Regional Research
Regional Growth and Integration
Neighborhood integration is a high standard to achieve in a nation divided by a oppressive history of racial and class segregation. I distinguish two types of integration, superficial and meaningful. Superficial integration happens when people of different background live in the same neighborhood. This diversity can hide spatial division (meaning the data are too coarse to pick up persistent divisions) and social divisions; both have been extensively documented. Meaningful integration is the elimination of social and political divisions between groups.
As US cities diversified, many neighborhoods became superficially and sometimes meaningfully integrated. This project focuses on superficial integration. I hypothesize that for its shortcomings, superficial integration is an important first step with many potential benefits. The geography of integration, however, is uneven. It concentrates not only in cities that have diversified thanks to immigration, but is higher in regions that have constrained housing markets. This points to a paradoxical relationship. Higher housing prices make it more difficult for people of color and lower income people to live in high opportunity neighborhoods, but it also makes race less salient as a deciding factor for where to live and results in more neighborhoods that are highly diverse.
Regional Migration Impact
As part of a team of scholar at USC, Oxy College, and UC Davis, this project examines how migration patterns from the high housing cost Bay Area to the surrounding region has impacted communities receiving large number of migrants. The project focuses on three dimensions:
Drivers of emigration and the socioeconomic impact receiving communities
Changes in long-distance commuting between the hinterland of the region and the Bay Area
Changes to local government finance
The project has also integrated the impact of COVID-19 as an additional factor likely to influence patterns of migration in the short- and medium-term.
Housing Crisis and Politics
Housing is political. Where housing is built, how much, and for whom are issues that have always been decided in a highly unequal political playing field. This project tracks how people are discussing housing issues on the popular social media platform Twitter.
We collected tweets from 2015 to 2021 to gauge engagement with different housing issues. We find that public housing, despite its marginal status in housing policy and as a share of the housing stock, drives more debate than renter protection and housing supply advocacy. The next phases of the project will focus on who sets the agenda in the various housing threads, how it feeds into political networks and affects change.