Laura Wolf-Powers studies neighborhood revitalization and urban and regional economic development policy and planning.  Her work explores the challenges of planning for community development under conditions of structural social inequality. It offers insights into the ways in which urban politics are mediated through policies governing the built environment and the economy and considers how planners and civil society organizations influence these processes. Her book University City: History, Race & Community in the Era of the Innovation District, was published by Pennsylvania Press in 2022 and will be re-issued in paperback in fall 2024. Her articles have appeared in Urban Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of the American Planning Association, Economic Development Quarterly, and other top journals. Her current research focuses on the political economy of land valuation and real property taxation.

Dr. Wolf-Powers has taught city planning at the Pratt Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and Columbia University. At Hunter, she teaches Planning for Economic Development, Community Planning in New York City, Economics of Real Estate Development, and Planning Studio. In Spring 2024, she was appointed to the faculty in Earth & Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she co-taught the course Technology and the City with Professor Emerita Sharon Zukin.

Together with UPP colleague Sigmund Shipp, she is part of a project that received a 3-year, $353,000 grant by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in 2021 to conduct community-engaged research on entrepreneurship and local wealth-building in partnership with the Brooklyn Communities Collaborative. She is a member of the steering committee of the Western Queens Community Land Trust, an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and co-editorial director of Metropolitics, an on-line journal of public scholarship about cities and urban politics.  

Dr. Wolf-Powers earned her PhD in Urban Planning and Policy at Rutgers University and won the Barclay Gibbs Jones award for the best dissertation in planning from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 2004. She holds a Master of Public Affairs degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Yale University.