Tag: housing

Categories
Academia

Access to the Exclusive City

I recently coauthored an article in Urban Studies with Julia Harten titled “Access to the Exclusive City: Home Sharing as an Affordable Housing Strategy.” We examined how shared housing serves increasingly diverse populations as a pathway into otherwise unaffordable housing submarkets.

From the abstract:

Home sharing, particularly via online platforms, is becoming a mainstream housing strategy as social processes evolve and housing costs rise. Recent research has studied shared rentals as a modality for students and kin-based households, as one strategy among diversifying pathways to housing and as a social phenomenon. However, we still know little about whether it actually creates opportunities for home seekers in unaffordable markets. Analysing online rental listings in Los Angeles, we find that shared rentals are both more affordable and more widely available across diverse neighbourhoods than traditional whole-unit rentals. Shared rentals have historically been understudied due to their limited data trail, but they offer important entryways into unaffordable markets. We argue for shared housing research to shift its traditional focus away from students and young adults and towards a broader exploration of the diverse populations that may benefit from or depend on shared housing.

For more, check out the article.

Categories
Planning

Air Pollution Exposure in Los Angeles

I have a new article out now in Urban Studies, which finds that—all else equal—residents of Los Angeles census tracts that generate more vehicular travel tend to be exposed to less vehicular air pollution, and that tracts with a larger non-white population proportion—whether high- or low-income—experience more air pollution than do whiter but otherwise similar tracts. There’s also a free, open access pre-print available.

Twentieth century planners designed and constructed an enormous network of expressways to open up growing American metropolises to motorists. Vast swaths of established urban neighborhoods were bulldozed to clear new channels for suburban residents to drive to job centers. Yet some older neighborhoods survived relatively unscathed.

For example, in Los Angeles, local residents organized to protest and eventually successfully cancel plans to extend State Route 2 through the affluent communities of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles’s westside. In contrast, similar grassroots efforts failed in Los Angeles’s eastside, where several major freeways carved up its less-affluent and less-white neighborhoods.

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Categories
Planning

Delivering Healthy and Sustainable Cities

I have a new article out now in The Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy, coauthored with a team that includes several of the folks from our recent series in The Lancet Global Health. The JCCPE article, “A Pathway to Prioritizing and Delivering Healthy and Sustainable Cities,” synthesizes findings and recommended policy actions arising from that recent TLGH series.

From the abstract:

Creating healthy and sustainable cities should be a global priority. Some cities prioritize 15-minute cities as a planning approach with co-benefits for health, climate change mitigation, equity, and economic recovery from COVID-19. Yet, as our recent The Lancet Global Health series on “Urban Design, Transport, and Health” showed, many cities have a long way to go to achieve this vision. This policy guideline summarizes the main findings of the series, which assessed health and sustainability indicators for 25 cities in 19 countries. We then outline steps governments can take to strengthen policy frameworks and deliver more healthy, equitable, and sustainable built environments. The Lancet Global Health series provided clear evidence that cities need to transform urban governance to enable integrated planning for health and sustainability and commit to policy implementation. Evidence-informed indicators should be used to benchmark and monitor progress. Cities need policy frameworks that are comprehensive and consistent with evidence, with measurable policy targets to support implementation and accountability. The series provided evidence-informed thresholds for some key urban design and transport features, which can be embedded as policy targets. Policies and interventions must prioritize identifying and reducing inequities in access to health-supportive environments. Governments should also invest in open data and promote citizen-science programmes, to support indicator development and research for public benefit. We provide tools to replicate our indicators and an invitation to join our 1,000 Cities Challenge via the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities.

For more, check out the JCCPE article itself. And you may also be interested in our recent The Lancet Global Health series of articles that developed similar themes in great depth.

Categories
Planning

ISPAH in Abu Dhabi

Alongside Billie Giles-Corti and Jim Sallis, I will be presenting our team’s recent research into accessible, sustainable urban design around the world at the ISPAH Congress in Abu Dhabi this week. Our symposium at the congress will share the methods and findings from our The Lancet Global Health series published this summer, as well as our ongoing work on the Thousand Cities Challenge.

Our geospatial team developed open-source software to calculate indicators of walkability and accessibility around the world, and then linked these back to cities’ policy contexts and identified populations living above and below estimated thresholds for physical activity. Few cities had measurable policy standards and targets to actually build healthier and more sustainable cities, and their health-supportive built environment features were often inadequate or inequitably distributed.

We simultaneously launched the Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities to promote healthy and sustainable urban planning, benchmark and monitor cities’ progress, and share more consistent, comparable urban data. The whole series of articles is free and open access, as is our software.

Categories
Urban

Scaling Urban Indicators

I have a new article out now in the journal of Urban Policy and Research coauthored with a team comprising many of the folks from our recent series in The Lancet Global Health. The article is titled “Policy-Relevant Spatial Indicators of Urban Liveability and Sustainability: Scaling from Local to Global” and discusses measuring urban indicators and scaling the software to calculate them from a local case study to a worldwide effort.

From the abstract:

Urban liveability is a global priority for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Measurement of policy-relevant spatial indicators of the built and natural environment supports city planning at all levels of government. Analysis of their spatial distribution within cities, and impacts on individuals and communities, is crucial to ensure planning decisions are effective and equitable. This paper outlines challenges and lessons from a 5-year collaborative research program, scaling up a software workflow for calculating a composite indicator of urban liveability for residential address points across Melbourne, to Australia’s 21 largest cities, and further extension to 25 global cities in diverse contexts.

For more, check out the article itself. And you may also be interested in our recent The Lancet Global Health series of articles that developed similar themes in great depth.

Categories
Urban

The Lancet Global Health Series on Urban Design, Transport, and Health

After many years of hard work, our series of articles on urban design, transport, and health has been published by The Lancet Global Health.

The Lancet Global Health infographic on benchmarking healthy sustainable citiesIn our first paper, we analyzed urban policies and calculated built environment indicators for 25 cities across 6 continents to assess walkability and accessibility. Our policy analysis found policies inconsistent with public health evidence, rhetoric endorsing health and sustainability but few measurable policy targets, and substantial implementation gaps.

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Categories
Urban

Housing Tech and Tilted Platforms

I have a new article out now in a special issue on platform urbanism, co-authored with Max Besbris, David Wachsmuth, and Jake Wegmann, titled Tilted Platforms: Rental Housing Technology and the Rise of Urban Big Data Oligopolies. We reflect on short-term and long-term rental housing technologies and how they’re affecting the housing search, equity, and affordability.

From the abstract:

This article interprets emerging scholarship on rental housing platforms—particularly the most well-known and used short- and long-term rental housing platforms—and considers how the technological processes connecting both short-term and long-term rentals to the platform economy are transforming cities. It discusses potential policy approaches to more equitably distribute benefits and mitigate harms. We argue that information technology is not value-neutral. While rental housing platforms may empower data analysts and certain market participants, the same cannot be said for all users or society at large. First, user-generated online data frequently reproduce the systematic biases found in traditional sources of housing information. Evidence is growing that the information broadcasting potential of rental housing platforms may increase rather than mitigate sociospatial inequality. Second, technology platforms curate and shape information according to their creators’ own financial and political interests. The question of which data—and people—are hidden or marginalized on these platforms is just as important as the question of which data are available. Finally, important differences in benefits and drawbacks exist between short-term and long-term rental housing platforms, but are underexplored in the literature: this article unpacks these differences and proposes policy recommendations.

For more, check out the article.

Categories
Planning

Rental Housing Spot Markets

My new article, “Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data,” with Jake Wegmann and Junfeng Jiao is now published in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (download free PDF).

How much does it cost to rent a typical apartment in your city? Answering this basic housing question can be surprisingly difficult. Consider the case of San Francisco in early 2018.

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Categories
Urban

Housing Search in the Age of Big Data

My article “Housing Search in the Age of Big Data: Smarter Cities or the Same Old Blind Spots?” with Max Besbris, Ariela Schachter, and John Kuk is now published in Housing Policy Debate. We look at the quantity and quality of information in online housing listings and find that they are much higher in White and non-poor neighborhoods than they are in poor, Black, or Latino neighborhoods. Listings in White neighborhoods include more descriptive text and focus on unit and neighborhood amenities, while listings in Black neighborhoods focus more on applicant (dis)qualifications. We discuss what this means for housing markets, filter bubbles, residential sorting and segregation, and housing policy. You can download a free PDF.

Housing search technologies are changing and, as a result, so are housing search behaviors. The most recent American Housing Survey revealed that, for the first time, more urban renters found their current homes through online technology platforms than any other information channel. These technology platforms collect and disseminate user-generated content and construct a virtual agora for users to share information with one another. Because they can provide real-time data about various urban phenomena, housing technology platforms are a key component of the smart cities paradigm.

This paradigm promotes information technology as both a technocratic mode of monitoring cities and a utopian mode of improving urban life through big data. In this context, “big data” typically refers to massive streams of user-generated content resulting from millions or billions of decentralized human actions. Data exhaust from Craigslist and other housing technology platforms offers a good example: optimistically, large corpora of rental listings could provide housing researchers and practitioners with actionable insights for policymaking while also equalizing access to information for otherwise disadvantaged homeseekers. But how good are these platforms at resolving the types of problems that already plague old-fashioned, non-big data? Does this broadcasting of information reduce longstanding geographic and demographic inequalities or do established patterns of segmentation and sorting remain?

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Categories
Planning

Online Rental Housing Market Representation

My article, Online Rental Housing Market Representation and the Digital Reproduction of Urban Inequality, has just been published in Environment and Planning A (download free PDF). It explores the representation of different communities in online rental listings from two perspectives: 1) how might biases in representativeness impact housing planners’ knowledge of rental markets, and 2) how might information inequality impact residential mobility, community legibility, gentrification, and housing voucher utilization?

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