At the intersection of sociology and public policy, my work on urban inequality aims to better understand and improve American cities.
Permitted: How Everyday Urban Governance Shapes Race, Space, and Opportunity
My dissertation project examines the role of local government bureaucracies in the reproduction of racial inequality, both on an individual and neighborhood level. I investigate the case of commercial zoning and permitting administration through the experiences of small business owners in New Orleans. Drawing on both interviews and administrative data, I show how City Hall facilitates uneven access to entrepreneurial opportunities - and how this leads to neighborhood disinvestment and social segregation across the urban landscape.
What Makes Gentrification ‘White’?The Racialized Impacts of Urban Gentrification.
Much of my research focuses on gentrification, or the process of upscaling and displacement in urban neighborhoods. Where most academic literature focuses on class-based issues, I focus on gentrification as a racialized process. I have published two theoretical papers outlining critical research agendas for scholars and practitioners (“What Makes Gentrification White?” and “Building a Du Boisian Research Agenda”). For several years, I have also been working with restricted Census Bureau data from the American Housing Survey to observe the social and political impacts of gentrification on urban communities. Here, I find racially disparate outcomes (“Whose Neighborhood Now?”).
Local Policy and Housing Outcomes.
In a series of collaborations with other scholars, I have been evaluating the impact of various housing policy interventions. In a paper recently published in American Sociological Review, we investigate pandemic-era emergency rental assistance programs (ERAPs). We find that these programs left informal renters illegible to the state, reinforcing existing inequalities for Chicago’s Black and Latinx population (“The Risks of Renting on the Margins”). In another paper, we track a police-based housing inspection mechanism, and find it is associated with high rates of foreclosure and other legal/financial entanglements for property owners (“Punishing People through Property”).
Eviction Vulnerability in New Orleans.
As a Tulane-Mellon Fellow in Community-Engaged Scholarship, in 2021 I began a collaborative research project with local 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 (“Eviction Court Outcomes”).
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.