Rachel Kleit

Ph.D. 1999, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Low-income housing, housing self-sufficiency programs, links between housing location, neighborhood composition, social networks, and access to opportunity.

Department: Evans School of Public Affairs
Position: Associate Professor
Email: click here
Phone: (206) 221-3063
Box: 353055
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Research Summary:

Rachel Garshick Kleit is assistant professor at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. Her major scholarly contribution has been to operationalize access to opportunity as the information and diversity of social networks in the context of low-income housing dispersal, including programs such as mixed-income housing, housing vouchers, dispersed housing programs, and the construction of small clusters of low-income housing in non-poor areas. Her work has also focused on evaluating the impacts of programs based in public and assisted housing that seek to enhance the economic well-being of residents.

Her work on Montgomery County Maryland’s dispersed and clustered public housing has demonstrated that that dispersed residents have neighborhood social networks that contain greater diversity, and therefore greater access to diverse sources of information, but use their neighbors less frequently in looking for a job than do clustered residents. When looking for a job, they tend to rely on formal methods of search, suggesting that living in dispersed housing may enable access to better resources that are external to social networks.

She is currently involved in three research streams. The first continues her interest in the impacts of housing programs that mix incomes and examines the social communities created within mixed income housing programs. Her findings thus far suggest that demographic differences among residents account for a lack of connection among people of different economic backgrounds (Kleit 2005).

The second research area investigates the impact of income mixing programs, such as the HOPE VI public housing redevelopment program, on the lives and well being of original residents. In collaboration with Lynne Manzo, this work focuses on the High Point and Park Lake Homes public housing redevelopments.

A third research focus is on the impact of the devolution of federal housing policy over the past 25 years on public housing authorities as agencies tasked with serving very low income populations. With her colleague Steven Page, she is involved in a study of innovation, defense and reactivity among public housing authorities in response to devolution.

Kleit, R. G., (2008), Neighborhood Segregation, Personal Networks, and Access to Social Resources, Segregation, the Rising Costs for America, Carr, J. H.; Cutty, N..

Kleit, R. G.; Manzo, L. C.; Couch, D., (2008), "Moving Three Times Is Like Having Your House on Fire Once": The Experience of Place and Impending Displacement among Public Housing Residents, Urban Studies, 45, 1855 - 1878.

Kleit, R. G.; Page, S. B., (2008), Public Housing Authorities under Devolution: Retrenchment, Innovation, and the Future of Public and Assisted Housing, Journal of the American Planning Association, 74: 1-Winter, 34-44.

Kleit, R. G., (2007), Housing Segregation in Suburban America Since 1960: Presidential and Judicial Politics - By Charles M. Lamb, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 37: 1, 170.

Kleit, R. G.; Manzo, L. C., (2006), To Move or Not to Move: Relationships to Place and Relocation Choices in HOPE VI, Housing Policy Debate, 17: 2, 271-308.

Kleit, R. G., (2005), HOPE VI New Communities: Neighborhood Relations in Mixed-Income Housing, Environment and Planning, 37: 8, 1413-1441.

Kleit, R. G.; Rohe, W. M., (2005), Using Public Housing to Achieve Self-Sufficiency: An Exploratory Analysis of Success, Housing Studies, 20: 1, 81-105.

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