Research Agenda

My research focuses on the intersection between urban political economy, housing inequality, and poverty governance in U.S. cities. Methodologically, I employ a mixed-methods approach and have collaborated extensively across a range of qualitative and quantitative research projects. My ongoing projects can be organized in the following three areas:

Reproducing and Contesting Urban Inequality

My primary interest centers on how urban inequality is reproduced within progressive, affluent cities, and how efforts to contest it emerge and evolve. My dissertation project examines the formation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as a case study to understand how new policy responses to homelessness take shape in progressive city-regions. Drawing on archival materials, in-depth interviews, and participant observation, my dissertation opens the black box of local poverty policymaking to theorize how new state responses to inequality are produced and the consequences they carry for those living unhoused. Grounded in Bourdieu’s theory of the bureaucratic field, this project foregrounds struggles between the varied actors involved in homelessness policymaking as they navigate rising homelessness, chronic resource scarcity, and competing demands.

Related projects have explored the meanings that gentrifiers assign to their role in neighborhood change; the emergence of unlikely alliances between an abolitionist shelter provider and business groups during the pandemic; and the 2015 Declaration of Emergency on Homelessness in Seattle and King County (forthcoming).

The Political and Historical Drivers of Financialization

In collaboration with Professor Sarah Quinn and Francisca Gómez-Baeza, this work explores the historical roots and contemporary spread of financialization. In a synthesis recently published in the Annual Review of Sociology, we show how historical scholarship on financial practices and institutions offers generative insights into the structure of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Ongoing projects extend this work by exploring how financialization advances politically as a recurrent “fix” to distributional dilemmas across domains such as housing, urban governance, welfare, pensions, and higher education.

The Built Environment & Housing Market Dynamics

I have also contributed to several quantitative research projects examining the relationship between the built environment and its inhabitants. In collaboration with Professor Kyle Crowder and others, I co-authored a study analyzing how neighborhood disadvantage shapes patterns of physical activity, leveraging a unique set of environmental and geospatial data. With Professor Gregg Colburn, I am involved in several ongoing projects that investigate the relationship between single-person household formation and housing affordability; post-pandemic changes in homelessness; and the relationship between rental vacancy rates and rent levels across metropolitan areas. Together, this work highlights how features of the built environment intersect with economic and demographic forces to shape housing access and urban life.