Regional Research
The environmental impacts of megaregional-scale commuting
Neighboring metropolitan areas tend to have long histories of exchange and shared interests. The continued growth of metropolitan population has deepened the integration of distinct but close metropolitan areas through the increasing flows of people and goods on a daily basis. This has blurred the boundaries of labor and housing markets. The dramatic increase in remote work that allowed people to eliminate or greatly reduce the need to commute further blurred those boundaries.
This project focuses on forms of commuting —long-distance commutes over 50 miles, telecommuting, and hybrid arrangements— that used to be marginal but that recent developments are pushing into much greater visibility. A series of papers has examined the environmental impact of these increasingly prevalent forms of commuting, and ongoing work is focusing on the link to housing affordability.
You can find the research reports on the METRANS research page.
Small Owner Rental Housing
Rental property ownership has evolved over the past three decades throughout the U.S., from a majority of individual owners in 2001 to a majority of LLCs by 2021, by number of units. The aftermath of the Great Recession and its attendant foreclosure crisis increased the overall market for single-family rental units. Investors, large and small, bought single-family properties to rent out, with some amassing thousands of properties. Some of these have used LLCs, driving part of the growth in LLC ownership. There is some evidence of increased corporatization of the multifamily market, though that had always had fewer individual owners and more LLCs and corporations. Previous qualitative and quantitative studies have suggested that larger investors and LLC or corporate owners have influenced rent levels, home prices, homeownership rates, and affordability. Some have also argued that tenants have seen potentially worse outcomes, with larger investors more likely to evict and receive code violations. Though some have found that investors were more likely to repair properties and perform home improvements. Many of these studies have focused on one city, one part of the market, and few have looked at California. This report fills these gaps and looks at the impact of ownership type and scale on tenant affordability and habitability outcomes throughout California.
Regional Growth and Integration
Neighborhood integration is a high standard to achieve in a nation divided by an oppressive history of racial and class segregation. I distinguish two types of integration, superficial and meaningful. Superficial integration happens when people of different backgrounds 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, despite 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 2024 to gauge engagement with different housing issues and how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped discourse about rental housing policy. This is an ongoing project with plans to examine how different networks form and engage within policy areas and the links between popular debates and policy outcomes.