 shared