Now, as he leaves the White House, Obama’s legacy is being evaluated on many fronts, including within the realm of urban policy. In a new book called Urban Policy in the Time of Obama, academics appraise his successes and failures. CityLab spoke with the book’s editor, James DeFillippis, an associate professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

So, did President Obama meet the high expectations he was beset with when he took office? What grade would you give him for his urban policy?  

I'm loath to reduce his work to just a grade. But if I had to, I would probably say a B-. There were a lot of interesting ideas, but there was very little follow-through. Most of what we got were a set of fairly small pilot-y kinds of projects: lots of planning grants, but very little implementation money.

You also really see it in the response to Baltimore. After what had happened in Ferguson, after everything that's been going on with Black Lives Matter, the response from the Feds was a collective shrug.

I recognize the constraints he was working with. The Republican Party clearly understands its constituency is not urban and couldn't care less about black and brown constituents in cities. Even so, where was the expenditure of political capital to force the issue from the administration? To push for a whole set of policies that would make things more equitable now? To build the organizational infrastructure for a more progressive, urban regime going forward? We didn't see it.

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The definition of “urban” changed during this administration. The book notes: “Governance innovations broadened the scope of what now passes in Washington as ‘urban’ policy, encompassing environmental, transportation, education, justice” and other domains.” In other words, it wasn’t just policies in urban areas but those that had large impact onurban populations. Of these, immigration policy fell by the wayside,Christine Thurlow Brenner, public policy professor at University of Massachusetts Boston, argues.

I often think that the most durable and transformative of the Great Societies legislation from 1964 to 1968, when it comes to urban issues, was the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. Maybe it’s because both my parents are immigrants and I grew up in an immigrant community in Flushing, Queens. It's very difficult for me to look at the trajectory of American cities and not see immigration as a central driving narrative. Immigrants are the ones that drove population growth in urban areas in the latter part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, and it was their kids and grandkids that were moving to the 'burbs. And there were no new immigrants coming—or very few—from the ‘30s to the ‘70s. I always push that immigration in particular is an urban issue, much more so than anyone ever talks about it.

The Obama administration went with healthcare instead of immigration reform. That does seem like a significant missed opportunity. It feels like you’re trapped in a Samuel Beckett play, you're kind of walking around in a circle, waiting, and saying to each other, “When is Godot coming?” That would have been the moment.

There’s a lot of speculation about what a Trump presidency means for cities. What do you think it means for Obama’s legacy?

With Ben Carson, you have a HUD secretary who doesn’t really know or care about housing and urban issues. I was going to community meeting, and a really smart organizer from the South Bronx said, "Look, I'm tired of people saying we don't know what's coming. All we have to is take the white papers from the Heritage Foundation website and read them. That's what we'll get." And I think this woman was pretty spot-on in her analysis.

What we'll get is vouchering out the project-based stock, time-limiting vouchers, and doing for housing assistance what was done for welfare in 1996 in the Welfare Reform Act. In terms of the more specific policy initiatives from the Obama administration, the little pilot stuff: those will all go away. Promised Neighborhoods, Promise Zones, Choice Neighborhoods. Some of the fair housing stuff is almost certainly going to be rolled back. And whether or not HUD will be enforcing the affirmatively furthering fair housing? It seems unlikely.

On the other hand, it's really important to say that people who want more progressive, more equitable, and more just cities have to use this moment to argue for something more and different from what we’ve been getting from the Feds for a long time, because that hasn't been good enough. We have to construct a policy agenda that is more forward-looking, that’s more than just about defending legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society programs.

I find myself now in a very frustrating position of having to defend policies that I'm uninspired by. I don’t want to defend the status quo, because it’s a status quo that I see as wanting in very basic ways, but the attack on the status quo is coming from places that are far worse.