My current housing research is about foreclosures. I’m interested in understanding the effects of the 2007-2012 foreclosure crisis on low-income communities of color, especially those who live in cities. I’m interested in cities because of how difficult it is to become a home owner in an urban setting. Limited housing inventory, high property values, and proximity to public transportation usually translates into expensive housing.
I’m also interested in homeownership in urban areas because cities tend to have large numbers of communities of color. There are multiple reasons why communities of color are overrepresented in urban areas. Most of those reasons can be traced back to discriminatory practices that kept households of color from buying homes in certain neighborhoods – a practice called redlining. [To learn more about redlining, read this book].
My current housing research project is putting together foreclosure data, collected between 2008 and 2015, with Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data to understand the effect of the foreclosure crisis on urban communities of color. It’s
I’m still working on putting together the data from the entire US (can you say summer research?), but I do have some nifty maps I made for the 2017 Population Association Of America (PAA) conference that I can share with you. They describe the foreclosure crisis in Washington State between 2008 and 2013.
These next set of maps examine the foreclosure crisis in Seattle, WA, the largest city in the state, between 2008 and 2013.
Housing the City 