In this essay, I explore the linkages between my research and that of Professor Devin Fergus, who presented research from his upcoming book, Land of the Fee, at UC Berkeley this past year. Both Professor Fergus and I are concerned with the ways in which practices in the financial services industry contribute to the racial wealth gap and close off historical routes to economic mobility. The essay provides a brief overview of Professor Fergus’s talk and sets it into conversation with my own work on disparities in access to mortgage credit as a lens through which to view the wealth implications of living in the land of the fee. I also highlight some emerging practices in San Francisco that attempt to stem the rise of abusive financial services and help lower-income families and families of color build assets.

Since the nation’s first Five-Year Plan in 1951, the Government of India has focused attention on increasing the country’s housing supply, particularly for low-income households. The nature of housing policy has shifted over the years, however, with the most recent period focused on developing a private housing market through governmental support of mortgage finance institutions and the establishment of a housing finance regulator. Despite these efforts, recent estimates place India’s housing deficit at close to 19 million units with tens of millions of the nation’s population living in slums. There has been limited research that has traced the evolution of India’s housing policy since 1951, precluding our ability to understand the persistence of unmet housing demand and the proliferation of slums.

This dissertation fills this gap by examining how low-income housing policy is shaped in India at three scales: 1) the global, 2) the national, and 3) the local or household scale. It argues that this multi-scalar approach to examining housing policy is necessary in order understand the factors that shape specific policy regimes. In India, international flows of capital collide with nationalistic goals of “slum-free” cities to produce specific policy actions, which again are shaped by the particulars of households’ decisions about where they choose to live and why.

The dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 1 introduces the low-income housing challenge in India, describes the three housing policy paradigms that dominate global housing policy discourse and praxis, and provides a review of how housing is funded in India.

Chapter 2 approaches low-income housing policy at the global scale, applying theories of policy diffusion to make the case that low-income housing policy in India is shaped by funding flows and knowledge-sharing from international actors. This chapter traces shelter lending from the World Bank Group, the single largest outside provider of development capital for housing to India, and examines the degree and type of influence the Bank has had on India’s approach to low-income housing. This analysis reveals that India is most susceptible to policy shifts that reflect the World Bank’s own policy objectives when it is most in need of outside funding. When India’s financial position is strong, housing projects are seen as attractive investments by the World Bank Group’s private sector arm and serve to provide momentum for India’s own housing policy objectives.

Chapter 3 is situated at the national scale and examines the role of policy frames in India’s public discourse on low-income housing in shaping the specific policies of different planning eras. The analysis applies a mixed-methods approach to reading the housing-related chapters in each of India’s twelve Five-Year Plans. These documents provide an ongoing, textual record of national directives and external messages concerning the country’s central planning efforts. Subjecting the plans to qualitative content and computational text analyses reveals the contours of India’s housing policy frames. This chapter finds that larger shifts in policy frames occur after significant events that fundamentally alter the Government of India’s conception of its institutional and fiduciary role in low-income housing provision.

Chapter 4 concentrates on the local scale, examining housing demand across two major Indian cities. The myriad low-income housing policies implemented by the Government of India have systematically overlooked low-income households’ demand or willingness to pay for housing. This chapter questions whether low-income housing policies have been remiss in ignoring their beneficiaries' preferences for housing characteristics. The data used here are previously-collected household surveys in the Maharashtrian cities of Mumbai and Pune. Using a hedonic analysis of housing markets, this chapter compares income and price elasticities of demand between slum and non-slum households. The findings reveal that demand elasticities are higher among slum-households, but also expose a number of empirical issues that compromise external validity when using pre-existing household survey data.

The findings from this dissertation have implications for India as it continues to urbanize and craft housing policies to address imminent growth. Other developing and emerging economies can also benefit from this scaled analysis that utilizes a range of data sources and methods to critically examine the role external forces play in shaping national housing policy, how the national government frames its approach to low-income housing, and what household behavior can reveal about which policies to pursue.

Planners from the federal to the local level routinely grapple with how to establish an efficient and equitable policy regime for rental housing. In attempting to promote affordability, fair access, and good maintenance of rentals, however, few planners have a good understanding of those who set rents, select tenants, and are ultimately responsible for property maintenance - the rental property owners. This dissertation focuses on these owners and tries to understand if certain kinds of owners behave differently than other kinds of owners, how owners as a group might be changing over time, and the role of technological advances is driving those changes. This is especially relevant because of the changes to the owner population brought on by Foreclosure Crisis, and the likely change in who owns the nation’s rentals that will happen because of the coronavirus pandemic. It also directly engages with the long but currently neglected scholarly conversation about rental property owner “professionalism,” especially how technology fits or does not fit into that lens of viewing owners, and the very much un-neglected topic of single-family rental housing.

For all of the hue and cry over rents and nefariousness or benevolence of certain rental property owners, there is extremely limited data on rents and who rental properties in the US. I use a range of strategies to deal with this dearth of data. Firstly, I gathered my own data using a large survey of the owners of small rental properties in the US. This survey was sent to over 53,000 owners and I received approximately 1,000 responses from owners ranging from 1-unit portfolio owners to owners with hundreds of properties. I also conducted follow-up interviews with about 160 of these owners. Secondly I joined under-utilized Census data on rental property owners with Census data on rental units and tenants to create a detailed picture of how hundreds of rental property owners set rents in the 1980s and 1990s. Lastly I used data scraped from the web to understand the influence of a specific technology, Craigslist, to measure the impact of the site over time. I feed these diverse data into OLS and logistic models to better understand how rental property owners have behaved and how technologies have changed rental markets across the US.

Chapter 1 sets the context for the dissertation, outlining the subjects of the owners of rental properties, professionalism, technology and how these relate to rents and fairness in rental markets. I pay particular attention to small rental properties, which are both distinct from and similar to multifamily rentals and owner-occupied single-family homes in many ways. Chapter 2 examines below-market rent-setting among the owners of small rental properties. There’s been a long-standing debate about the extent to which small rental properties are a site of exploitation versus a site of opportunity for tenants and discerning whether owners knowingly set rents below market is an important part of that debate. I find that about half of small rental property owners do set rents at least $50 below market. The average amount that rents are below market is substantial, about $270 per month. The reasons for setting rents below market rate are diverse. There are economic reasons, such as minimizing turnover costs and attracting and retaining low-cost tenants. There are also social and ethical reasons, such as owners who reported that they “didn’t need” the additional income or set rents based on what they thought their tenants could afford. Lastly there were information reasons, where owners raised rent when they realized the extent to which their unit was below market. The distinction between owners who set rent below market and those who did not didn’t follow the typical dividing lines between professional and amateur owners. Portfolio size had only a very small effect, as did whether the owner held their properties in a corporate entity. Owners who held their property “As future security for family member(s),” owners who perceived their tenants to be low income, and owners who didn’t use technology for property management or rent setting were more likely to report setting rents below market.

Chapter 3 keeps the national-scale frame but expands the scope of the analysis to multifamily, as well as small rental properties, and looks across a decade to examine how different landlords set rents. Specifically, I track “rent stickiness,” the owner’s decision to hold rents flat over two years, and “rent shocks,” the owner’s decision to increase rents by 20% or more in a two-year period. From 1985 to 1995 stickiness and shocks were both fairly common. I examine whether these behaviors are correlated the extent to which an owner is a professional or amateur landlord, while controlling for the many other factors that influence rent-setting. Over a given two-year period about a quarter of units’ rents “stuck” while about 15% rose sharply. Stickiness was far more common with continuing tenants (though was still pronounced upon turnover), while shocks were slightly more common at turnover. None of the traditional measures of owner professionalism were strongly correlated with either stickiness or shocks. The role of turnover, however, obscures how some owners might use stickiness to entice tenants to stay put, and shocks to entice tenants to move.

Chapter 4 concerns how technology has affected US rental markets generally, from both the supply and demand sides. Many scholars have hypothesized that, as technology makes it easier for buyers and sellers to gather and analyze information, markets, including rental housing markets, should become more efficient. The precise ways in which rental markets may become more efficient, however, is not clear. This chapter focuses on the rise of Craigslist in the mid-2000s and examines whether this particular technology had an impact on various measures of rental market efficiency. The rise of Craigslist appears uncorrelated with changes in vacancy dynamics and does not appear to have generated a rise in non-family households or affected renter mobility. Craigslist also appears to have had little to no impact on the rental vacancy rate. The rise of the site, however, was correlated to an increase in rents. This may be related to the finding from Chapter 2 that owners who consulted online sources for comparables when setting rents were less likely to set rents below market.

Chapter 5 discusses the broader implications of the research and identifies promising avenues for further study. Rental housing market are changing on many fronts, from shifts in who owns rental units to changes in how owners manage their properties now that they can access and analyze information thanks to technology. Much attention has been paid to the former change, but my analysis shows that the latter change might be at least as important for rent levels and changes in rents and that the distinctions between owners may need to be more nuanced than the typical metric of portfolio size. Further I argue that planners should view below-market small rental properties as an affordable housing asset in their communities and consider policies to preserve and generate more of this stock.

In 2013, the School District of Philadelphia closed ten percent of its traditional public schools. Citing poor academic performance, declining enrollments, and fiscal constraints, the District deployed school closure as an education reform strategy. Other districts mirror Philadelphia’s efforts, closing from five to fifty percent of their public schools. This dissertation examines how public school closures, sales, and reuse can be seen not only as education reform policy, but also as urban policy, transforming the physical, social, and political fabric of a city. This dissertation thus extends the work on the education-related impacts of school closures, and demonstrates the salience of school closures from an urban policy and planning perspective.

Using Philadelphia as a case study, I draw on theories of frame analysis and use ethnographic methods to explore the discourses of closure that circulate among policy makers, residents, and the broader public. I conducted seven months of fieldwork in Philadelphia, including 118 interviews with City and School District staff, residents, and non-profit leaders, and participated in City, School District, and neighborhood association meetings. I look not only at the closure decision-making process, but also follow the trajectory of school buildings from vacancy to the transformation of schools into capital assets to the reimagining of school reuse. Examining the discursive frames of school closures, sales, and reuse is a first step at grappling with the racialized tensions and material consequences of this policy intervention.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide an introduction to the issue of and current empirical research on public school closures, and background on the City and School District of Philadelphia. Chapter 3 situates the Philadelphia case in a larger national context by examining newspaper media coverage in 13 cities across the country. Coverage fosters a conflictual and dichotomous framing of closures, reducing plural meanings of schools to two competing and singular arguments: arguments for closure, based in rationality and technical expertise and arguments opposing closure, based in emotionally laden messaging. Media are predominantly sympathetic to the problem definition and causal interpretations of school closure proponents. Newspaper media do not maximize their role as a democratic institution, and neglect the disproportionate and racialized impact of closures.

In Chapter 4, I move to the Philadelphia case. I use Philadelphia’s school closures as a revelatory case to shed light on the multifaceted values that schools have to neighborhoods, planning, and urban governance. Schools are valued economically, socio-spatially, and symbolically, and this extreme case expands the scope of these values currently found in the literature. Economically, schools are an employment center, often for neighborhood residents; assets or liabilities that contribute to school district fiscal solvency; and redevelopment sites and vehicles for private profit making. Socio-spatially, closures reveal how school buildings have potentially negative value, as attractive nuisances in the absence of stewardship. Schools are key physical landmarks in the urban fabric, serving as nodes on pathways throughout the neighborhood, shaped by individual perceptions of safety and community. Symbolically, closures stand in for larger processes of neighborhood change, triggering or exacerbating fears about gentrification or continued disinvestment. Decisions about schools represent a larger and historically racialized relationship between particular communities and the public sector, one that is defined by systemic respect or disrespect. In Chapter 5, I build on the values identified in Chapter 4 and describe the three discursive frames of school closures that emerged from my research: closure as crisis management, closure as loss, and closure as oppression. Each one places schools in a different spatial context – from the a-spatial market (crisis management) to the school site and/or neighborhood (loss) to broader citywide patterns of re/development (oppression). This variation is tied to different notions of time, which foreground the past, present, and future in divergent ways.

Chapter 6 concludes with reflections on the racialized nature of school closures, sales, and reuse, and on directions for practice and research. My findings demonstrate that to understand the consequences of school closures, research needs to examine not only the moment of closure, but also the subsequent sales and reuse of school buildings. “Placing” schools in this way situates this education reform policy in its spatial context, and reveals how school infrastructure is urban infrastructure, playing a central role in urban change. This study also illustrates the importance historicizing school closures, and considering links to past and present place-based policies that have sought to improve poor neighborhoods, yet have had racist impacts. This study documents how the administrative boundaries of the school district and school attendance catchment areas define people’s mental maps of their neighborhoods, and challenges planners to consider school district or school attendance boundaries as a spatial unit of analysis. The tensions over perceived lines of accountability, political action, and resistance around school closures, sales, and reuse also suggest more reflection and attention by practitioners to bridge cross-sector silos and reconsider silo-ed public engagement processes. This research reveals the ways that schools are sites of contestation in the politics of place. It helps further understanding of the geographic and geopolitical boundaries that are tied to school sites and school districts. It enhances planners’ conceptualization of and work at the nexus of place and schools. From an urban policy or planning perspective public school closures, sales, and reuse call for a recalibration or assessment of interventions in neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

Homeownership is core to the American Dream and US housing policy in part due to the many advantages homeownership can confer in American society: a financially privileged form of wealth-building and access to communities with healthy environments, prosperous schools, and well-connected neighbors. Policies to extend homeownership to low-income and minority households are coupled with a belief that these policies will not only diminish housing inequality but also reduce broader inequality by providing access to neighborhoods of opportunity. But not all neighborhoods are created equal, and minorities may not be able to purchase homes in the best suburban neighborhoods due to a combination of discrimination, historical redlining, and structural inequality. The vast majority of studies on Hispanic homeownership have examined barriers to entry or the influence of immigration on homeownership. Much less research focuses on how Hispanic families' experience with homeownership may also be contributing to inequalities. This dissertation focuses on where Hispanics own homes, and how the geography of homeownership may be contributing to inequality. This is especially important as spatial patterns of Hispanic settlement, housing construction, and poverty have shifted in recent decades. The results from this dissertation point to continued differences in the areas in which whites and Hispanics reside, even among homeowners. These findings highlight the multifaceted nature of housing inequality where outcomes that are typically thought of as integrative, like homeownership, can still produce highly unequal outcomes. This dissertation also draws attention to the changing nature of suburbs and conceptions around suburbs as the prime locations for homeownership.

Chapter 2 examines trends in both Hispanic homeownership and suburbanization from 1990-2018 using the decennial censuses and the 2018 5-year American Community Survey for the 100 largest metro areas. By looking at the interaction of homeownership and location, this research explores the question of whether moves into homeownership by Hispanics have been coupled with moves to the suburbs (and the opportunity structures present in suburban communities), and whether suburbanizing Hispanics are able to capture the benefits of residential stability and wealth-building through homeownership in suburban neighborhoods. Results show that despite larger overall growth in the Hispanic suburban homeowner population, Hispanic homeownership rates grew more in cities. It additionally finds consistent deviation in homeownership-location trends between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, indicating differing relationships between homeownership and location for these groups.

Chapter 3 uses a multinomial logit model to evaluate the determinants of joint tenure and location (defined as city/suburb) choice for Hispanic and white households, paying particular attention to measures of acculturation of Hispanic families, in addition to classic determinants of homeownership such as income, education, age, and household composition. The analysis finds that the Hispanic-white homeownership gap is predominantly a suburban gap and that traditional drivers of suburban homeownership are less strong for Hispanic families. These results suggest lingering barriers to homeownership among Hispanic families and that further research is needed to observe the impact of differing residential location on wealth-building and other homeownership outcomes.

Chapter 4 examines whether Hispanics achieve neighborhood parity with whites through homeownership by comparing the neighborhoods of recent Hispanic and white homebuyers using the 2018 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data coupled with neighborhood information from the Decennial Census and 2014-2018 American Community Survey for the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas. It measures aggregate differences between the neighborhoods of Hispanic and white homebuyers, and uses regression models to test whether these differences hold for demographically and financially similar homebuyers. It also compares urban and suburban neighborhoods to examine whether neighborhood differences are attenuated or exacerbated based on urban/suburban location. It finds that Hispanic buyers are purchasing homes in neighborhoods with greater racial segregation and economic disadvantage (as measured through poverty rates, median incomes, and median home values), and with greater racial change and economic decline, even after controlling for demographic, financial, and loan characteristics of the buyer. It also finds that the gaps in neighborhood characteristics between Hispanics and whites are often just as large in suburbs as in cities, and that smaller suburban gaps are a result of declining conditions in suburbs relative to cities.

As climate-related disasters magnify in frequency and severity around the world, global Southern governments are increasingly working with disaster risk and development finance institutions to implement climate finance instruments like catastrophe bonds and other insurance-linked securities (ILS) in their states and regions. These instruments are attractive because they are designed to transfer the burden of risk from governments to global private capital markets, but they have drawbacks: they require debt-driven repayment on premiums; they cannot be implemented without the appropriate political, economic, and legal frameworks in place ‘on the ground’; and they are less appropriate at the scale of the city, where disaster risk is often concentrated. This research investigates emerging pathways for these instruments as they are promoted in Mexico, and the cascading effects of their use under a new political regime in the wake of sovereign disaster governance restructuring—namely the dismantling of the Fondo de Desastres Naturales (the Fund for Natural Disasters, or Fonden). This dissertation takes the form of three research articles organized into chapters. The first chapter is a case study in Xochimilco that brings the established urban theoretical concept of peripheral urbanization together with more recent work on disaster urbanization to advance the twin theories of “everyday disaster” and “autorecovery” as processes that self-organize and improvise in response to the uneven distribution of state resources. This framing offers a more expansive conceptualization of disaster governance, risk, and recovery that both contributes and responds to calls to challenge the pervasive ideological focus on “resilience” in contemporary development, disaster finance, and critical urban studies scholarship while thinking from the South. The second chapter investigates the publics and counterpublics of “resilience” discourses and their significance for development-driven disaster governance and organizational activism. By looking at sites of organizational activism and at the World Bank’s persistent attempts to “innovate” a municipal contingency fund in Mexico City, this study shows how subjective political economic conditions and ideologies dictate the kinds of interventions deemed investable, complicating radical activism efforts “on the ground” and claims from critical climate finance scholarship that development finance-driven insurance instruments can seamlessly “fix” overaccumulated capital in global Southern cities. The third chapter draws on political economy and economic geography to demonstrate how Mexico’s relationship with development-driven disaster governance is taking new forms since the dismantling of Fonden, and appears to be reproducing and even intensifying “neoliberal” modes through austerity and a financialization of risk that generates new markets for preferred forms of governance. Where these market forces converge under AMLO’s campaign to transform the state through Morena, Mexico represents a critical political moment—and a political party emerging in the service of these new market forms—I call the “populist resilience regime.”