Research

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

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.

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