Research

Ongoing Research

Dissertation

Living for the City –– Perceptions on Planning Racial Integration in New York City

Despite national efforts to integrate schools, businesses, and communities, the United States remains racially segregated. Segregation has widespread implications on one’s access to health, education, employment, safety, and public services. These disparities exacerbate growing inequality nationwide (Beck et. al 2020, Quillian 2014, Trounstine 2016). Consequently, diverse, populous cities have outlined policies to encourage racial integration in neighborhoods. New York City has held forums discussing its hopes to reverse the impacts of historical, structural barriers to housing opportunities imposed on Black and brown communities, leading these groups to experience worse socioeconomic outcomes and perpetuating cycles of inequality.

Throughout this government-led process, communities of color were asked about their thoughts on integration. While there is no consensus about what neighborhood integration actually means, some New Yorkers assert that integration is a path for equity. One resident remarked: “This is a color-conscious country. So, yes, I want integration because it brings better services. I don’t care about integration per se, only if I get benefits that I should have had all along.” Another resident stated that if given a choice between living in an integrated neighborhood and gaining access to equitable services, they would much prefer equitable services. Although there is a collective understanding that segregation has caused lasting harm in pursuit of equity, there is little scholarship assessing the municipal institutions considering integration as its antidote and even less examining how citizens define what racial residential integration looks like or understand its consequences.

My dissertation aims to answer: what attitudes do people of color (i.e. Black, Latinx, and Asian) hold about racial residential integration? How do attitudes towards integration motivate individuals to engage with formal institutions charged with overseeing land-use and integrationist policies? And how, if at all, are these attitudes reflected in the fabric and outcomes of the institutions that oversee housing and integration efforts, from membership to policy recommendations?

Working Papers

1. A Tale of Two Cities: Race and Housing Equity in de Blasio’s New York

   Upon entering office, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to take on pervasive economic and social inequality. Along with efforts towards expanding healthcare access, establishing universal pre-K, and addressing police-community relations, de Blasio pledged to solve New York City’s staggering housing crisis. To that end, the administration has put forth a two-pronged approach to address the City’s housing inequity. To that end, the de Blasio administration launched HousingNY, committing to initially contribute 15,000 units of new, affordable housing to the City’s subsidized housing stock. New York City residents normatively commend the City’s commitment to increase its affordable housing stock. However, communities of color have argued that the majority of HousingNY units are developed in neighborhoods of color, specifically those composed predominantly of Black and Latinx New Yorkers; the mayoralty states that development is targeted towards high poverty neighborhoods, which are often high proportion minority. This paper explores the spatial distribution of housing development in New York City, in an attempt to elucidate how policy implementation reflects the City’s stated overarching goals vis-à-vis housing inequality.

2. Safety First? Policy Diffusion and State Security Policies Post 9/11

   Following the September 11th terror attacks, Congress passed The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001 (“The Patriot Act”). In its initial passage, these pieces of federal legislation addressed various fundamental policy areas, altering the nation’s approach to surveillance and intelligence gathering, police and law enforcement, and immigration/border security issues. Despite legal challenges to iterations of these policies, revisions, provisional sunsets, exclusions of former stipulations, and superseding legislations, their initial iterations generated permeating institutional effects on state and local governments within these policy realms By conducting a search of state legislation and public laws from 2002 to 2016, I examine state actions following the national passage of the Patriot Act to observe whether or not this legislation had longer term institutional influence on state governments via the process of top down, vertical policy diffusion. I observe an increase in related state policies (i.e. antiterrorism, surveillance, policing, immigration). This policy diffusion may be via direct language and provisions of the federal law, or the diffusion of ideas presented at the federal level to state policymakers.

3. Confederate Monument Removals Predict Exacerbated White Racial Attitudes (with Colin Cepuran)

   Efforts to remove Confederate Monuments have gained national attention in the U.S. Removal of the monuments compromise the status afforded to white supremacist separatism in the U.S. Research into white racial attitudes and contextual political behavior suggests: (1) Monument Removals will inflame whites’ anti-Black affect (which we measure via the FIRE scale), (2) that such effects will be contextually specific, and (3) that those effects will be short-lived. We match the 2016 and 2017 Cooperate Congressional Election Studies to a dataset of Confederate Monuments, identifying their presence and removal in a respondent’s ZIP code. While removal timing is not random, we argue that the relationship between removal dates and CCES interview dates is. This design yields three findings about the relationship between the timing of Monument Removals and white racial attitudes. First, the effect of Removals is small—being interviewed chronologically near monument removal coincides with around a 10% increase in whites’ FIRE scores. Second, the effect dissipates within two years of Monument Removals. Finally, these effects might depend on a campaign environment that makes white supremacy.

4. Introducing a Dataset of Fundraising Emails from the 2020 Federal Elections in the United States (with Colin Cepuran, Cameron Mailhot, and Angie Torres-Beltran; under review)

   Candidates for office in the United States send numerous fundraising emails. These emails are an underutilized source of data on (a) the dynamics of American electoral strategy, (b) how candidates communicate their appeals to constituents, and (c) how campaigns evolve over time and respond to exogenous events. Thus, we introduce a novel dataset of over 15,000 emails sent from candidates for House, Senate, and the major party Coordinated Committees between May 2020 and April 2021. Each email is an observation on this dataset; each observation includes the timing (down to the minute) of the email, complete subject and body of the email, and other information about the candidate. Descriptive analyses of word usages in subjects and bodies suggest that emails extensively refer to prominent national politicians but otherwise focus on non-issue-based electioneering: establishing urgency and sharing calls to action. We describe opportunities for analysis presented by this dataset.