About

I’m a Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I teach and research at the intersection of housing policy, neighborhood change, and social equity in cities. In the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, I serve as the Director of Graduate Studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Geography
• Economics
• Economic growth
• Business
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Demographic economics
• Medicine
• Demography
• Socioeconomics
• Psychology
• Public economics
• Law
• Finance
• Development economics

Selected publications

• On the Outside Looking in: Latina/o/x and African American Student Perspectives on Community-Engaged Courses

  Journal of Planning Education and Research · 2025-06-13

  articleSenior author

  To date, research has not explored the perspectives of Latina/o/x and African American (LAA) students engaging with LAA communities as part of community-engaged courses. To understand their unique perspectives, this qualitative research relies on twenty-two interviews with LAA students from the United States. We found that LAA students perceived that prep-work to enter communities puts white students at the center of the conversations. Once at the site, LAA students felt the constant need to teach others about racism, xenophobia, and so on. At the end of the course, LAA students felt guilty for leaving when the semester-long project ended.

  PublisherDOI

• On the persistence of racial health inequities: Maternal exposure to geospatial racism is transmitted to infant

  Medical Hypotheses · 2025-07-15

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Calculator for Sustainable Tradeoff Optimization in Multi‐Generational Product Family Development Considering Re‐X Performances

  2024-01-26 · 2 citations

  other

  Design for Re-X (reuse, remanufacturing, recycling) in a multi-generational product family setup is a challenging task that requires new and more advanced, quantitative, and user-friendly tools to ensure environmental savings and economic profitability for product makers. Through this REMADE-funded project, state-of-the-art Re-X, reliability, and lifecycle-based models are combined within a new design tool in order to generate and compare designs for Re-X alternatives. This newly developed Calculator aims to assess the potential of reliability-informed analysis of long-term benefits/costs of Re-X in product family design to enable substantial reductions in embodied energy and carbon emissions. To do so, three integrated modules are working together: (i) the LCA/LCC module; (ii) the reliability module; and (iii), the Re-X policy optimization module. Notably, the lifecycle-based module allows testing and comparing the impact of different material alternatives, part designs, and sub-assemblies. In addition, the Re-X and reliability analysis modules enable to compare and optimize different designs based on, e.g., material composition, the percentage of remanufactured components, the energy consumption, or the remaining useful life of critical components. In particular, for the reliability module, the inputs are the following: the shape/scale from reliability info or estimated using warranty claims, the warranty length (provided from the product or part information), the total number of new and used parts, and the weight (initial weight of product/subassembly being evaluated). The outputs enable the user to estimate the additional units for warranty claims, the reuse rate, and the adjusted weight. The Re-X policy optimization module includes: the bi-objective function (as of now, minimize cost and energy consumption), the Pareto front exploration, the impact of component reliability, the impact of warranty length, the impact of return rate, and the impact of remanufacturing cost. This new Re-X Calculator is being tested, fine-tuned, and validated based on two complementary product family categories (utility tractor product family design problem and mobile phone design and recovery problem) provided by the industrial partners, John Deere and Global Electronics Council.

  PublisherDOI

• Developing a Participatory Action Research Analytic Network to Advance a More Inclusive Process to Housing Research

  Journal of Participatory Research Methods · 2024-07-29

  articleOpen access

  Community residents have repeatedly organized and identified policy solutions to address rapidly increasing housing pressures within the greater Boston area. However, resident expertise is often dismissed as anecdotal. Since 2015, The Healthy Neighborhoods Research Consortium (HNRC) has used a participatory action research (PAR) approach to articulate research questions, design mixed methods instruments, collect and analyze data, and share findings to meet community-identified research priorities. We argue in favor of research processes that enable resident experiences and expertise to be used in conjunction with quantitative data analysis, and that support real-time action to address the harms of gentrification in their communities. The goals of this brief are to describe the HNRC’s process for developing a “PAR Analytic Network” — a program focused on building community residents’ power to create new academic partnerships for the purpose of answering their broader systems-level questions. Based on our experience we offer four recommendations: 1) Apply a PAR approach to identify research question(s) of mutual interest; 2) Community control over the academic partner selection process; 3) Academic Partners: Trust the PAR process; and 4) Community Residents: Identify the Silver Linings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Opportunity Zones and Race

  Pittsburgh Tax Review · 2024-03-20

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  

  PublisherDOI

• Urban Heat Mitigation Effect and Affordable Housing Greenery Injustice Measured by Green View Index (GVI): A Case Study in Washington, D.C.

  Preprints.org · 2024-10-14

  preprintOpen access

  The deterioration of living conditions is highlighting the benefits of urban greenery for creating sustainable cities. Using Washington D.C. as a case, we demonstrate the performance of GVI and examine disparities in greening surrounding affordable housing. With the pre-trained segmentation model, we generated GVI based on 54,691 Street View images and applied the Spearman’s correlation analysis to examine LST cooling effect. We found that LST shows significant negative correlations (p<0.001) with GVI and newly developed GVI-3D with coefficients of -0.60 and -0.73. The distribution of GVI in residential zoning was polarised, affordable housing projects have less greenery. In conclusion, we argue that it is of practical significance to monitor GVI instead of large scale NDVI for urban environments due to its controllability and human-centric attributes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Black Mothers in Racially Segregated Neighborhoods Embodying Structural Violence: PTSD and Depressive Symptoms on the South Side of Chicago

  Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities · 2023-01-30 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lessons (Not) Learned: Chicago Death Inequities during the 1918 Influenza and COVID-19 Pandemics

  International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · 2023-03-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  During historical and contemporary crises in the U.S., Blacks and other marginalized groups experience an increased risk for adverse health, social, and economic outcomes. These outcomes are driven by structural factors, such as poverty, racial residential segregation, and racial discrimination. These factors affect communities' exposure to risk and ability to recover from disasters, such as pandemics. This study examines whether areas where descendants of enslaved Africans and other Blacks lived in Chicago were vulnerable to excess death during the 1918 influenza pandemic and whether these disparities persisted in the same areas during the COVID-19 pandemic. To examine disparities, demographic data and influenza and pneumonia deaths were digitized from historic weekly paper maps from the week ending on 5 October 1918 to the week ending on 16 November 1918. Census tracts were labeled predominantly Black or white if the population threshold for the group in a census tract was 40% or higher for only one group. Historic neighborhood boundaries were used to aggregate census tract data. The 1918 spatial distribution of influenza and pneumonia mortality rates and cases in Chicago was then compared to the spatial distribution of COVID-19 mortality rates and cases using publicly available datasets. The results show that during the 1918 pandemic, mortality rates in white, immigrant and Black neighborhoods near industrial areas were highest. Pneumonia mortality rates in both Black and immigrant white neighborhoods near industrial areas were approximately double the rates of neighborhoods with predominantly US-born whites. Pneumonia mortality in Black and immigrant white neighborhoods, far away from industrial areas, was also higher (40% more) than in US-born white neighborhoods. Around 100 years later, COVID-19 mortality was high in areas with high concentrations of Blacks based on zip code analysis, even though the proportion of the Black population with COVID was similar or lower than other racial and immigrant groups. These findings highlight the continued cost of racial disparities in American society in the form of avoidable high rates of Black death during pandemics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating the quality of street trees in Washington, D.C.: Implications for environmental justice

  Urban forestry & urban greening · 2023-05-05 · 15 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Follow the Money (Deeper)—A Clinical Diagnosis of Opportunity Hoarding

  Housing Policy Debate · 2023-02-15 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In his argument for a rereading of opportunity hoarding and related policy prescriptions, David Imbroscio provides evidence for the misdiagnosis of elements of the problem vis-à-vis the entry and exit hypotheses consequentially resulting in limited effectiveness of common “prescribed treatments” for this behavior. His way forward focuses on a fundamental rebalancing of the instruments through which wealth is distributed to create more parity—a breaking up of the hoard. Thinking about his argument, I offer three additional premises that ask us to look more closely at how we treat the symptoms of opportunity hoarding, in a way that reflects the power of the mechanisms that sustain it.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ruby Mendenhall

  Illinois College

  12 shared

• Bethany B. Cutts

  North Carolina State University

  8 shared

• Michael Saidani

  8 shared

• Benjamin W. Chrisinger

  Oxford Policy Management

  8 shared

• April Jackson

  7 shared

• Kaitlyn Hornik

  7 shared

• C. Aujean Lee

  University of Utah

  7 shared

• François Cluzel

  Laboratoire Génie Industriel

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Urban Planning and Policy

  University of Illinois at Chicago

  2012

• M.S., Urban and Regional Planning

  University of Iowa

  2006

• B.A., English and Sociology

  Grinnell College

  2004