Place & Housing

My housing justice work focuses on analyzing city-building and urban redevelopment between the 19th and 21st centuries (primarily) in the U.S. context to interrogate the simultaneous emergence and continuing significance of the fields of urban planning, geography, sociology, and community development upon the production of urban space since the Progressive Era (~1880-1930). I investigate how planning knowledge and orientations have been constituted by science and technological innovations, legal-juridical frameworks, political-economic considerations, as well as spatial orders that are formed by sociological and geographical thought; their implementation in urban development initiatives, including a focus on issues of urban governance and public participation; and, modalities of spatial contestation which different publics perform to strategically engage state actors, planners, and capital on issues of housing, neighborhood change, and how these articulate with issues of (socio-environmental) housing justice.

At its core, I analyze how state-market-society relations shape political, social, and economic impacts of the production of urban space through the optics of understanding how individuals and communities experience urbanization and urban life. In particular, his work focuses on critical conceptualizations of community and community development that draw on political-economic, post-colonial, and Black Studies theoretical scaffolding to analyze how people participate in processes of urban restructuring throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and connect these themes to broader issues of belonging, property, personhood, and race. In doing so, he examines capital-state and state-society relations and how they inform one another.

Research Exemplars

My interest in community and development has developed through multiple projects, both analyzing and evaluating government and foundation-sponsored projects since the 1990s when there was a renewed interest in the role of public participation in neighborhood redevelopment through comprehensive community-building initiatives (CCIs) and simultaneously a rise in social mix policies seeking to ‘de-concentrate poverty’ for both place-based and people-based goals. My first large-scale project on urban development occurred while I was a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. I was a director of a research center and lead researcher for a five-neighborhood revitalization initiative. Using a mixed-method approach and leading 75 neighborhood residents in collecting 1000 surveys across the study areas, I provided real-time data and analysis for the city and foundations to gauge and measure the outcomes of their efforts. Through this experience, I examined issues of urban citizenship, public participation, and the factors that shape the possibilities and limitations of the community options for governing neighborhood change efforts associated with the initiative. Out of this experience, I published a series of well-received articles (spanning 2003-2014 to capture long-term outcomes) in Urban Affairs Review, Environment & Planning A, City & Community, and the Community Development Journal on the opportunities and limitations of local communities participating in urban redevelopment efforts in the context of the political-economic, legal-juridical, and cultural restructuring of cities since the late, mid-twentieth century (~1970s).

I am continuing in this line of inquiry through multiple externally funded projects that have constituted a ten-year engagement in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine (OTR) neighborhood during a major initiative to revitalize the neighborhood under the auspices of creating integrated and socially mixed urban environments through public-private partnerships. Working with the late Dr. Tom Dutton (Architect & former Director of Miami-Ohio’s Center for Community Engagement) and many others, I have led a decade-long study analyzing the plans, spatial practices, and material outcomes associated with the transformation of Cincinnati’s most impoverished neighborhood adjacent to the downtown district. In a recent publication in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, I draw upon my former studies, evaluations for government agencies and foundations, and academic writing on mixed-income housing initiatives since the early 2000s to reflect upon the dynamics operating in OTR. One of the key findings is that social mix, spawning gentrification in many situations, is the significance of community organizing that both uses direct action and strategic state engagement to develop coalitions to support interventions, including the development of community land trusts, community benefits agreements, and, at times, resistance movements to provide alternative plans for place-making that does not result in systematic displacement(s) whether through evictions associated with the financialization of housing and urban space at the expense of creating housing and place precarity for the those experiencing some level of economic poverty.