My work connects sociology and public policy in order to better understand and improve American cities. Scroll down to browse my current projects and topics of interest:
How Land Use Regulation Shapes the Cultural Life of Neighborhoods.
My dissertation project investigates municipal land use regulation practices (i.e., zoning, permitting, and code enforcement) through the experiences of small business owners in New Orleans. In conducting interviews with vendors across three neighborhoods, I aim to uncover how regulatory practices and everyday bureaucracy reinforce inequality and shape neighborhoods’ character and cultural life. Stay tuned for updates as this work progresses!
The Racialized Impacts of Urban Gentrification.
I have been thinking about the intersection of gentrification and race/ethnicity. Recently, this work has led me to publish two theoretical papers outlining critical research agendas for scholars and practitioners, linked below. For several years, I have also been working with restricted data from the American Housing Survey to observe the social and political impacts of gentrification on low-income urban communities. Here, I find racially disparate outcomes (see working paper below).
Eviction Vulnerability in New Orleans.
As a Tulane-Mellon Fellow in Community-Engaged Scholarship, in 2021 I began a collaborative research project with community organization Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative. Together, our goal has been to collect data on evictions in New Orleans and analyze the factors that lead to both higher vulnerability and more positive outcomes for renters. Our paper in Housing Policy Debate demonstrates that Jane Place’s tenant-focused interventions led to modest declines in court-ordered evictions.
Housing Mechanisms in Chicago.
In collaboration with several Chicago-based scholars, I have been evaluating the impact of various housing policies interventions. In a paper forthcoming in American Sociological Review, we investigate pandemic-era emergency rental assistance programs (ERAPs). We find that these programs, while impactful, left informal renters illegible to the state, reinforcing existing inequalities for Chicago’s Black and Latinx population. In another collaboration, we track a police-based housing inspection mechanism, which is associated with high rates of foreclosure and other legal/financial entanglements for property owners - leading us to argue that this mechanism denies alleged offenders of their due process rights.
The Social Production of Authenticity.
In a collaborative project with Jeffrey Nathaniel Parker of the University of New Orleans, we have been looking into what we term shibboleths - or locally-salient symbols and phrases that act as points of distinction and boundary-making in contested urban environments. We investigate how and why shibboleths become instantiated in local-specific consumer culture: graphic t-shirts, posters, dog toys, and more. We have presented some of our early observations at the 2022 and 2023 ASA Annual Meetings - look out for our first working paper, coming soon!
Banner image by Frank Relle.