About

Kyle Crowder is the Blumstein-Jordan Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at the University of Washington. He earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany in 1997 and his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 1990. Prior to returning to UW in 2011, he held faculty positions at Western Washington University and the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the processes of residential differentiation and the effects of physical and social context on individual life conditions, with particular emphasis on neighborhood selection, racial and ethnic differences in residential mobility, and broader patterns of residential segregation. Crowder's work involves large-scale projects examining racial differences in neighborhood experiences, the stability and access to high-opportunity neighborhoods for low-income families, and the health impacts of neighborhood pollution exposure, especially as they relate to racial disparities. He teaches courses related to urban sociology, demography, research methods, and statistics, and has contributed to graduate and undergraduate education through courses on urbanism, urbanization, and sports in society.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Demography
• Biology
• Veterinary medicine
• Gerontology
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Economic growth
• Gender studies
• Geography
• Genetics

Selected publications

• Social Construction of Urban Space: Using LLMs to Identify Neighborhood Boundaries From Craigslist Ads

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2025-05-31

  preprintOpen access

  Rental listings offer a window into how urban space is socially constructed through language. We analyze Chicago Craigslist rental advertisements from 2018 to 2024 to examine how listing agents characterize neighborhoods, identifying mismatches between institutional boundaries and neighborhood claims. Through manual and large language model annotation, we classify unstructured listings from Craigslist according to their neighborhood. Further geospatial analysis reveals three distinct patterns: properties with conflicting neighborhood designations due to competing spatial definitions, border properties with valid claims to adjacent neighborhoods, and "reputation laundering" where listings claim association with distant, desirable neighborhoods. Through topic modeling, we identify patterns that correlate with spatial positioning: listings further from neighborhood centers emphasize different amenities than centrally-located units. Natural language processing techniques reveal how definitions of urban spaces are contested in ways that traditional methods overlook.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Associations between neighborhood social capital, oral health risk factors, and tooth decay among Medicaid-enrolled adolescents: A hypothesis-generating preliminary study

  PLoS ONE · 2025-08-13

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Neighborhood-based social capital - defined as resources within neighborhood social networks - is a potential contributor to adolescent oral health, but mechanisms that link the two are not well elucidated. We evaluated the potential mediating role of neighborhood, household, and individual oral health risk factors in the neighborhood social capital-tooth decay relationship. We collected cross-sectional data from 331 Medicaid-enrolled adolescents (ages 12-18 years) and one of their caregivers from 73 census tracts (neighborhoods) in three counties in Oregon, U.S.A in 2015 and 2016. Medicaid is a public insurance program in the U.S. providing no-cost dental insurance to low-income children. We measured four neighborhood social capital constructs: social support, social leverage, informal social control, and neighborhood organization participation. Oral health risk factors included worrying about food money, poor access to vegetables and fruits, inconsistent family and oral health routines, and adolescent stress. The outcome was number of untreated decayed tooth surfaces. Causal mediation analyses with mixed effect models were used to examine associations. Neighborhoods with higher social support had a lower prevalence of worrying about food money (prevalence ratio [PR] 0.74;95% CI: 0.56, 0.96;p = .02) as did neighborhoods with higher informal social control (PR 0.75;95% CI:0.58, 0.97;p = .03). All oral health risk factors were strongly associated with untreated decayed tooth surfaces. No form of neighborhood social capital was significantly associated with tooth decay. Natural indirect effects of neighborhood social support and informal social control operating through worrying about food money were not statistically significant. Future longitudinal studies that include robust measures of neighborhood social capital and adequate sample sizes are needed to enable neighborhood-based interventions that promote adolescent oral health.

  PublisherDOI

• Association between neighborhood poverty and ovarian reserve: the ovarian aging study

  Menopause The Journal of The North American Menopause Society · 2024-03-05 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to examine the association between neighborhood poverty and ovarian reserve. METHODS: Among 1,019 healthy premenopausal women in the Ovarian Aging Study, aggregate exposure to neighborhood poverty was examined in relation to biomarkers of ovarian reserve, antimüllerian hormone (AMH) and antral follicle count (AFC). Specifically, the interaction of age-x-neighborhood poverty was assessed cross-sectionally to determine whether AMH and AFC declines across women may be greater in women exposed to more neighborhood poverty. Neighborhood poverty was assessed by geocoding and linking women's residential addresses in adulthood to US Census data. RESULTS: Independent of covariates, a significant interaction term showed the association between age and AMH varied by degree of exposure to neighborhood poverty in adulthood ( b = -0.001, P < 0.05). AMH declines increased progressively across women exposed to low, medium, and high levels of neighborhood poverty. In addition, main effects showed that higher neighborhood poverty was related to higher AMH in the younger women only ( b = 0.022, P < 0.01). Results related to AFC were all nonsignificant ( P > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Across women, greater aggregate exposure to neighborhood poverty in adulthood was related to lower ovarian reserve, indexed by AMH. In addition, there was a positive association between neighborhood poverty and AMH in younger women that attenuated in the older women. Together, results suggest that neighborhood disadvantage may have detrimental impacts that manifest as initially higher AMH, resulting in greater ovarian follicle loss over time. However, it remains unclear whether these results examining differences across women may replicate when AMH declines by neighborhood poverty are examined longitudinally.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The companion dog as a model for inflammaging: a cross-sectional pilot study

  GeroScience · 2024-06-01 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring the association between household compositional change and mobility of subsidized householders in the United States: A life course perspective

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2024-07-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This study examines the relationship between household compositional change and residential mobility of subsidized householders. Data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Annual Longitudinal Files 2005-2018 is used to measure household compositional change and mobility for subsidized householders in the Public Housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs. Householders are 67% more likely to move when a change in household composition occurs. Members entering the household induce larger estimated mobility effects than members exiting the household. Although the odds that a householder move are associated with a household compositional change is greatest in the Housing Choice Voucher program for tenant-based vouchers, there is still a strong association with household compositional changes and mobility in Public Housing and for project-based voucher units where options for mobility are limited. The results have implications for future research on program design factors such as occupancy standards in subsidized housing in the United States.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Do Real Estate Actors Advertise in Mixed-Income Neighborhoods? The Importance of Home Security

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Throughout its history, the real estate industry has emphasized privacy and exclusion in housing advertisements, helping entrench patterns of residential segregation in the process. Recently, however, some forms of neighborhood-level social diversity are becoming more common, as indicated by the growing number of neighborhoods that are mixed-income. Does the proliferation of income-diverse neighborhoods suggest that advertisers are curtailing their exclusionary rhetoric when marketing homes in mixed-income communities? To answer this question, this study analyzes over one million Craigslist rental listings posted in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in July and August of 2019. Findings show that real estate advertisers continue to rely on rhetorical strategies that likely reinforce, if not encourage, privacy and exclusion in mixed-income neighborhoods. Specifically, rental advertisements in mixed-income neighborhoods were disproportionately likely to mention that the advertised unit came with a home security device, a rhetorical tool likely aimed at calming homeseekers’ apprehension toward living in an income-diverse neighborhood. This finding suggests that scholars have underexamined the strategies that real estate actors use to persuade homeseekers to live in diverse neighborhoods. Furthermore, the security rhetoric prevalent in income-diverse neighborhoods may encourage homeseekers’ fears of mixed-income settings and impede cross-class social integration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Do Real Estate Actors Advertise in Mixed-Income Neighborhoods?The Importance of Home Security

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “Mom-and-Pop” Landlords and Regulatory Backlash: A Seattle Case Study

  Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Against the backdrop of an acute rental affordability crisis and a resurgent tenant’s rights movement, rental industry groups have frequently argued that tenant protection laws disproportionately harm “mom-and-pop” landlords and, by extension, the disadvantaged tenants they serve. The authors leverage a changing regulatory environment in Seattle to provide a rare empirical interrogation of these claims. This analysis of a novel set of consumer data linked with parcel records provides no evidence that tenant protection laws drove “mom-and-pop” landlords out of the rental market. Moreover, an analysis of a survey of almost 4,000 Seattle landlords suggests that “mom-and-pop” landlords use management practices that are largely similar to those used by landlords with larger rental portfolios. These findings run counter to pervasive political narratives regarding the detrimental effects of tenant protection regulations on the small-scale rental sector and bring needed attention to the repercussions of claims-making for stratification in the housing context.

  PublisherDOI

• The dynamics of housing cost burden among renters in the United States

  Journal of Urban Affairs · 2024-01-09 · 10 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Housing cost burden-defined as paying more than 30% of household income for housing-has become a central feature of the American stratification system with dire consequences for the health and wellbeing of adults and children living in burdened households. To date, existing research has largely focused on the overall prevalence and distribution of housing cost burden-that is, the percentage of households that are cost burdened at a given time and differences in exposure to housing cost burden based on race and income using cross-sectional sources of data. To more fully understand the dynamics of housing cost burden among renter households in the U.S., including the frequency and duration of spells, we use 50 years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The analysis reveals that, in contrast to the episodic nature of poverty, housing cost burden is deep, frequent, and persistent for a growing share of American households.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cumulative housing cost burden exposures and disadvantages to children’s well-being and health

  Social Science Research · 2024-02-13 · 13 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Administrative Core

  NIH · $10.4M · 2002–2027

• NIH Grant R21HD049610

  NIH · $256k · 2009

• Collaborative Research: Kin Location, Neighborhood Characteristics, and Residential Migration

  NSF · $97k · 2013–2015

• Demographic Vulnerability, Neighborhood Pollution, and Racial Health Disparities

  NIH · $1.1M · 2014–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Scott J. South

  University at Albany, State University of New York

  46 shared

• Audrey Ruple

  Virginia–Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine

  18 shared

• Chris Hess

  Kennesaw State University

  17 shared

• Stewart E. Tolnay

  University of Washington

  16 shared

• Sandi Shrager

  14 shared

• John Logan

  John Brown University

  13 shared

• Marta G. Castelhano

  Cornell University

  11 shared

• Matthew D. Dunbar

  11 shared

Labs

• Kyle Crowder LabPI