I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Denver and a Nonresident Fellow in the Housing Policy Finance Center at the Urban Institute.
My research focuses on housing, housing stability/instability, poverty, spatial inequality, legal regulation, and the built environment. I am an expert on manufactured housing and issues facing manufactured home communities (also known as mobile home parks and trailer parks).
My book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place (winner of the 2019 Robert Park Award from the American Sociological Association) examines the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for low-income residents in U.S. manufactured home parks. The book draws on two years of ethnographic data collected inside closing manufactured home communities before, during, and after community-wide evictions. I examine the political economy of the manufactured housing industry and the impact of manufactured housing insecurity on residents. I continue to publish on various aspects of housing insecurity as it relates to manufactured housing. My work on this topic has appeared in American Sociological Review, Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of the American Planning Association and elsewhere. This research has been covered in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and other media outlets. I was named a CU Denver Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholar, which recognizes “outstanding contributions to the Denver metro region through community-engaged scholarship.”
I have also served as PI or co-PI on three projects funded by the National Science Foundation:
1. Mapping Manufactured Housing (with Noah Durst, Michigan State University) uses big data and machine learning to measure the morphological characteristics - the shape of buildings and their relation to each other - across all U.S. neighborhoods (including formally planned cities & suburbs, manufactured home communities, and informal subdivisions or colonia-type developments). By refining these measurements we aim to produce a first-time systematic database of manufactured home communities and informal subdivisions in the US. Project details: NSF Award #2048562
2. The Social Justice and Environmental Quality - Denver (SJEQ_D) Project (with Shelly Miller and Shivakant Mishra, CU Boulder) partners with residents in four environmental justice communities in Denver to understand the intersections of air quality, health, and wellbeing during major infrastructural redevelopment (the widening of Highway I-70 through these neighborhoods). Project details: NSF Award #1952223
3. The Mobile Home Hurricane Action Research Project (with Andrew Rumbach, Texas A&M, and Carrie Makarewicz, CU Denver) investigates disaster exposure and recovery in manufactured home parks in Texas following Hurricane Harvey and in Florida following Hurricanes Irma and Micheal. Project details: NSF Award #1825341
My research focuses on housing, housing stability/instability, poverty, spatial inequality, legal regulation, and the built environment. I am an expert on manufactured housing and issues facing manufactured home communities (also known as mobile home parks and trailer parks).
My book Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans' Tenuous Right to Place (winner of the 2019 Robert Park Award from the American Sociological Association) examines the social, legal, geospatial, and market forces that intersect to create housing insecurity for low-income residents in U.S. manufactured home parks. The book draws on two years of ethnographic data collected inside closing manufactured home communities before, during, and after community-wide evictions. I examine the political economy of the manufactured housing industry and the impact of manufactured housing insecurity on residents. I continue to publish on various aspects of housing insecurity as it relates to manufactured housing. My work on this topic has appeared in American Sociological Review, Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, Qualitative Sociology, Journal of the American Planning Association and elsewhere. This research has been covered in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and other media outlets. I was named a CU Denver Chancellor’s Urban Engaged Scholar, which recognizes “outstanding contributions to the Denver metro region through community-engaged scholarship.”
I have also served as PI or co-PI on three projects funded by the National Science Foundation:
1. Mapping Manufactured Housing (with Noah Durst, Michigan State University) uses big data and machine learning to measure the morphological characteristics - the shape of buildings and their relation to each other - across all U.S. neighborhoods (including formally planned cities & suburbs, manufactured home communities, and informal subdivisions or colonia-type developments). By refining these measurements we aim to produce a first-time systematic database of manufactured home communities and informal subdivisions in the US. Project details: NSF Award #2048562
2. The Social Justice and Environmental Quality - Denver (SJEQ_D) Project (with Shelly Miller and Shivakant Mishra, CU Boulder) partners with residents in four environmental justice communities in Denver to understand the intersections of air quality, health, and wellbeing during major infrastructural redevelopment (the widening of Highway I-70 through these neighborhoods). Project details: NSF Award #1952223
3. The Mobile Home Hurricane Action Research Project (with Andrew Rumbach, Texas A&M, and Carrie Makarewicz, CU Denver) investigates disaster exposure and recovery in manufactured home parks in Texas following Hurricane Harvey and in Florida following Hurricanes Irma and Micheal. Project details: NSF Award #1825341