Researching Poverty and American Housing with Big Data

Eva Rosen, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy, is using her MDI Seed Grant to further her research in poverty and American housing policy. In a project titled “Landlords, Housing Vouchers, and Neighborhood Rise and Decline,” Rosen and her team of collaborators have begun analyzing the role that landlord practices play in shaping low- and moderate-income households in different housing and neighborhoods in urban areas across Baltimore, Washington DC, Dallas, and Cleveland.

Although much research has examined the structural, economic, cultural, and institutional mechanisms that trap poor families in low-quality housing and high-poverty neighborhoods, this previous work has largely overlooked the role that supply-side actors—namely landlords and property managers—play in urban housing markets. In this research, Rosen will examine how landlords play into and broker the geography of opportunity for low- and moderate-income renters, especially those with Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV). Eva Rosen’s research interests examine the creation, existence, and persistence of urban poverty, with a focus on housing policies and racial segregation. This interest encompasses urban sociology, poverty and inequality, race and ethnicity, ethnography, social policy, immigration, crime, and culture.