Research

My CV – September 2024

 

Current Projects

Neighborhoods and School Closures

Public school closures are increasing in number and size in U.S. cities. This increase has led to contentious debates between school district officials who focus on cost efficiency and academic performance, and teachers, families, and public school advocates who argue that closing public schools negatively affects multiple institutions and actors. One such institution is the neighborhood. Despite the wide-ranging implications of urban public school closures, few studies have quantitatively examined where closures occur and their consequences on the neighborhoods they serve. In this project, I examine the association between school closure and neighborhood ethnoracial and socioeconomic characteristics in cities across the United States. I also investigate the effects of public school closures on various neighborhood outcomes, including crime, housing values and segregation.

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Papers

Media and Outreach

Presentations

Funding

 

Urban Neighborhood Networks

Research from various disciplines employing multiple methods on a diverse set of populations has demonstrated that neighborhood conditions have an independent influence on individual health and well-being.   Another strand of research shows that neighborhood conditions diffuse or spill over to nearby communities. These two strands of research restrict processes of neighborhood influence to operate only within and between geographically contiguous neighbors. In an increasingly interconnected and mobile society, this assumption is questionable.  This project’s contribution is to demonstrate that social and economic processes extend beyond the focal neighborhood and its geographically adjacent neighbors to a wider network of neighborhoods based on where and how residents move within a city.  If time spent in space is theoretically meaningful, then expanding the view to consider the broader network of connected neighborhoods may shed new light on a wide range of social processes.

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Presentations

Funding

The Effects of Ridehailing

Since the first paying passenger connected with an owner/operator driver through the Uber mobile application on July 5, 2010, ridehailing services have grown exponentially around the world. Uber facilitated 1.9 billion rides in just the fourth quarter of 2019 and its largest US competitor, Lyft, provides over a million trips per day. Chinese ridehailing company Didi connected 60 million trips per day in October 2020. Ridehailing drivers now account for up to 13% of vehicle miles travelled in some US cities. Such immense disruption to transportation systems has had far-reaching impacts.  This project examine these impacts, focusing primarily on their influence on alcohol-related injury and death due to road traffic crashes.

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Papers

Media and Outreach

Funding

 

Measuring Neighborhood Opportunity

Policymakers and practitioners are coordinating efforts to implement place-based interventions to increase spatial opportunity for disadvantaged population groups. The goal is to enhance the well-being of historically disadvantaged households by improving the places around them, whether through strategic neighborhood investments, residential mobility programs, or both. The increasing inclusion of neighborhood opportunity in policy intervention efforts calls for a need to quantify it. Several approaches to measuring neighborhood opportunity have emerged in recent years. Applications of opportunity mapping vary widely across a number of factors, including their intended use, geographic scale, and the number and types of variables included in the model. These widely varying approaches to measuring opportunity coupled with the increasing recognition of a neighborhood’s role in shaping access to resources has led to the proliferation of publicly available data-driven web applications and equity atlases that plot and identify opportunity on a map. However, there have not been sufficient efforts to critically evaluate the construction of these indices and quantitatively examine whether and how much they overlap. This project fills this gap by comparing different quantitative measures of opportunity used in practice, policy and research.

Collaborators

  • Jenny Wagner, Assistant Professor, Sacramento State University
  • Amanda Portier, B.S. Community and Regional Development, UC Davis
  • Raziel Ramil, B.S. Community and Regional Development, UC Davis
  • Citlali Plaza, B.S. Community and Regional Development, UC Davis
  • Kayla Lujan, Undergraduate, Community and Regional Development, UC Davis
  • Javier Morla, Public Health Sciences PhD Student, UC Davis

Papers

Media and Outreach