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
Academia

Geospatial Tool Building

My new article “The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building” has been published in Transactions in GIS (free PDF). I originally presented this paper as the 8th annual Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG annual meeting last year. I argue that tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to build better tools. Better tools and data models, spearheaded by academics, can help infuse theory into our field’s quantitative work where it is too often lacking. But if we want better tools, we have to build them. It is not ESRI’s job to satisfy all the theoretical needs of the spatial sciences.

Categories
Academia

AnyConnect VPN on Linux

I run Linux on my school computer, which I brought home to get work done during the stay-at-home order. But when I tried to set up a VPN connection, I was surprised to discover that USC IT didn’t seem to provide a Linux client for Cisco AnyConnect. When I contacted them to ask how to connect, I was informed that “at this time IT doesn’t support Linux.” Shrug emoji.

Fortunately I do support Linux, so if anyone else wants to connect to the USC AnyConnect VPN, here’s how. You could roll your own solution using OpenConnect and a vpnc-script, but that’s complicated. Instead, you can download a current Linux client for Cisco AnyConnect here (you’re welcome). Install it and run it.

You want to connect to sslvpn.usc.edu (the normal vpn.usc.edu server does not work here). To log in, enter your normal USC username and password. For “second password” open your Duo Security app, generate a two-factor code, and enter it here. And ta-da, you’re in.

Linux Cisco AnyConnect VPN client

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?