My current research agenda focuses on the intersection between spatial dynamics, the built and natural environment, and social and economic change. My methodological approach is in the Chicago School tradition of community studies and ground-level ethnographic work.
A primary concern of my work is the study of the relationship between residential and social mobility in the context of the spatial ecology of race and class in the United States. I focus primarily on American suburbs as contested sites of mobility.
My dissertation research was an in-depth qualitative study of a 100% low-income subsidized housing complex in a NJ suburb. In the study, interviews with over 100 community members show how suburban social institutions such as schools, community watch groups, and property managers structure social control and order within the complex and affect the character of the residents' social networks, access to economic and cultural resources, and use of space. I am currently preparing a book manuscript based on the research, titled "Making it out here: Peace and peril in a suburban affordable housing complex."
With Douglas Massey and Princeton graduate student Elizabeth Derickson, I coauthored an article measuring the effect of low-income housing residents on a town's crime rates, property values, and taxes. The article is currently under review and is available for download at SSRN.
Do Affordable Housing Projects Harm Suburban Communities?
Together with Doug Massey and others, I coauthored a book manuscript (currently under review) titled Monitoring Mt. Laurel. The study utilizes survey and interview research in a natural experiment to measure the impact of neighborhood effects on low-income residents in the suburbs. Using propinquity score matching, the study compares low-income residents in the suburbs to matched pairs of low-income residents in cities, to provide insight into the differential impact neighborhood context has on residents. Our findings make a decisive intervention into the discourse on neighborhood effects and mobility programs such as Moving to Opportunity.
With Rebecca Casciano (Princeton postdoc) I coauthored a study evaluating the use of regional contribution agreements in NJ, a controverial public policy tool that allowed municipalities to sell their affordale housing requirement to other municipalities. In addition, I am preparing three journal articles based on my research on affordable housing in New Jersey. A draft of one paper, which addresses the issue of the Right to the Suburbs for the residents of low-income housing, was presented on the panel "Public Housing Transformation and the Right to the City", at the 2011 Urban Affairs Association Conference.
Please email me if you'd like to read a draft of these articles.
Together with Stephanie Malin (Brown University) and Brian Jennings (Albright College) I am conducting a comparative study of natural gas boomtowns in Pennsylvania and Wyoming. The research focuses on how understandings of the natural landscape have shaped both the natural gas industry and the political resistance to natural gas drilling.
I conducted an ethnographic study of urban explorers in order to understand how they understand abandoned buildings and space. I found that explorers use abandoned sites to create self-directed narrative understandings of past historical moments, such as the organization of psychiatric healthcare or industrial labor, that are often critical or contrary to those produced by place entrepreneurs and knowledge professionals. The article is currently a revise and resubmit at the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.