About

Andrew Messamore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin, obtained in 2024, and a B.A. in Sociology from the same institution, earned in 2015. His research focuses on the dynamics of housing systems in the United States, specifically examining how landownership, housing investment, and property usage evolve over time. His work investigates the consequences of these dynamics for housing affordability and urban inequality in contemporary cities. Currently, his research involves developing new data and computational tools to map the shifting landscape of landownership and creating theoretical frameworks to understand the evolution of rental landownership. In addition to his research, Messamore teaches courses related to urban sociology, the U.S. housing crisis, and sociological theory. Since joining the University of Washington faculty in 2024, he has become a faculty affiliate of the eScience Institute, the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Business
• Public relations
• Law
• Economics
• Public administration
• Keynesian economics
• Economic system
• Linguistics
• Medicine
• Medical emergency
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Social psychology
• Management

Selected publications

• Replication Files For: The Heart vs. The Head: How Nonprofit Use of Emotion and Cognition Attracts Donors and Volunteers

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-05-06

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication Respository for "The Heart vs. The Head: How Nonprofit Use of Emotion and Cognition Attracts Donors and Volunteers" Andrew Messamore University of Washington Pamela Paxton University of Texas at Austin Kristopher Velasaco Princeton University

  Publisher

• Review of “We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big”

  Social Forces · 2025-11-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Do Crises Impact Policy Debates? The shifting national landscape of discourse on rental housing in the USA

  Urban Affairs Review · 2025-08-17

  articleSenior author

  How do crises impact national policy debates? We map the discursive field around rental housing policy in the USA via online speech between 2015–2023 with a framework of six policy areas : (1) private rental, (2) subsidized rental, (3) state-owned, (4) pro-supply, (5) antidevelopment, and (6) fair housing. We measure activity on social media with 36 keywords to create a corpus of 12.7 million posts on the platform Twitter (now X), which proxies public discussion. We find that the crisis of COVID-19 expanded and changed the structure of discourse: from a smaller conversation pre-COVID-19 in which public and subsidized housing prevailed toward an explosion during the pandemic on eviction protections and rent controls, followed by a larger emphasis on discrimination. These differ from stated priorities of local elected officials. Our findings show that the crisis shifted policy debates toward greater government involvement and stronger tenant protections, suggesting that attention to state intervention intensifies during periods of crisis. We emphasize the growing significance of social media as data for understanding how ideas circulate about policy today, with repercussions for the public, researchers, and policymakers.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond scale: Legal, organizational, and economic factors that shape landlord behaviors and tenant housing experiences

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2024-12-16 · 5 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Housing movement coalitions in the United States: Trends from big networks among urban civil society leaders

  Urban Studies · 2024-01-06 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Coalitions of formal housing, civil rights and anti-poverty organisations play an important role in urban housing movements. However, the extent and dynamics of these ‘housing movement coalitions’ are not well understood. In this article, I document the geography of housing movement coalitions across 148 US cities using leadership networks among 11.8 million civic leaders. I show that cohesive coalitions of formal housing, civil rights and anti-poverty leaders exist in a wide range of US cities, including in conservative states. In terms of change, housing coalitions have only grown in a handful of politically liberal cities since the global financial crisis, and most housing coalitions have stagnated and some have declined. Finally, change score regression models indicate that economic insecurity is associated with housing coalition emergence, but municipal austerity and hostile political environments may weaken the opportunities for coalitions to expand. These findings suggest movement scholars should widen their focus to include housing coalitions in more diverse contexts, and more closely examine how municipal funding shapes housing coalitions and their relationship to grassroots activism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Text as Data to Reveal Changing Organizational Perspectives on Violence Against Women in the United States

  Social Currents · 2023-09-16 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Public understanding of violence against women, and appropriate solutions to tackling gender-based violence, have changed enormously over the past 50 years. In this paper, we study how violence against women is practically understood through organizational efforts to frame and combat it in the United States. We use topic modeling and dictionary-based content analysis to explore the missions and programming of 918 service and advocacy nonprofits directly involved in anti-violence work between 1998 and 2016. We find that, in contrast to earlier foci on direct crisis intervention, anti-violence organizations increasingly understand violence against women as a multifaceted problem that must be addressed by comprehensive programming. We also find that nonprofits increasingly use medicalized, criminal-legal, and bureaucratic language to describe their work, underscoring the tensions of institutionalization.

  PublisherDOI

• The Institutionalization of Landlording: Assessing Transformations in Property Ownership Since the Great Recession

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Business
  • Economic system
  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Community Organizing on Landlords’ Use of Eviction Filing: Evidence from U.S. Cities

  Social Problems · 2023-01-04 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for this decline. I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organization of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning sixteen years estimate that an addition of ten community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a ten percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Community Organizing on Landlords’ Use of Eviction Filing: Evidence from U.S. Cities

  2022-08-11

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Eviction filing rates have declined in many large cities in the United States. Existing scholarship on eviction, which focuses on discrete tenant-landlord relationships, has few explanations for why. In this article I consider whether community organizing by nonprofit organizations shapes the social organizations of communities and causes landlords to file fewer eviction filings. In cities where tenant and anti-poverty organizing has become common, community-oriented nonprofit organizations advocate for disadvantaged communities and help residents avoid poverty. Community organizing has rarely been studied as a predictor of housing security among low-income tenants, though, despite studies of how community organizing shapes the use of property in wealthy neighborhoods. I estimate the causal effect of community organizations on eviction filing rates between 2000 and 2016 using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the endogeneity of nonprofits and eviction. Evidence from year-to-year models in 75 large cities spanning 16 years estimate that an addition of 10 community nonprofits in a city of 100,000 residents is associated with a 10 percent reduction in eviction filing. This effect is comparable to the effect of community organizations on murder and is roughly a third of the association between eviction and concentrated disadvantage.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Network Approach to Assessing the Relationship between Discrimination and Daily Emotion Dynamics

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2022-10-15 · 11 citations

  article

  Discrimination-health research has been critiqued for neglecting the endogeneity of reports of discrimination to negative affect and the multidimensionality of mental health. To address these challenges, we model discrimination’s relationship to multiple psychological variables without directional constraints. Using time-dense data to identify associational network structures allows for joint testing of the social stress hypothesis, prominent in discrimination-health literature, and the negativity bias hypothesis, an endogeneity critique rooted in social psychology. Our results show discrimination predicts negative emotions from day-to-day but not vice versa, indicating that racial discrimination is a risk factor and not symptom of negative emotion. Furthermore, we identify sadness, guilt, hostility, and fear as a locus of interrelated emotions sensitive to racism-related stressors that emerges over time. Thus, we find support for what race scholars have argued for 120+ years in a model without a priori directional restrictions and then build on this work by empirically identifying cascading mental health consequences of discrimination.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Pamela Paxton

  The University of Texas at Austin

  3 shared

• Samuel Bondurant

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  1 shared

• Faith M. Deckard

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1 shared

• Henry Gomory

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1 shared

• Jacob E. Cheadle

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• Kristopher Velasco

  Princeton University

  1 shared

• Sumin Lee

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared

• Ken-Hou Lin

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1 shared