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Building Through Uncertainty: An Organizational Analysis of Affordable Housing in Los Angeles
Building Through Uncertainty: An Organizational Analysis of Affordable Housing in Los Angeles
In my dissertation research, supported by the American Sociological Association and the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, I examine organizational differences among affordable housing developers working in the Los Angeles region. In the U.S., affordable housing is constructed and rented by private organizations who use government subsidies to rent at low costs. Yet, the developers receiving such support vary widely—from large, national for-profit organizations to neighborhood-based nonprofit organizations—and we know very little about how these differences might shape the housing that developers build and the experiences of low- income renters who live in it. Affordable housing development is a complex process fraught with uncertainty that I suspect may impact development organizations differently and in ways shaped by their organizational form. This study employs mixed methods to study a large sample of developers across the Los Angeles region in order to understand how the complexity of the development process impacts the characteristics of low-income housing and how these processes and outcomes differ across tax- exempt status, as well as organization size and community embeddedness.
Between the City and the People: The Pitfalls and Potential of Hyper-local Governance of the Homelessness Crisis in Los Angeles
Between the City and the People: The Pitfalls and Potential of Hyper-local Governance of the Homelessness Crisis in Los Angeles
Cities across the U.S. have instituted neighborhood-level governance systems in response to calls for more localized democratic participation. For over two decades, Los Angeles’ neighborhood council system has served as a forum for resident input and an advisory body to elected officials, but findings are mixed on whether neighborhood councils reaffirm existing spatial inequalities or are political venues with limited ability to hold government officials accountable. This paper examines how neighborhood councils address homelessness in Los Angeles using interviews with neighborhood council members and three case studies. We found that how neighborhood councils understand their constituency and how open City Councilmembers are to their political preferences help explain what neighborhood councils do and how effective they are. Our findings point out that, despite decades of research on how local groups perpetuate spatial inequality, neighborhood councils can potentially serve as venues for the inclusion of historically marginalized groups in local politics.
Tran, V., & Smock, K. (2025). Between the city and the people: The pitfalls and potential of hyper-local governance of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2025.2564107.
The Landscape of Expiring Affordability Covenants in Los Angeles
The Landscape of Expiring Affordability Covenants in Los Angeles
Scholarship highlights the importance of increasing the production of affordable housing to alleviate housing shortages and the homelessness crisis. However, much less attention has been paid to the maintenance and preservation of existing affordable housing. In this project,
Victoria Tran and I aim to better understand the landscape of properties with expiring affordability covenants—the regulatory agreements that mandate the length a property must remain affordable. To do so, we create a unique dataset on the characteristics of properties with expiring or recently expired affordability covenants to understand who owns these properties, how such properties are distributed geographically across the city of Los Angeles, and how local policies and political actors may intervene in the process of affordability expiration.
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