Research

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.

In this manuscript, coauthored with Victoria Tran and supported by the UCLA Luskin Institute for Inequality and Democracy, we examine the role of neighborhood councils in urban governance and homelessness policy in Los Angeles using interviews with NC members, meeting observations, and document review. We find that neighborhood councils move beyond their advisory capacity to shape urban conditions and the distribution of resources for the unhoused. Despite their limited official capacities, neighborhood councils engage in a wide variety of activities in response to homelessness including providing services, conducting outreach, organizing residents to demand sweeps, and promoting homelessness related policies. In response to more powerful elected officials, neighborhood councils also wield place-based legitimacy to both support and undermine the political activities of electeds. This study makes contributions to both the literature on urban governance and the governance of homelessness by illustrating how neighborhood organizations can affect urban space in meaningful and sometimes subtle ways.