Two years ago, newly pregnant and fleeing a violent partner, Briana Drummer left her life behind and checked into a family shelter. There, feeling overwhelmed, she spotted “a big, bright poster” advertising CUNY Reconnect, a program that allows adults with partial college credit to finish their degrees at the City University of New York.
“I took that as a sign from God, and soon after, I stepped onto campus to begin my new life,” Drummer told a rapturous audience at Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center in March, where she spoke ahead of Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ State of the City speech. Drummer will graduate this year from CUNY’s Brooklyn College, she said, and plans to pursue her dream of attending medical school.
Drummer’s story traces its origins to a specific source: the Center for an Urban Future, a Manhattan-based think tank that has quietly emerged as a force in New York politics. CUF proposed CUNY Reconnect in a 2022 policy paper, and within months saw the idea enacted and funded with $4 million after being championed by the council speaker. Through last year, it had received another $5 million and re-enrolled more than 42,000 people in college, with 6,000 earning degrees — a pathway, supporters hope, to new lives and better-paying jobs.
The council speaker drew heavily from Urban Future’s ideas in her March address, where she embraced the group’s other recent proposals to create an accelerator for minority-owned businesses and to forgive student debt so that more CUNY students will be encouraged to complete their degrees. Indeed, although it has existed since 1996, CUF has hit its stride in recent years, managing to catch the attention of powerful city officials with its brand of pragmatic, hyper-specific ideas for improving economic mobility.
“There are a lot of people in the city that are trying to get their ideas in front of people in government,” said Jonathan Bowles, CUF’s executive director since 2010. “Since the pandemic, there’s been a real consensus among policymakers that we need to create a more inclusive economy. It played to exactly what we’re about as an organization.”
Although its output is wide-ranging, the Center has built credibility over the years by focusing hard on a few key hobbyhorses, including CUNY, parks, libraries, affordable housing and entrepreneurship. Its reports often have a journalistic feel — relying on interviews, citing precedents from other cities and using reader-friendly titles like “15 Policy Ideas for NYC to Start 2025.”
CUF seems poised to grow its influence further in the years ahead. Funding threats from Washington may force city policymakers to look locally for governing solutions, and Republican inroads among urban voters have left Democrats desperate for simple policies they can hold up as wins.
Maria Torres-Springer, the recently departed first deputy mayor, told Crain’s she has followed CUF’s work since the Bloomberg administration and appreciates their approach.
“A lot of research institutions, it’s 100 pages, mostly unusable recommendations,” she said in an interview. “CUF is different in that their recommendations tend to be very actionable, very practical, tethered to reality and therefore more accessible for policymakers.”
Years of influence
The Center for an Urban Future was created in 1996 as a sister organization of City Limits, the tenant-focused housing publication. CUF became independent in 2009 and now exists as its own nonprofit, with $1.5 million in revenue as of 2022 that comes mostly from donations and grants.
Local charities such as the Altman Foundation and Fisher Brothers Foundation fund much of CUF’s day-to-day operations, while the Center approaches other potential supporters to fund specific projects — the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, for example, underwrote CUF’s recent study on ways to grow the city’s green economy. CUF’s board of directors includes executives from Boston Consulting Group, Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg Philanthropies, as well as local entities like NYU, the MTA and HR&A Advisors. (CUF points all potential sponsors to its integrity policy, which states that CUF only does research that aligns with its mission, will not do research that financially benefits its funders, and does not accept government funding.)
With an office in Chelsea, CUF has a full-time staff of seven, plus a rotation of visiting fellows and a half-dozen paid interns. In a city crowded with powerful labor unions and high-powered lobbying firms jockeying for influence, CUF stands somewhat apart as one of a small number of independent policy groups.
It helps that CUF’s generally progressive outlook jibes with the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic elected officials — giving it an easier task compared to peers like the hawkish Citizens Budget Commission, which faces the tall task of persuading liberal leaders to rein in spending, or the newer group Vital City, which focuses on thorny criminal justice topics. In its early years, CUF was sometimes described as a liberal counterweight to the conservative Manhattan Institute.
One of the Center’s early wins was a 2007 report on immigrant entrepreneurs. The 60-page study, authored by Bowles, documented an explosion in businesses founded by immigrants in New York City and elsewhere — and faulted city leaders for doing little to harness the growing sector.
Bowles recalled the study being greeted with skepticism, arriving at a time when immigrants’ role in the city’s economy was widely unappreciated. But the work found champions in high places — including Torres-Springer, who was serving at the time as an executive in the Economic Development Corp. Within a few years, the Bloomberg administration had rolled out three programs aimed at supporting immigrant entrepreneurs.
Around the same time, CUF turned its attention to the city’s tech sector, still in its infancy. In a report, Urban Future argued that New York was missing a huge opportunity to open high-paying research hubs at its flagship hospitals and universities.
Seth Pinsky was already pushing similar efforts as head of EDC under Bloomberg, and said CUF’s research helped shape the conversation. The push culminated in the creation of the Roosevelt Island Cornell Tech campus, expected to generate some $1.5 billion in economic output and 7,100 jobs for the city by 2030.
“We were trying to convince people that this was a big opportunity for the city. Sometimes we were successful at it, sometimes we were less successful,” Pinsky said. “When [CUF] reported on it, they framed it in a way that really helped to get the message through.”
CUF had a few high points in the ensuing years: A 2011 study of the city’s growing design industry led then-Council Speaker Christine Quinn to create a weeklong festival, NYCxDesign, that is still going strong. A major boost to public library funding in 2016, which allowed the city’s three systems to increase service from five days a week to six, came after CUF mounted a campaign that framed libraries as undervalued engines of opportunity.
But CUF has found an especially receptive audience among the current crop of city leaders, who are trying to make sense of a post-pandemic economic recovery that has benefited high earners more than blue-collar workers. In 2022, as Adams began crafting an agenda following her dark-horse victory in the council speaker’s race, she quickly gravitated toward CUF’s focus on economic mobility, an aide recalled.
She used her first major appearance before business leaders, at a March 2022 Association for a Better New York breakfast, to propose CUNY Reconnect — citing a CUF report from earlier that year that suggested a program modeled after a similar effort in Tennessee.
In a statement to Crain’s, Speaker Adams said she appreciates CUF’s “solution-oriented research that highlights evidence-based programs that New York City should be implementing, but has not.”
The same month as the speaker’s ABNY speech, CUF published another report that identified public housing tenants as an untapped source of entrepreneurship. Coverage of the report in The New York Times caught the attention of real estate executive Ron Moelis, chairman of L+M Development Partners, who called CUF and offered his help. The following year, fueled by $1 million from Moelis’s foundation, the city created NYC Boss Up, which will give grants to entrepreneurs living in New York City Housing Authority apartments.
In a city with a budget exceeding $100 billion, CUF’s proposals are relatively modest. But that may leave the Center well-positioned to maintain its stature in the coming years: Steep cuts at the federal level appear likely to blow holes in the city’s budget, ushering in an era of fiscal restraint and forcing city leaders to abandon big-ticket proposals in favor of smaller-scale policy ideas.
Indeed, CUF has turned its attention lately to finding creative revenue sources to fund city services — putting out a string of reports in recent months that propose putting a surcharge on live event tickets or opening more restaurants and cafes in city parks to steer money toward the underfunded Parks Department. Bowles said he expects CUF to broaden that approach to study ways to help other agencies, and continue studying other topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the rise of e-commerce.
“There’s a lot of budget uncertainty going forward for New York, especially with Washington,” Bowles said. “We’re going to need public-private partnerships, we’re going to need new revenue ideas. That’s something that we’re going to continue to think through.”
If CUF does maintain its stature, it won’t be thanks to lobbying or chumminess with politicians. Instead, Bowles said, it will be based on the simple strength of their ideas.
“I think ideas matter,” he said. “I think the city needs ideas more than ever.”
